The Green Idea House
An Interview with Owner/Builder Robert Fortunato
The city of Hermosa Beach, California is abuzz about a very exciting, very green project that just may change the way buildings get built throughout the state and across the country. The Green Idea House, which won the 2012 Los County Green Leadership Award, is the brainchild of Robert and Monica Fortunato. In 2007, they began planning a renovation project that they could be proud of: a truly green home that would conserve energy, water and other natural resources and provide a healthy environment in which to live. They ended up building the cornerstone case study for Southern California Edison’s Net Zero Energy Initiative.
Designed to minimize energy use in operation, materials, waste and toxicity, the Green Idea House is an economical, carbon-emissions-free, zero-net-energy single family home that anyone would be happy to come home to. Robert and Monica and their 10-year old son moved into their new home in March 2012. Even though there is still some cosmetic work left to do, they are eager to share what they have learned, and recently invited us to their home for a tour and interview. Here's what Robert had to say about this model of green architecture.
How did the idea for the Green Idea House come about?
Several things led up to it. First off, as an 
economist, I believe that green building is the next industrial revolution; it means jobs and so much more. But when we would go to green open houses, we saw stuff that was way too expensive and nobody knew if it actually worked. We wanted to see metrics and weren’t seeing them. Even if a building is LEED platinum certified it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s performing well.
After designing our own massing model and floor plan using Google SketchUp, we hired a green architect; we just needed somebody to draw it up, green it up and submit it to the city. We ended up spending an embarrassing amount of money and time with this individual and he just wanted to change what we had done. For example, the building works because it has a 5’ overhang on the southwest side of the house – he wanted to take it off. He eventually admitted that he never wanted to be a green architect anyway. The fact that we got taken on this ride made us wonder what experience others were having when attempting to build green.
How long did the planning and research phase of the project take? How about the actual building time?
Planning started in 2007, and it took one year to build. We moved into the house in March 2012.
Roughly, what was the total project cost?
The house is 2100 sq ft and the construction cost was $200/sq ft, which is less than average for our area.
I read that you opted to deconstruct, rather than demolish, your old house, and to keep as much of the yard, foundation and existing structure as you could. What percent were you able to divert from landfills and how?
The ReUse People were incredible. They find homes for windows, concrete, lumber, etc. They came in here and deconstructed the whole house. When we had too much left over material, we separated and sorted it into sand, rocks, scrap lumber and put an add in the Pennysaver for free building materials. We also found homes for all the plants and rocks from our yard – if you look around the neighborhood, the green belt, and the Manhattan Beach Botanical Garden, you’ll see our old plants and rocks. Altogether, we were able to keep 97.5% of the deconstruction waste out of the landfill, which also meant we didn’t have to pay to have much of it hauled away.
The house is being touted as net zero energy and zero carbon. Now that you’ve been living in the house for a few months, have you been rewarded with a big fat $0 on your electric bill?
Yes, with only half of the solar array turned on, we are producing on average 85 kWh more energy than we are using. In our old house, which was only 1,300 sq ft, our average was energy use was 1,561 kWh/month (including the conversion for natural gas usage). In our new house, which measures 2,100 sq ft, we are averaging about 233 kWh/month. The natural gas has been completely capped off. In the future, we hope to get two electric cars, probably one hybrid electric and one fully electric, and still be net zero energy.
Can you tell us something about the energy-efficient features of the home?
The heart of the building is the 5’ overhang over the front of the building. In the middle of the summer, during the day, it acts as an umbrella for the whole building. And in the winter, when the sun rides low in the sky, it allows the passive heat to enter the garage windows, which might be the most energy-saving feature of the house. The sunlight heats up the thermal mass in the garage, and the heat-pump hot water heater, which is an air-to-water heat exchanger, takes the ambient heat in the room and pushes it through a heat pump cycle. As a result of that, it elevates the water temperature to 120°F for domestic hot water use. As a result, the heat-pump hot water heater is almost three times more energy efficient than the most efficient tankless water heater. And these are actually less expensive than a tankless water heater.
The home is heated by a second heat pump hot water heater and radiant baseboard heaters; the 120°F water goes through those radiators, comes back at 90°F, then the second heat-pump hot water heater heats it up again and sends it back out.
Inside, the thermal chimney is like the lungs of the house. When you create a thermal chimney like this with an opening at the top and just crack open a door at the bottom, hot air naturally rises with no fan energy. This evacuates any VOCs and naturally ventilates as well.
Also, the house has very few canned lights, which create lots of air leakage. Instead, we use a single uplighted fixture in the center of the room - this uses the ceiling as a reflector. We also reduce our energy load by never having to turn on a light during the day. We even have skylights in the closets.
Building green means energy- and water-saving devices and recycled and otherwise sustainable materials. These things can certainly add to construction costs. Any tips for building green on a budget?
Some things can be more expensive. Reclaimed wood flooring, for example, which has been planed, sanded, and sealed, can cost $30/ft2. We didn’t do that, but we did splurge a little in the bathrooms on recycled tiles from Stone Peak and Oceanside Glass.
But green building can save you a lot of money as well. Our new living room ceiling, for example
, is made of 80-year-old old-growth redwood spared from a house in Los Angeles. We got it from The ReUse People – it would have gone into the landfill otherwise. We got a whole pile of it for $500. And there’s plenty to go around: every year, in Los Angeles county alone, ½ billion board feet of lumber ends up in landfills.
We also saved the foundations all around the house and rebuilt the house on that same foundation and as a result saved $40,000 in footings alone. We also saved a ton of lumber and as much as possible, put it back into the house. To remove the nails from all that wood in order to reuse it, we hired the guys from Youth Build, a program that ensures that at-risk teens finish school and learn a trade.
And in the future, when we get too old to navigate the steps to our second-floor master bedroom, no expensive renovation will be necessary – we’ll just move downstairs. We purposely built the downstairs large and comfortable enough that we could have one-floor living when that time comes.
How much money were you able to save with rebates, tax credits and tax deductions?
We saved $8000 through Energy Upgrade California rebate program, plus $2,000 with a rebate for the GreenPoint certification. We also got a $8,500 tax credit for our solar PV system, and a $38,000 tax deduction for donating deconstruction materials to The ReUse People, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Congratulations on being Build It Green's 10,000th GreenPoint Rated home. Is it expensive to get certified? What’s in it for the homeowner?
Basic rating fees typically range from $1,200 to $1,500 for a single-family home (which you get back with the $2,000 rebate). Getting your home GreenPoint Rated puts you in a community of people who really know green, and the people who are certified to do the work have gone through very specific training and they understand what they’re doing.
Is there a reason that you went with GreenPoint certification instead of LEED?
The U.S. Green Building Council has done a great job of bringing awareness to the need for green building, but the story of this house is to build community around the idea that anyone can and shoud build with energy and sustainability in mind. That means it has to be affordable. LEED is very expensive – they wanted around $7,000 for the certification, and we’d rather spend that money on more solar panels. But this building would have met Platinum standards had we gone with LEED.
For more information about the Green Idea House, including more about the energy- and water-efficient aspects of the home, and highlights of the sustainable and recycled materials used in the remodel, visit www.greenideahouse.com and www.greenideahouse.com/blog.
