In the future, you won’t have to be related to Ted Turner to have a “green” house built in Atlanta, according to the real estate and media mogul’s daughter, Laura Seydel. In fact, the goal that Seydel and her husband Rutherford, a prominent Atlanta lawyer and part owner of the NBA’s Hawks and the NHL’s Thrashers, had when they conceived of the EcoManor was to make green building more popular.
Granted, most homes don’t have names. This, however, is not a typical home, according to builder Jerome Rosetti of Atlanta-based Delaney Rosetti Construction. The 5,000-square-foot-plus Tudor-style house is expected to become the first U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified residence in the Southeast.
The owners, both active in the environmental awareness movement, hope the energy-saving features in their anything-but-green-looking home will spur others to go eco-friendly. Rosetti thinks it will — including builders. This particular home, he says, “has all the bells and whistles in it.” Other homebuyers and other builders don’t have to choose each and every one of the green features, Rosetti adds, but EcoManor serves as an example of how a completely environmentally-geared home can come together. “Actually,” Rosetti says, “incorporating eco-friendly features into houses is fairly easy. I had done most of these things in other homes; I just hadn’t done them all in the same home.” If the Seydels want their home to raise awareness of the benefits and the quality of green building, their timing couldn’t be better, according to David Hardy of Atlanta-based Interior Media, an integration company that worked on the construction. “When they started this a few years ago, nobody was talking or writing about green building,” he says. “Now it’s all over the media.” So is EcoManor. And there’s a lot to write about.
There are the photovoltaic solar panels that connect to the electricity grid, generating most of the home’s energy and earning the homeowners credits with the utility company. There’s the soy-based foam insulation. There’s the solar tubing system that funnels sunlight into a windowless bathroom, saving electricity costs. There is the geothermal heating and cooling system that consists of 12 wells dug 220 feet deep to tap subsurface water. There is the rainwater collection system that funnels water from the roof through a gutter system into rainwater collection tanks that send the “gray” water back to toilets and to use in irrigating the garden.
These are just a handful of the eco-friendly features in EcoManor. Ironically, though, the most energy-saving part of the home might be the electronics.
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Rosetti called upon Interior Media to tie many of the eco and audio/video features of the home together via a control system.
“We use a Crestron system, as we do in most of our projects,” Hardy says, “but this one is different.” For one thing, it’s different because of the 15-inch Crestron touchpanel in the kitchen. That’s the “master panel,” he says. It’s where the homeowners can monitor the home’s energy usage in real time, and make adjustments on the fly to save money.
The Crestron interface is built with a platform called Builder Dashboard, developed by Lucid Design Group. The user-friendly display tracks how much, in dollars and cents, is being saved by using solar panels to produce electricity and geothermal energy to heat and cool the house. The savings are based on standard energy usage calculations. Local utility Georgia Power buys back the electricity produced by the solar panels, so the savings can be displayed on the Crestron screen via the Building Dashboard.
Interior Media, which oversaw much of the electronics-based subcontracting, recognizes that Atlanta-based programming partner Synpros Corp. was critical in creating the energy-monitoring feature. Hardy explains that the guys from Synpros hooked up the Crestron system to sensors that measure electricity usage — on the geothermal system and in the water collection tanks, for instance. “It’s all run through a processor and sent through the IP to the Dashboard, enabling the people inside the house to view energy usage on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis,” he says. Being able to monitor energy usage, according to Hardy, is one of the keys to driving green technology. “If homeowners have the ability to see their energy usage daily and make a change to modify their behavior and usage, it makes a huge impact.”
The Seydels, meanwhile, hope EcoManor’s presence will have an impact on the perception of green building. Their idea to build a home to serve as a vehicle for the message of green building evolved, ironically enough, after a 200-year-old oak tree fell and crushed a tiny cottage they had bought with the intention of its being a guest house to their nearby home.
In rebuilding, they decided to go the whole nine yards — and go green. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t cheap, Hardy says. “It cost them a lot of money and they also had a lot of components donated.” He explains that many of the donated items didn’t come in on time and the construction schedule was often compromised.
As challenging as the project was, few would expect the first-ever LEED-certified residence in the Southeast to go off without a hitch. “Thanks to the efforts of our dedicated team of builders, interior designers and architects, Laura and I are excited to call EcoManor our new home,” Rutherford Seydel says.
According to Hardy, the effort toward getting the word out on green building seems to be working. “Around here, it used to be just a couple of builders doing that stuff,” he says. “Now it [green building] really seems to be catching on.”