Read the article here. One of the highlights is you’ll find pictures of the illusive Jeff Buscher doing things like faking reading a newspaper. For these and other priceless shots, go to “Related Links” and click on “Home of the week: Buscher”.

A quadruple pane window from Serious Materials installed in a hempcrete wall of the Nauhaus Prototype

The Nauhaus Prototype project hit a milestone this month with the installation of doors and windows form Serious Materials. The project hasbeen designed to reach the Passive House Standard and therefore requires extremely high performance windows.

Though a number of German companies make windows in this category, Serious Materials is the only US company that can meet the required specs. All window and door units on the project have fiberglass frames and quadruple pane glazing. Southern glazing has a center of glass insulation value of R-7 with an impressive solar heat gain coefficient (the percentage of solar heat that passes through the glass, 1.o would be 100%) of about 0.7. This allows for heat gain from the low southern winter sun, a strategy integral to the Passive House integrated design system.

North, east, and west glazings weigh in at an amazing center of glass rating of R-11, a rating equal to the fiberglass insulation in some conventional stick frame walls! This is compared to R-2 for a typical double pane window found on most US projects. Unlike the heavier European windows, Serious reaches this performance level with two pieces of glass and two pieces of plastic allowing for a thinner profile more like conventional windows typically available in the US.

“In a Passive House in our climate region, walls need to be about R-40. You just can’t stick an R-2 hole in an R-40 wall,” says Clarke Snell of the Nauhaus Institute. “The idea is to spend money on passive elements, extra insulation and really good windows for example, that don’t require energy inputs to do their job once installed, unlike heating, cooling, and ventilation equipment. In the right configuration, these passive elements combine to allow for a much simpler and less expensive mechanical system, thus saving money in construction and afterwards with much lower energy bills.”

Here’s a rockin’ ad for the Nauhaus prototype put together by our own Jennifer Bennett.

Click here to view the entire Nauhaus Prototype Construction Chronology.

If you’re interested in volunteering for the Nauhaus Prototype Project, please contact Billy.

Nauhaus Prototype Project from jennifer bennett on Vimeo.

The big blizzard of ’09 temporarily put the kibosh on construction, but we’re back up and running.  The Hemcrete forms have come off of the first floor, Serious Materials windows have arrived, and the roof is moving forward, with horse drawn, local, sustainably harvested hemlock fascia boards from Mountain Works installed this week.

If you’re interested in volunteering for the Nauhaus Prototype Project, please contact Billy.

Click here to view the entire Nauhaus Prototype Construction Chronology.

Asheville, NC–The Nauhaus Institute (NHI) is scheduled to begin the installation of its revolutionary hemcrete walls on its prototype research home this Wednesday December 2^nd. Because a small part of the wall system was installed as a demonstration on November 12^th, the prototype home is already the first of its kind in the US. The material, called Tradical® Hemcrete®, is made from waste hemp shiv and a lime-based binder. Designers from NHI have opted to pursue Passive House certification which would make the house not only one of the fist ten certified in the US but also the first Passive House hemp home in the world.

“This is going to be a really significant project on a global scale,” said Ian Pritchett, the Chairman and Technical Director of Lime Technologies who manufactures Hemcrete®. Pritchett flew in from the United Kingdom to mark the event. (see the full interview here – Youtube).

Designers of the home say that the new material will not only create breathable, long-lasting walls but also give the home an insulation performance of three times what building code requires. The material can be mixed and poured in to forms in a similar fashion to concrete.

“We’re essentially building with a bio-composite made from agricultural waste and a recyclable binder,” said Tim Callahan, Architectural Designer for NHI. “The lime binder itself has been used as a building material for thousands of years.”

The construction project has already raised eyebrows nationally in the green building world. “It’s going to be off the scale for LEED points,” said Pritchett. “This is a very big deal.” LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” and is the dominant rating system for environmentally sustainable construction. And it doesn’t stop there; the NHI team is projecting that the house will break records in nearly every quantifiable sustainability standard by which homes are measured.

“We sought out this home because it’s had a reputation as a historic project,” said Matt Schillig, owner of WNC ProBuilt. Schillig is installing the Hemcrete®, framing and Eco-Panels roofing on the prototype home.

The Nauhaus Institute is the research, education, and information-generating branch of the Nauhaus family of organizations based in Asheville, NC. The goal of NHI is to merge the best of modern high tech building science with the core principles of the “natural” and “green” building movements.