OOPS! You're in the wrong website!

BrightBuilt Barn has moved its website, but the search engines haven't caught up yet. This website hasn't been updated for quite a while.

Here's our new, up to date website:

www.brightbuiltbarn.com

Hope to see you there!

Keith

BrightBuilt Barn's First Year Performance

BrightBuilt Barn is now one year old.

The solar systems were turned on just one year ago - time to review its performance to date.

I'm happy to report that it has exceeded all expectations.

On a subjective level, it has been a joy to live and work in - warm in the winter, cool in the summer, light and airy and lovely to look at all year round. I am also delighted to report that I have not had one minute of trouble with any of the systems - high praise indeed from a guy who hates maintenance and repair, and who has had his share of woes while living in a number of conventionally built houses over the years. The solar systems in the Barn are simple, with few moving parts, and highly reliable - so far, they just work.

On an objective plane, here are the numbers. In its first year, BBB produced 6345 kilowatt hours of electricity, and used 1251 kwh, leaving a surplus of 5094 kwh.

In other words, BBB produced five times as much electricity as it used. My little BBB could power itself and four other homes just like it.

According to the US Department of Energy, the average American home uses 936 kwh of electricity per month. So, the average home in the US uses as much electricity in 5 weeks as the Barn did in its first full year. Conversely, BBB produces enough electricity to power itself and just under half the yearly electricity use of the average home.

The Barn does, in fact, power my conventionally built main house (over 15 years old and no paragon of energy efficiency) which sits about 100 feet away, and has produced over 60% of that home's electrical use.

So, Happy Birthday, BBB! And congratulations on a highly successful first year!

Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors Show

The BrightBuilt Barn will have a booth at this weekend's Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors show in Rockland, Maine. We'll be there Friday through Sunday in Tent I, and will be offering tours of the BrightBuilt Barn Saturday afternoon. Stop by and say hello!

BrightBuilt Monitoring

The May/June Residential Architect included a piece on the BrightBuilt Barn.  For those readers who have found their way here, monitoring information on the barn is currently house on our website at www.brightbuiltbarn.com

Another Tight One

Check out this article in the latest Journal of Light Construction, an excellent magazine for Home Builders and a source of great info for all residential architects and consultants as well. It is written by a local builder of all things sustainable and good, Dan Kolbert, and describes a recent project we completed together in Falmouth, Maine for our excellent clients, Stew MacLehose and Kathy Hayden. Kolbert is quickly becoming one of the top sustainable home builders in the region. He already has a LEED Gold and a LEED Platinum under his belt. Time to loosen that belt another notch, Dan...

This project is on track for LEED Platinum Certification. It features cellulose-filled, double stud walls, triple glazed windows and an exceptionally tight envelope in the range of BrightBuilt and Passivehouse (0.77 ACH5o). It has solar hot water and is slated to get some PV on the roof soon too.

We will soon make available live energy data on this project as well, in the same format as our BrightBuilt data, through our friends at Powerdash.

Dan Kolbert's website:

http://www.kolbertbuilding.com/

Details of the superinsulated structure:

DSIRE

This is a terrific website that lists all state incentive programs and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency.

http://www.dsireusa.org/

Another LEED Platinum from KTA

Kaplan Thompson Architects, the team that designed BrightBuilt Barn, have recently been notified that their Metro Green project in Arlington, Virginia has been awarded LEED Platinum, the first LEED Platinum home in the state of Virginia.

Sited only 5 miles from the center of Washington DC, the structure has a whole wish list of green features, including a green roof and rainwater capture, in addition to solar electric energy and super-low heating costs.

Here's the link to a brief article about this home:

http://www.jetsongreen.com/2009/06/metro-green-home-leed-platinum-virginia.html

And here's the website of the builder:

http://www.metrogreenhome.com/

For only $1.175 million, this green dream home can be yours.

Pecha Kucha

Keith will be participating in Pecha Kucha night at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland on June 29.  

"Pecha what?" you say.  

Pecha Kucha (pronounced pe-chak-cha) is a presentation system begun by two young architects in 2003 to provide their peers with a format for presenting their work without droning on and on as we designer types are prone to do.  The strict format allows for 8-14 presenters to show exactly 20 slides for exactly 20 seconds each.  No more, no less.  Thus each person has the stage for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.   Pecha Kucha Nights are held all around the world now, in over 170 cities and Rockland, Maine is no exception.  

With so much to show and say about BrightBuilt, we commend Keith for taking on the challenge of boiling things down to the allotted time frame.  If you're in the area - don't miss the opportunity to see him present.  Pecha Kucha Nights are always fun filled evenings of artists and art appreciators - we highly recommend them.

