The secret of the
blue star home

By Forrest Adams

Most household and business budgets are tight these days, but property owners may be able to save on their energy and utility costs by investing in the ENERGY STAR.

“Green starts with blue. The blue is the ENERGY STAR,” said Mat Gates, CEO and Building Science Consultant from Residential Science Resources.

That’s green as in cash and green as in energy conservation. His company does home performance testing, certification and consulting to determine if the homes are being constructed according to ENERGY STAR standards. Throughout construction, they verify and determine the home’s energy efficiency and then notify the homeowner that they have achieved ENERGY STAR certification.

“You have an extremely energy efficient house that’s built in a smart way,” he said. “It controls its waste and pays attention to the amount of water being consumed in the house. The insulation is better. The material used in these houses is used more efficiently.”
That translates into less cost for heating and cooling the house, depending on the lifestyle of the person living there. According to www.energystar.gov, Americans, with the help of ENERGY STAR, saved enough energy in 2007 alone to avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 27 million cars — all while saving $16 billion on their utility bills.

For Mindy Shears of Cottage Grove, an employee of K. Hovnanian Homes, it has meant less cost to heat and cool the house. Five years ago she and her husband lived in a 1,200 square foot town home in Michigan and regularly spent about $250 per month to heat and cool it. He’s a network engineer and has two servers and four computers running all the time. Their energy demands have not decreased, but their living space has increased substantially. Now they live in a 4,500 square-foot single family ENERGY STAR residence, and they’re paying about the same as they were in the smaller home to heat and cool it, $250 per month.

Les Anderson and his wife Shann moved into their new ENERGY STAR home in a Maple Grove community for people over 55 years old on May 1, and they, too, say they’re saving money. Les said the electricity in the old house usually ran about $240 per month. In the new house, he said it’s a little over $100. All of their appliances have the ENERGY STAR ratings, and the home is ENERGY STAR qualified. They moved from a Minnetonka home that was constructed in 1969. Their new home is about 5,000 square feet, roughly the same as the old.

“We’re very, very impressed with the construction and the quality of the house,” he said. “You sometimes pay a little bit more for the ENERGY STAR, but then you save in the long run. One of our requirements when we were looking for a new home was one that was built according to the foundational issue of energy conservation.”
Adding ENERGY STAR appliances, and building a new home to the ENERGY STAR platform adds to the overall construction cost, admitted Shane Kadrlik from K. Hovnanian, but he pointed out it improves to the quality of the home. He added that K. Hovnanian Homes doesn’t pass on the excess cost to the consumer.

“We are building to ENERGY STAR level, which is 15 to 30 percent more performance than if we built it to code,” said the vice president of construction services. “If we were just building to code, I can guarantee you that we’d be able to reduce costs, but we don’t think that’s the right thing to do as a company. We build to the ENERGY STAR platform, and we don’t pass the cost along to the consumer.”

In 2007, K. Hovnanian Homes was presented with the 2007 ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year award by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. According to the EPA, homeowners can expect to save between $200 and $400 annually on their utility bill in ENERGY STAR qualified new homes. K. Hovnanian Homes is the leader among ENERGY STAR qualified home builders in Minnesota with a grand total of 1,031 homes constructed that are labeled ENERGY STAR qualified.
ENERGY STAR is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy that encourages citizens to invest in energy-efficient products and practices.

To earn the ENERGY STAR, a home must meet strict guidelines for energy efficiency set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These homes are at least 15 percent more energy efficient than homes built to the 2004 International Residential Code (IRC), and include additional energy-saving features that typically make them 20 to 30 percent more efficient than standard homes, according to www.energystar.gov.

Readers can contact Forrest Adams at fadams@swpub.com.