Our initial excitement of pursuing LEED certification for our Harlem Brownstone slowly faded to confusion, lurched into fatigue, then collapsed in frustration.
LEED (the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council) may turn out to be the biggest red herring in residential home building since that never-go-out-of-style linoleum...
LEED for Homes is supposed to give homeowners and builders a standardized way to ensure their renovations meet well-established guidelines for energy efficiency, low impact building products and air quality.
While that is perhaps true for NEW construction and office buildings, it is 
virtually impossible for renovating and/or restoring existing homes. In fact, to become a LEED-certified home, you need to *create* more waste than is necessary (e.g., mandatory gutting of walls to determine insulation values). 30% of the material in home building ends up as waste.
In many cases, this makes no sense. For example, I could leave my existing walls in place, generate all of my heating and air conditioning via renewable sources (solar, geothermal, wind) and still not achieve a LEED rating. That's just crazy.
There is a new standard that is eating into the LEED of ummm... LEED. It is the Green Globes certification by the Green Building Initiative.
Green Globes more heavily weights energy systems, up to 36% of the total points needed. LEED limits the energy category to 25% of the total. This means you can overcome the often unnecessary and wasteful gutting that LEED demands by over-speccing your solar, wind or other renewable energy systems.
There's a great article on this over at GreenLaw, Shari Shapiro's blog that covers the legal aspects of green building.
After all, Reuse, Reduce and Recycle should also apply to the building trade!
[where: 10032][Harlem][Sugar Hill]
Aug 12, 2008
Hey LEED: Follow or Get Out of The Way...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Like you, I was initialy exited at the prospect of applying green building to restoration projects. What I've come to learn is their rating system actually promotes waste and consumption which is not green in my opinion. Check out my blog, and look at the article linked on the newest post. Mike Jackson has done the research on this and proven (in the context of a 19th century masonry load-bearing structure) it is almost always better to restore than to build new. Also exciting is the fact that the average 19th century brick building has the same operating energy consumption as a leed certified new building.
Post a Comment