Check out http://www.farnsworthmuseum.org/event/pecha-kucha-night-live-wyeth-center

We Made the List

Eco Home Magazine has included BrightBuilt on its list of "6 Prefab Houses That Could Change Home Building."   In these times when more and more architects and builders are throwing their hats into this green prefab ring (and some not making it - see previous post), we are honored to have made it to the top of the list and be in company of some old favorites (Unity by Bensonwood) and some new (IKEA. SmartCarHouse).

http://www.ecohomemagazine.com/news/2009/may/6-prefab-houses-that-could-change-home-building.aspx?page=5

Premier green prefab firm closing its doors.

Yikes - Michelle Kaufmann has long been a leader in the green prefab industry and has fallen victim to current circumstances.  As newcomers to the green prefab world, we've been watching her closely - this news just underscores the challenges (and opportunities) ahead for us as we delve into this world.

Modern Prefab On The Ropes: Michelle Kaufmann Packs It In

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/michelle-kaufmann-packs-it-in.php

"A year ago I wrote that modern prefab had lived fast, died young and left a good looking corpse. But I thought if anyone would survive it would be Michelle Kaufmann, the queen of prefab design and marketing, who when I wrote her best of green award, said "an entire industry rides on her coat-tails."

When times were good, Michelle could not find factories to build her stuff; they were making too much money building crap. When the crap market dried up, so did they. Then the banking crisis delivered the final cut, and it is over."

BrightBuilt Barn at AIGA CompostModern Maine

Our presentation to CompostModern Maine was a success.  We learned a lot in organizing our thoughts for the talk and had a captive audience throughout, including a lively discussion after the presentation.  We've uploaded a copy of the presentation to Slide Share (without the charming words) in case anyone wants to see what BrightBuilt did to us as a studio.

BrightBuilt Barn at AIGA CompostModern Maine

View more presentations from kaplanthompson.

Measuring Performance

Updated energy figures as of 5:00 PM today, May 18:

Total electricity produced from go-live in October 2008:   3135 kwh

Total electricity consumed by the Barn in the same period: 1001 kwh

Total surplus to date: 2134 kwh

My electric bill at the main house for April: $7.95

Soon we will have the new and improved website implemented, which will have all performance numbers continuously updated. Stay tuned.

This Saturday, Jesse Thompson and Robin Tannenbaum from Kaplan Thompson will be presenting the BrightBuilt Barn at Compostmodern ME. This is a one day conference geared towards designers and followers of the sustainability movement that explores how incorporating sustainability practices in the design process can help create a socially, ecologically and economically responsible society. Check out http://maine.aiga.org for more information or just come on down.

PowerDash

Real time energy monitoring of the BrightBuilt Barn is almost here. As Keith discussed in the last post, the barn is performing beautifully and is producing so much energy that it is even offsetting most of the energy use of the main house on his property. Our newest partner in the BBB endeavor is PowerDash, a Massachusetts based energy monitoring company that is setting up a network to translate information about energy production and consumption from the barn into an easy to read easy to understand format that for our website. Stephen Lapointe, one of PowerDash partners joined us on site in late April to work on nuts and bolts of this process.

More Numbers

It's been a sunny week here in Maine, and so the Barn has been creating lots of electricity. I decided to check all the numbers again, and compare them to those at the last post, on April 20.

Today at noon the Barn's total production since go-live was 2745 kilowatt-hours. That means that in the past 9 days the PV panels have pumped out 224 kwh, or an average of almost 25 kwh each day. Usage has been modest, now that the cold weather is gone, with air handling, lights, and computers accounting for most of the load - and with the longer days, light usage is going down noticeably. Total usage to date has been 970 kwh, compared with 953 kwh ten days ago, or only 1.9 kwh of electricity used per day.

This means that the current difference between electricity generated and electricity used in the Barn stands at 1775 kwh surplus, meaning that we have put a net of 1775 kwh out on the grid over the past 6 months. The past 9 days alone have accounted for 207 kwh surplus, or about 23 kwh per day on average.

This contribution to the grid helps pay off our carbon debt incurred in the making of the Barn, at the rate of one to two pounds of carbon per kilowatt-hour, depending on the major source of the electricity on the grid. So we appear to have knocked approximately one metric ton of carbon off our debt, even through the depths a cold Maine winter.

And since our main house is just "upstream" of the Barn, we get the benefit of most of that surplus electricity, which is lowering our electrical bill substantially. Last month, our bill from Central Maine Power was only $11.00.

Here's hoping for a sunny Spring!

Performance So Far

Spring is, well, springing up here in Maine. At 9:00 this morning it's bright and sunny, and the outside temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Almost all of the snow has melted, except for one  small mound perhaps 6 feet long and 2 feet wide that lies in the perpetual shadow of the north side of the main house. 

In the Barn it is a cozy 68 degrees, with no heating except the sunshine pouring in the south-facing windows.

It is almost 6 months since the Barn systems were turned on last October, and it seems time to assess performance so far.

