What Makes It Special?

These features, in conjunction with its beauty, work together to make the BrightBuilt Barn unique.

Super Insulation = No Furnace: Each component of the building envelope (walls, floor, ceiling/roof) achieves R-40 insulation; which in combination with high efficiency windows, creates a building tight enough to require NO FURNACE. (R-value is a measure of a material’s resistance to heat flow. Historically, typical American residential construction achieves closer to R-19 in walls and ceilings and little to no insulation in the floors.)

In the super-insulated BrightBuilt Barn, enough heat is generated by the movement of the occupants inside and by the occasional use of an appliance to provide a cozy interior temperature on all but the coldest days. It’s like living inside a big down sleeping bag, made snug and warm by your own body heat. On extremely cold days, this “body furnace” is supplemented by heat from the solar hot water system.

Net-Zero Plus: This building takes a radical stance toward carbon neutrality. Not only does it generate all the electrical and heat energy that it needs, thus reducing its annual carbon footprint to zero (i.e. Net Zero). It takes the next step by generating substantially more electricity over the course of a year than it uses, and sending it out into the national electrical grid, where it displaces the need for more carbon-producing sources of electricity such as coal-fired generators.

Thus we expect that in energy terms, this building will be a GIVER MORE THAN A RECEIVER. Over time, the surplus energy will erase the “carbon debt” incurred by building the BrightBuilt Barn.

(Any construction adds carbon to the atmosphere both indirectly, through use of energy and energy-intensive materials, and directly, as in the carbon dioxide released during the curing of concrete. In our view, this construction-related carbon dioxide production represents a “debt” that should be repaid over the life of the building if we are to get to true sustainability. Producing excess energy, and thus displacing more carbon dioxide production than you create, is one way of paying back this carbon debt.)

Wears A Mood Ring: Home occupants and observers will be able to track the building’s energy performance in two ways. The first way is through an LED light skirt that wraps the building. The light skirt is wired to glow green when the building is on track to produce more energy than it uses and glow red when it is using more energy than it produces. An interior glowing light also corresponds to the skirt. The second way occupants and observers can track the barn’s energy performance is on the BrightBuilt website which tracks energy performance in real time.

Sun Worshipper: The roof of the BrightBuilt Barn is packed with 30 individual 32” x 62” solar panels able to produce approximately 20 kWh or 210 watts per day, making the system capable of producing 6.2 kw at peak production.  These photovoltaic panels are arranged symmetrically on each side of 60 evacuated solar thermal tubes, long glass tubes constructed like thermoses, which trap heat energy from the sun even on the coldest days. The solar panels will roughly produce 32 kWh per day and will feed any excess energy back into the grid. The tubes will produce the energy equivalent of approximately .37 gallons of heating oil per day, saving an estimated yearly total of 137 gallons for domestic hot water and, as needed, to the space heating needs of the building.

To put this in some context, the space heating load for a typical two person 700 sq. ft. Maine home consumes roughly 310 gallons of heating oil per season. This means that the BrightBuilt Barn could meet over half of the yearly heating oil consumption of a conventionally constructed house its size with solar tubes alone; yet the super-insulated BrightBuilt Barn is projected to need only a fraction of this amount, leaving ample margin for severely cold weather. As an added safety measure, any remaining need will be met by a back-up air handling heat pump unit powered by the Photovoltaic solar panels. The heat pump can also double as an air conditioner in the Summer.

Offsite Fabrication: Bensonwood, a timber frame company known for its energy efficient panelization process, is able to fabricate offsite about 90% of the project in their New Hampshire workshop. Offsite fabrication is a green building method because it greatly eliminates waste in the construction process by allowing for computer-assisted fabrication under controlled conditions; rather than onsite, outdoors in unpredictable weather and chaotic working conditions, as in conventional construction methods.

Material waste in conventional construction can be 50% or more – for every house that is built, the waste materials could build half of another one the same size. Material waste at Bensonwood is less than 10%, because computers pre-calculate every cut for each piece of wood and every leftover cut timber, which would end up as scrap onsite, is automatically retained in the computer’s inventory to be used where appropriate in the next project. Construction in a workshop also allows development of efficient workflows, reducing the wasted time and effort created by the chaotic working environment onsite, where simply scheduling the work of the different trades (carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc.) becomes a monumental task.

LEED Platinum: The BrightBuilt Barn has received a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, the highest attainable designation in this national green rating program. Fewer than 10% of the projects certified by the USGBC have received this rating and this is projected to be just the 7th in New England. www.usgbc.org

Cascadia Living Building Challenge: This emerging rating system goes beyond the benchmarks of LEED in challenging buildings to be sustainable. By using a set of stringent and absolute criteria instead of a point system that allows trade-offs, buildings that participate in this challenge cannot compromise in any of their decisions. BrightBuilt Barn has been inspired by this Challenge. http://ilbi.org/

Open Source Collaboration-Sharing the Knowledge: Central to our innovative team design and building process has been the unusually extensive use of web-based collaborative communication systems to exchange information, in addition to periodic face-to-face conferences. This is the way designing and building structures will occur in the future. To help bring about that future, we have made our process and learning curve available to anyone. The project has a website which serves as a portal to both a wiki which stores information on goals, processes, and lessons learned, and an active blog which records our weekly progress.

A 200-Year House: In today’s building culture, the average lifespan of new built structures is measured in decades, not centuries. There is little economic incentive for a developer or original owners to create structures that outlast their lifetime. This means that the carbon debt incurred by building the structure has a relatively brief period of utility, before the structure is demolished and another structure built, incurring additional carbon debt. The BrightBuilt Barn, on the other hand, is designed and constructed to last indefinitely as a result of both the durable qualities of its materials and by keeping its systems disentangled, allowing for flexibility and adaptability of design.

Disentanglement: In conventional structures, systems are entangled. For example, in a conventional house, the electrical wiring and plumbing typically meander through the structural beams of the house according to the whim of the tradesperson installing. This means that wiring and plumbing often end up criss-crossing unpredictably and are then hidden behind wall surfaces, or even entombed within concrete floors or walls. This wouldn’t be a problem if things didn’t break, wear out, or homeowners didn’t ever want to make changes. But in reality, these entangled systems make repairs and renovations needlessly difficult and expensive.

Disentanglement ensures that systems are kept separate, typically in known locations such as chases, raceways, and conduits; which increases a structure’s adaptability, and adaptability increases its longevity.

Innovative Efficient Glazing: In addition to triple glazed windows, natural light is allowed into the building through high thermal efficiency, light transmitting sheet polycarbonate, creating the effect of a translucent wall which will allow light in during the day, and glow from the inside at night.

“State of the Shelf” Design: Rather than using “bleeding edge” technology, which often leads to structures that are more science project than usable and livable buildings, we have opted for highly innovative uses of proven technologies. While BrightBuilt Barn includes some high-tech leading edge materials and technologies, we have avoided the unproven, and have looked for creative uses of all materials, new and old.