Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Heat Science 101

Most of the time we assume to know everything. Sometimes folks can say it better than we can. Back Woods Home magazine has an excellent article series on energy science. Why plagiarize when we can just send you there?

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/yago111.html

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Follow the Blue Star

All this prior talk about energy efficiency and well built homes made us decide to do something about it. So we went ahead and partnered with Energy Star for our home designs. All of our stock plans can be simply modified to meet Northwest and National Energy Star guidelines. What does this mean? This means that our qualified plans will carry the Energy Star logo. If your home is built with the details we show, you can achieve an Energy Star label for the home. When you order a plan, please let us know that this is your intention and we will contact you about how you want to achieve the standard. We will work these details into the plan before we send it to you.

For the national scale, this can probably best be achieved by using 2x6 walls (as most of our plans are) or 2x4 with exterior rigid foam, R-38 raised heel trusses, R-30 floors and U=0.35 windows among other things. For the Northwest, we are familiar with the four BOP paths, the most common of which is the envelope upgrade. Hawaii has its own set of rules.

Now your homes can be more energy efficient when you purchase plans from istockhouseplans. Come see our catalog today.