(This is an article that recently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly on a Control4 job that cyberManor completed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011. To see a short video of the home's control and automation highlights, please visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrSxJ6Vouak)
Xanadu
A california couple seeks to build the world’s greenest home.
By Joshua Green
Paul Holland and Linda Yates thought it only natural, when they set out to build a luxury home six years ago, that theirs would be the world’s greenest. In Silicon Valley—where Holland works as a venture capitalist and Yates as a management consultant—even competition is environmentally conscious.
The couple’s 5,600-square-foot home will be outfitted with a host of aggressively eco-friendly technologies and materials: a recycled-steel roof that diverts rainwater to a 50,000-gallon underground cistern; reclaimed stone left over from the construction of Chicago skyscrapers; solar panels powerful enough to provide electricity to the home, charge five electric cars, and still return energy to the grid; a cedar interior cut from sustainable forests (where trees are selectively harvested to minimize environmental damage); doors and windows of Portuguese eucalyptus approved by the Forest Stewardship Council; oak floors salvaged from old granaries; recycled-glass sinks; a recycled-steel kitchen hood.
The house has no paint, ducts, or HVAC, and it uses no fossil fuels. Sliding glass walls let in the breeze during the summer, and in the winter the home’s ground-source heat-exchange system pumps water deep underground to be warmed by the Earth’s thermal energy, then pushes it up to heat the floorboards. The home’s climate, lighting, and irrigation will be controlled remotely—by iPad, of course.
The phrase world’s greenest home isn’t entirely a boast. Green accreditation is conferred by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit that measures eight areas of sustainable building for its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design ratings, including waste, water, energy, materials, and habitat. The Holland-Yates residence will easily exceed the top “LEED platinum” rating when it’s completed in November, and should earn the most LEED points of any home ever built. Its engineering was innovative enough to flummox San Mateo County officials, who initially wouldn’t approve a toilet system that fed into a front-yard meadow, and had to be persuaded that it wasn’t a health hazard.
All of this effort and expense—the couple says the finished complex will cost 2 to 5 percent more than “traditional homes,” which in their neighborhood start at about $5 million—is intended to serve a larger social purpose: to edify others and inspire them to build sustainable, regenerative houses. Holland and Yates plan to train docents to give tours of their home, and they want to create a Web site detailing the materials and vendors used for every aspect of its construction. They hope that, as with any “open source” project, others will carry on and improve what they’ve begun.
Holland-Yates Project Design Considerations
Environment:
The home is controlled with the Control4 total home control platform. All lighting loads can be dimmed and switched by intelligent Zigbee-based lighting controls located throughout the home. Motorized shades can also be controlled by the Control4 platform to maximize incoming solar gains in the winter and minimize heat loss at night. Occupancy sensors are located throughout the home to turn lights off after 7 minutes that no one has been in the room. The HVAC system is a radiant flooring system for efficient whole house heating needs.
Monitoring Systems:
A Control4 dashboard will be used to monitor electrical consumption for the home and several key loads in the home. In addition, solar energy gains will be monitored, water flows will be measured, and rain water reclamation and irrigation will be analyzed and displayed on web portals that can be viewed on Apple iPADS distributed throughout the home. In the near future, we plan to management the electrical loads per time of day parameters set forth by PGE, the local utility company.
Product Selection:
Control4 Control equipment was selected to control the AV, lights, shades, cameras, security system, HVAC, and pool equipment in the home. Best in class Sony and Denon AV equipment was used in the home because their electrical consumption met or exceeded EnergyStar requirements. Apple iPADs are distributed throughout the home and are used as control and dashboard monitoring platforms.
Innovation:
Several innovative building and energy solutions were used to create this net zero energy home. Innovations included:
- IP addressable power loads that can be turned on and off by the Control4 home control system as warranted by usage or time of day models
- Dashboards of electrical consumption, solar production, geothermal production can be viewed on any iPAD throughout the home.
- AV equipment is hidden in sub-floor pop-up TV systems. Speakers are hidden in alcoves where they cannot be seen.
