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Maine Watch: Green Home Construction in Maine
By: Jennifer Rooks

You might have heard about zero-energy homes in places like southern California, but here in Maine? A new house is Belfast comes pretty close. This program looks at new trends in green home construction.

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Savings Plan: A Zero-Energy Design Breaks the Affordability Barrier
By: Bruce D. Snider · March 1, 2010

Building a super-energy-efficient single-family house at an affordable cost is no easy task. In Maine, with its frigid winters, the challenge is especially stiff. But G•O Logic, a design/build collabo­ration of architect Matthew O’Malia and builder Alan Gibson, has produced a stylish and practical prototype house that will meet both Passivhaus and LEED Platinum standardsat a construction cost of only $150 per square foot. “Instead of just building a slightly better shell,” O’Malia says, “we’re building a home that uses 90 percent less energy for space heating.”

Design innovations begin with a shallow foundation completely isolated from the earth by rigid insulation (including the footings that support the hybrid timber-frame structural system). Using the Passivhaus Planning Package software to model various building shell configurations and mechanical systems eliminated the need for a mechanical engineer. Production efficiencies center on a computer model that guides fabri­cation of all major structural components. The 6½-inch-thick SIPs arrive at the site pre-cut and ready to lift into place. Proper solar orientation, fanatical air sealing, reduced thermal bridging, and ultra-high-performance German windows help the building meet an annual energy consumption target of 120 kilowatts per square meter.

G•O Logic offers the house in 1,200-square-foot, 1,500-square-foot, and 1,700-square-foot versions and will rent out the prototype for two years to monitor its long-term energy performance.

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"Passive House" Does Away With Heating Bills, Maine Designers Say
By: Tom Porter · April 2, 2010

In Maine's cold-weather climate, it might seem like an impossible task to design a house that requires almost no heating, but this is what a firm of mid-coast architects is doing. G-O-Logic in Belfast is putting the finishing touches to a prototype dwelling that looks on the surface like a simply-designed, three-bedroom, 1,500 square foot family home with a peaked roof on about an acre of land. But this is no ordinary house: It's about to be approved as Maine's first so-called "Passive-House" certified home -- and indeed one of the few to be found in the Northeast.

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