Category: energy efficiency

Insulation improves energy efficiency Often clients come to us with a home that's already designed. They ask us to help them improve a home's air tightness and thermal envelope. One straightforward solution is adding insulation. Spray foam is an effective insulation because it forms an air barrier around your structure — sealing and insulating in one step. Once it is sealed, the air inside can be controlled by your heating and air unit. In this video, we show a traditionally-framed home. Instead of installing batted insulation, we chose a bio-based spray foam insulation. This insulation...


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  In this video, passive home experts John Suppes and Sean Misskelley discuss the Clarum Homes mission and vision of building comfortable high-performance passive homes. If you look at the average home, it's being built in the same way as homes were built 40 years ago. Nothing has really changed. In contrast, Clarum Homes is unique because we are continuously working to lead and innovate the way homes are built. Our entire team focuses on the following: sustainability in building materials thermal envelope so that the homes use less energy to heat and cool indoor air quality making...


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Clarum Homes Owner John Suppes and Director of Construction Sean Misskelley discuss building and living in passive homes. We build passive homes for their sound ethics, aesthetic beauty, internal comfort and interior air quality. A passive home is simply a building that employs a set of advanced building technologies to achieve extreme energy efficiency. Energy consumption is reduced by 90% or more compared to that of conventional homes. And these efficiency gains aren't due to some weird, boxy, ugly building design. Passive homes are elegant, comfortable living spaces with beauty that can rival...


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Sean Misskelley from Clarum Homes talks about the solar thermal system in the Menlo Passive Home Project. The house is equipped with a 3-panel 120-gallon Velux solar thermal system with a high-efficiency vortex made by A.O Smith as a back-up water heating source. This system is designed to offset approximately 80% of the energy needs for heating the home's water and up to 50% of the home's demand for its space heating. This system is also used inside the home in conjunction with the heat recovery ventilation system with a hydronic in-line heat coil. This system heats the water on the roof,...


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Energy and Green Building Expert John Suppes of Clarum Homes explains the Photovoltaic Electrical System at the Menlo Passive Home Project. We installed a 4-kilowatt Sharp Solar Panel Package System with Enphase Micro Inverters because of the shading issue - these perform much better when there is shading on the panels. This system should provide more electricity than is used in the house, so Clarum Homes installed an electric car charging station in the garage. There is also a 3-panel 30,000 kilo BTU solar thermal system on the roof, which will provide 90% of the hot water needs and up to 40% of the home's...


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John Suppes from Clarum Homes explains the Zehnder Heat Recovery Ventilator System at the Menlo Passive Project. One of the keys to a passive home's efficiency is its air tightness. This means that it's essential to have a system that brings in fresh air to the house. All air coming into the house is filtered through a Merv 13 air filter. This means all of the air in the home is clean - free of pollens and particulates. All of the stale air from the home is exhausted through the other side of the HRV. With this system, all the air in the house is exchanged 9 times a day with fresh air. The best...


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Sean Miskelley from Clarum Homes explains the use of SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels) in the Menlo Passive home. Structural insulated panels (SIPs) are high performance building panels used in the external envelope - floors, walls, and roofs for residential buildings. The SIPs panels are typically made by sandwiching a rigid core of foam plastic insulation between two structural skins of oriented strand board (OSB). They offer great air tightness and insulation with superior R values. The resulting home is extremely strong, energy efficient and cost effective. Building with SIPs will save...


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Energy expert Sean Misskelley from Clarum Homes talks about the heating and cooling effect of high performance Gaulhofer windows and SeriousWindows in the Menlo Passive Home Project. Read more about the Menlo Passive project features here: http://bit.ly/iA8V3Y. And some additional photos here: http://bit.ly/p3An2N. Serious Materials energy efficient SeriousWindows feature U-values ranging from 0.14 to 0.18. and Gaulhofer windows' U-values range from U values 0.19 to 0.29 and a superior R value. These windows maximize passive solar heating and cooling - contributing to the passive home's...


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We finished up the construction of our Menlo Passive custom home a few weeks ago and just had our photographer come out to capture the home for us. Check out these beautiful photos – showcasing the exterior, the great room, kitchen, master suite and bathrooms. Menlo Passive proves that green can be gorgeous! Not only does Menlo Passive provide energy efficiency, comfort, health and durability, and up to 90% in energy savings coupled with construction techniques that exceeded the passive house air tightness standards by 65%, but it looks beautiful too. Passive house standards can be integrated...


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Back in April, we wrote about this contemporary high performance custom home we’re building in the Sonoma wine country.   It’s really unbelievable.  Now that the framing is completed, you can see the incredible views that our client is going to enjoy from this beautiful multi-level home that they designed with architect Stuart Welte at Environmental Innovations in Design. The original architectural design included large steel “I” beams. To reduce the carbon footprint of this home, we worked with the engineers to use more sustainable engineered wood products. Clarum’s client also...


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