Las Vegas builder completes green home to high standards

Las Vegas builder Brian Plaster's new home is a verifiable, certified green home, built to the highest green building standards available at this time. The 4,400-square-foot, two-story home is located near Alta Drive and Rancho Road, where his family moved in October. Plaster is the vice president of Signature Custom Homes and founder of Sustainable Energy Services, which performs energy audits and develops energy efficiency solutions for clients' buildings.

"The home is performing well so far," Plaster said. "Our first power bill was $25, and $15 of that amount was for the connection fee, and $8.40 were the fees, so basically, we had no power bill."

According to Plaster, the home has so many environmental features that it earned a list of third-party verifications and certifications and will earn the highest rating, platinum, from the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It will also earn an emerald rating from the National Association of Home Builders' Green Building Standard program, its highest rating.

To earn these prestigious ratings for the home, the Plasters enrolled to participate in several green building certification programs that use independent, third-party inspectors, known as HERS raters, to ensure all the requirements of the programs were met, beginning with the design of the home, through construction, and to the implementation of the home's operation systems.

Those programs included the Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership, a program of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association and the Green Building Initiative of Portland, Ore., based on the NAHB program; the city of Las Vegas' Green Building Program; and the Environments for Living program, which was developed by the giant Masco Co. in 2001 in response to a growing need to help applying building science and energy-efficient construction practices in the field.

Green building refers to a design and construction system that directs the efficient use of resources, materials, energy and water; and maximizes the indoor environmental quality.

Plaster was the first home builder to enroll in the Southern Nevada Green Building Partnership program in the summer of 2007.

Green homes are rated based on a home energy rating score, or HERS score. Plaster's home earned a 34 HERS score from the Environments For Living. By comparison, highly energy-efficient homes rate in the mid- to low-40s. The majority of newer homes with energy conservation features rate about 85 (Energy Star); the majority of older homes, which were not built to the 1992 Model Energy Code, rate above 100.

Some of the homes' green features include a radiant heat barrier located beneath the roof tiles, Energy Star light fixtures with CFL bulb, LED lighting, tankless hot water heaters, low-flow water fixtures, dual-flush low-flow toilets, house paints with low-to-no volatile organic compounds, dual-glazed Anderson 100 Series windows with SmartSun glass that rejects unwanted solar heat gain and have U values less than .30, a 5 kilowatt solar panel system installed by Bombard Electric, Energy Star appliances and air-conditioning units with a Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio rating of 17.

"Perhaps the biggest difference in how we built this house versus every other home we have built in Las Vegas deals with the insulation and how we sealed the home. Every aspect of the building envelope was sealed using expansive foam that eliminates a great deal of air transfer between the indoor and outdoor elements," Plaster said.

"We used three types of insulation in the house. Icynene was used in the garage, all interior walls received formaydhyde-free batt insulation, and blown-in cellulose was used in the attic and all exterior walls. We used an insulation system in the attic where the cellulose was blown into bags hanging from the underside of the roof trusses, which expands our building envelope to include the attic, thereby eliminating the inefficient practice of a having a non-conditioned attic."

According to Plaster, building green can add about 3 to 5 percent to the cost of constructing homes, not including the cost of the solar panels, but those extra costs will be recouped in five to 10 years because of the savings on resources, such as electricity, gas and water.

Plaster said he envisions significant benefits for homeowners who buy the new generation of energy-efficient homes.

"First, they're going to have much lower operating costs by helping to reduce their need for resources like gas, water and electricity so they are going to save a lot of money over the lifespan of the home. The home will be a healthier place to live in as the residents will benefit from a higher level of indoor air quality, and the more efficient heating and cooling systems will create a more comfortable living environment."

A higher level of indoor air quality is a major component of the green building requirements. For example, the requirements call for, in part, ensuring particleboard, medium-density fiberboard and hardwood plywood substrates are certified to low formaldehyde emission standards; composite wood/agrifiber panel products must either contain no added urea-formaldehyde resins or must be third-party certified for low formaldehyde emissions; installing carpet and padding that hold Green Label certificates from Carpet and Rug Institute's indoor air quality testing program or meet equivalent thresholds verified by a third party; using house paints with no- to low-volatile organic compounds and managing potential pollutants generated in the home by providing mechanical exhaust fans from the kitchen range, bath and laundry to the outside of the home; there are also mechanical ventilation requirements for the bedrooms.

Plaster's interest in the environment began growing up in an environmentally conscious family. The graduate of the Meadows School earned a bachelor's of science degree in natural resources, which is a combination of geology and forestry, in 1999 from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. During that period, he also studied sustainable development in Costa Rica.

He earned a master's degree in geography from Texas State University in San Marcos. While working for a custom home builder in Austin, Texas, he toured homes under construction using green-building standards. Austin has one of the oldest green building programs in the United States and most builders there participate in that program, Plaster said. The time and experiences in Austin sparked an intense interest in learning more about green building, and perhaps, one day, building green homes himself -- a goal that he has now accomplished.

He has networked with other custom home builders involved in green building and has attended green building conferences, including the green building conferences sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders, which developed the Model Green Home Building Guidelines in 2004.