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Winning GO Home Costs Just $300 a Year to Heat

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From Jetson Green, we learn that the GO Home that we covered last year has won the USGBC Project of the Year, announced at the 2011 Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Toronto. Our own “Passive House in Maine Will Demonstrate How US Homes Could Use 10% of Normal Energy” is a winner!

The gorgeous and (despite being a decidedly chirpy red) very green home in Maine “uses minimal energy and was built at construction costs comparable to a building a standard home. As a net zero and passive house, The GO Home was designed to bring design and energy performance in line with affordability” says the USGBC in announcing the win.

GO Home was designed to slash energy usage by 90 percent, and succeeds. It costs merely $300 a year to keep this house warm. Surprisingly, many of the improvements in energy efficiency and comfort come from just a very much more scrupulous attention to tightly sealing the home than is usual in the US. But the windows are key.

The giant windows act as solar heating system, trapping 60% of the suns heat indoors using triple glazed German windows filled with a greenhouse gas to keep the warmth in, and framed with aluminum on the outside and sheathed in pine on the inside that seal super tight when closed because of thermal breaks on the frame and sash.

With this recognition, the house will be now be replicated across a 36-home community in Maine, bringing these kinds of extraordinary energy savings to 36 other households in the chilly northern state.

Having set out to meet the very much higher energy efficiency standards of the German PassiveHaus, using PassivHaus planning software, Matthew O’Malia of GO Logic has made a super tightly sealed 1,500 sq ft home able to withstand Maine’s chilly winters, as you can see in his Youtube video walkthrough.

GO Home, Maine’s first Passive-House-Certified home, is an elegant and functional model of the German Passive House Standard.