Gail Siegel is a full-time jeweler specializing in precious metals. She uses fire in her work and needed some extra space to do. After weighing the various options — renting a space, buying a larger home, building a backyard shed — she decided to install a Studio Shed with solar power from Denver-based SolSource.
There’s some interesting history to this net-zero energy home in Lenado, Colorado. Apparently, a “cranky,” gun-totting squatter named Jack Hogue, or “Lumber Jack,” built a cabin and bathhouse near the top of Woody Creek and took title by adverse possession in the 1990s, after 17 years. Branden Cohen and Deva Shantay of True Nature Healing Arts bought the place from Lumber Jack and improved it, but at 8,650 feet in elevation, it turns out they needed, among other things, a bathroom *in* the home, not out.
This year’s HGTV Green Home is in the popular Stapleton infill development of Denver, Colorado. The New Urbanist community features nothing but Energy Star homes that are about 30% more energy efficient than standard homes and 20% more water efficient than typical Denver households. But the HGTV Green Home 2011 steps things up a notch with a LEED Platinum certified project — it’s one of about 40 in the state.
In Fraser, Colorado, there’s a new net-zero energy house that was designed with impressive active and passive building technologies. It’s grid-tied and all-electric, using no fossil fuels thanks to the solar photovoltaics and evacuated tube solar thermal array. But the house isn’t the only thing powered by the sun. The 17-kW array also powers two all-electric plug-in vehicles.
Colorado-based Ec Manufacturing started making structural insulated panels (SIPs) about a year and a half ago. The company was studying 2009 building code and thinking about how to innovate their products, when someone decided the building industry could use a thermally broken lumber material. That led to the creation of rSTUD.
Project Profiles
