The homes at Sage Green are state-of-the-art machines, crafted by experienced professionals who love what they do and are intent on helping you make a better place in the world. They use the best ideas and practices in the industry to make the most energy-efficient home possible using mainstream materials and methods. Sage Green Homes run on about one-fourth as much energy as an average home. They produce more than that.

Sage Green establishes the new standard for performance
and sustainable home construction.

Zero-Net-Energy

“Zero-Net Energy” means that over the course of a year, a Sage Green home will produce as much energy as it needs. This is a very simple idea: no exceptions, exclusions or shenanigans.

It will be helpful to understand some of the details of how this works.

We don’t consume energy in our homes at a constant rate, and solar panels don’t produce energy at a constant rate either. More than that, the schedules of those varying rates of consumption and production don’t correspond to each other in any useful way. Sometimes a home at Sage Green will produce more than it consumes, and sometimes it will be the other way around.

The homes at Sage Green address these imbalances, capture the value of over-production and meet the demands of under-production, by connecting to the power grid. When they’re producing more than they need, they send energy out onto the grid for someone else to use. When they need more than they’re producing, they bring it in from the grid, just like any conventional house.

grid power

Electricity is difficult to store. Generally, we store energy in source form, say, as water behind a dam or oil in a barrel. Then, when there’s a demand for power, we use that source energy to generate electricity, transmit it and consume it.

The grid operates some power plants full-time to meet the constant minimum load. It fires up other plants in response to temporary increases in demand, and shuts them down again when demand falls off. Those latter “peak load” power plants tend to be less efficient. One of the preferred source fuels for peak load response is natural gas.

Overall grid efficiency, starting from the energy in the numerous sources (coal, gas, rivers, wind and so on) through the processes of generating, transmitting and distributing electricity, to the point of use (e.g.: your stove) is somewhere in the range of 30-40%. Put another way, as much as 2/3 of source energy (say, 650 of the roughly 1000 BTUs in a cubic foot of natural gas) is lost before you start cooking dinner. This defies belief, but it’s absolutely true. (Google “USDOE GridWorks”)

hybrid fueling

The homes at Sage Green not only deliver conventional amenity by using gas (maybe most importantly and visibly at the stove) they also reduce grid-wide carbon emissions and increase distribution of zero-carbon photovoltaic electricity. Consider this: It takes roughly the same amount of energy to boil a pot of water whether you’re using gas or electricity. But when you use gas at your stove, the power company doesn’t have to produce and deliver the electricity (see GRID above). You consume the same amount of energy in your home, but your choice of fuel displaces a “leveraged” amount of grid source-energy. This means an overall reduction in fossil fuel consumption. Moreover, because the solar panels on a home at Sage Green produce as much total energy as the home needs, any gas consumed at the house delivers an equal amount of zero-carbon solar electricity to the grid for some other conventional consumer to use.

REVOLUTIONARY RESOURCE EFFICIENCY and STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING

The homes at Sage Green are carefully engineered machines, each part considered and tailored to achieve the best fit with all the other parts.

As an example, the exterior walls of the homes at Sage Green are designed and built to be more than twice as energy efficient as walls built to code standards. They achieve this improvement with just a few small, inexpensive changes: they are thicker, more airtight, and have a thin layer of foam board between the sheathing and the framing.

That thin layer of foam alone increases the thermal performance of the walls by about 40%. Energy savings alone should pay for the foam in well under 10 years. More importantly, though, that thin layer of foam transforms the seismic characteristics of the wall.

In tests performed by the wood science lab at Oregon State University, these wall assemblies demonstrated the capacity to withstand more than twice the stress levels at which code walls disintegrated. The seismic capacities of these walls exceed the limits of the tests that underlie current international building codes. They are Patent Pending at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

ENERGY OUT OF THIN AIR

The homes at Sage Green literally harvest energy out of thin air, using air-source heat pumps to heat both air and water.

CONSERVATION

The homes at Sage Green have triple-glazed windows, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and high-efficiency mechanical equipment and appliances. Additionally, they recover the energy out of air and water leaving the house to pre-heat air and water coming in.

ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY

In addition to their energy efficient construction, the homes at Sage Green are built with low- and no-VOC paints, adhesives and interior finishes, protecting air quality both indoors and out. They also use recycled and locally-sourced materials.