Most important to me, the Barn has been a pleasure to live and work in. It has been comfortably warm all winter, even during record-setting cold spells. The systems have worked flawlessly, with no breakdowns or failures. The structure has held up to extreme weather, including impressive snowfalls of up to 2 feet per storm, and several feet cumulatively.

As of this morning at 9:00 AM, the solar electric panels have produced 2521 kilowatt-hours of electricity since being "switched on" last October. The barn itself has consumed 953 kwh during that time, for a net surplus of 1568 kilowatt-hours. I find this remarkable, given how cold this winter was.

Those surplus 1568 kwh translate into nearly 3000 pounds (more than a metric ton) of carbon that will not be needed from a coal-fired electric generating plant.

More directly, the Barn's energy surplus is reducing our use of grid power at the main house -my electric bill this past month was $11.00, compared to nearly $130 this same time last year.

Soon we plan to have the Barn's energy performance tracked continuously on our website, so anyone can monitor our results.

So stay tuned - there's much more to come.

More Hugs from Treehugger - BBB is Best of 2008

Treehugger, one of the leading green lifestyle blogs, has just awarded BrightBuilt Barn its annual "Best of Green" designation in the Architecture and Design category.

Here's the link:

http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2009/04/best-of-green-design-and-architecture.php?page=11

Documentary

An independent production company has been working with our team recently to put together a documentary about the first BrightBuilt Barn.  The documentary will focus as much on origins of the project and the process of bringing it to fruition as it will on the final product.  Many of us who were involved in the project will be screening a rough cut later this week to give feedback.   We look forward to debuting the final version.

BrightBuilt Barn is Awarded LEED Platinum

BrightBuilt Barn has recently received official notification that it has been awarded LEED Platinum status, the highest level of sustainability certification by the US Green Building Council. BBB thus becomes only the 7th home in all of New England to attain this highest level of certification, which is awarded to fewer than 10% of all projects that apply.

BrightBuilt Barn Goes International

On Wednesday, April 1, BrightBuilt Barn was featured on a segment of "This Week in the Americas", a weekly newscast of France24, who describe themselves as the CNN of France.

Check out the link below - the clip on BBB is toward the end of the show:

http://www.france24.com/en/20090402-week-americas-obama-car-industry-mexico-washington-against-drug-trafficking-el-salvador-oscar-romero

Own Your Own BrightBuilt Barn

We're almost there!

Now that the first barn is up, interest is increasing and we are working actively with Bensonwood to pull together a package outlining the process of producing subsequent BrightBuilt Barns.  They will be for sale through Bensonwood.  Thanks to the hard work by our friends there, we are pleased to announce that the range of prices for the BBB will be from roughly $165,000 - $230,000. The lowest price represents a base model which allows the owner to finish out some of the non essential aspects of the building. The higher price(s) reflect the addition of available upgrades such as appliances, fixtures, kitchen build out, exterior decks, etc. We are really happy with these prices for such an innovative and beautiful product, especially given that purchasers can add renewables to their barn which will ensure they will have virtually no utility costs down the road.  Stay tuned for more details, and be sure to send us an e-mail if you would like more information about purchase options.

Even More Great Press!

We are honored to be the cover story for Maine's newest home design magazine, Maine Home + Design. The folks at MH+D have been following this project's progress since its inception and were thrilled to finally showcase the beautiful finished product. Also this month, the project is featured in an article in Smart HomeOwner Magazine.

Maine Home + Design
http://www.mainehomedesign.com/

Smart HomeOwner
http://www.smart-homeowner.com/ME2/Default.asp

Start Spreading the News . . . .

Well the BrightBuilt Barn has truly arrived. In the Home section of the NEW YORK TIMES that is! A short pithy piece on the project and the cool glowing lights that monitor energy production and consumption were featured in Thursday's paper. We are so pleased that an organization like the Times is picking us up because the project will reach a much wider audience (not just us design and green tech groupies) who will have their consciousness raised about the cool side of being green.

Here is a link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/garden/15tools.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=brightbuilt&st=cse

A Working Manifesto

In the spirit of Sustainability and Collaboration, we - The BrightBuilt Team - dedicate ourselves:

-To immediately share all concepts, details and systems of the first BrightBuilt project (BB001) with all interested others

-To try to evoke critical thought and invite feedback, with the aim of improving these systems

-To work with builders to offer this first BrightBuilt model, as well as any subsequent prototypes, to others at a reasonable cost and with a greatly reduced construction timeline

-To encourage others to build and test their own BrightBuilt projects as examples of livability, sustainability and attainability

-To create a central online space for learning and interaction among like-minded parties

-To maintain ongoing transparency of operational performance, with the live and historical energy performance of all BrightBuilts continuously visible to all

These are ambitious goals. We look for the collaboration and input of others in the global community. If you are interested in taking part in this grand, and potentially transformative experiment, please sign up at www.brightbuiltbarn.com to be kept in the loop, or simply start commenting below...