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Standing at the rear of a class full of students at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Matt Kubik is talking animatedly about avoiding “penetrations.”
And he's not talking about playing a better brand of basketball.
“Penetrations are the source of a lot of your heat loss,” Kubik says, referring to the openings on exterior walls needed for electrical outlets and kitchen or bathroom exhaust fans.
“These are the things you need to think about now. All of these small details are what is going to make a difference in energy efficiency.”
Kubik, an IPFW design professor, offered his penetrating commentary this month to poke holes in some rather lofty student ideas.
Students in the construction technology class he addressed are designing and building the first sustainable “green” house for the Fort Wayne affiliate of Habitat for Humanity.
The national non-profit builds affordable homes using volunteer labor for low- and moderate-income families who agree to help with construction.
“The idea is that sustainable, ‘green' homes are not just for rich people,” says class instructor Regina Leffers of IPFW's Center for the Built Environment and a member of the Fort Wayne-based Northeast Indiana Green Build Coalition, a project initiator.
Leffers says that is not the only idea about homebuilding the two-semester project is turning on its head.
“Traditional building has been about a top-down, hierarchical structure,” Leffers explains. “Green building is about collaboration and relationships and making decisions together.
“It's thinking through things before you start designing, so the design itself is imbued with sustainability from the ground up.”
For this project, that means the 13 students in Leffers' class made atypical choices in everything from the way the house is situated on the lot to selecting countertop materials.
Given an overgrown, wooded site 50 feet wide and 150 feet deep at 3720 E. Sherwood Terrace in Fort Wayne, students decided to save as many trees as possible and position the home so the trees would provide shade and wind protection, instead of cutting down the vegetation, and orienting the home's entrance toward the street.
The students placed windows in their home design to catch the sun and breeze. They diverted water run-off from the roof into a “rain garden” at the marshy rear of the property - a feature that will filter the water and take it back to the water table instead of into a storm sewer.
Students also chose to install a geothermal heating and cooling system to tap the earth's underground heat instead of a conventional furnace. And they turned to a new concrete technology for the walls of the house's crawl space.
Insulated Concrete Forms, known as ICFs, are sided with foam insulation that stays in place after the concrete is poured into them. Students in the class call them “giant Legos,” says senior Craig Campbell, because that's what they look like to them.
Solar tubes in the ceiling and a row of windows at ceiling height in the main living area will bring extra light and passive solar heating into the interior of the 1,100-square-foot home.
Paperless drywall will eliminate mold problems and emit fewer pollutants, as will zero-VOC paint.
VOC stands for volatile organic compounds, an air pollutant.
Windows will be three-pane, insulated to an R10 standard and have a special reflective coating to make them more energy-efficient.
Flooring, when not carpeted, will be linoleum, which is 100 percent recyclable. Kitchen cabinetry will be manufactured from bamboo, a quick-growing renewable resource.
Water-saving faucets, a showerhead and toilet will be installed, and kitchen countertops will be made from stamped concrete, which provides an economical, tough surface made from natural and recyclable materials.
Landscaping will be with native plants, and space has been left for a vegetable garden where residents can grow some of their own food.
Even the construction debris will be recycled through a local company.
To accomplish their design, the students split into 16 divisions. They also consulted with industry experts with some suprising finds.
Representatives of Fort Wayne's WaterFurnace International Inc., for instance, learned that their smallest unit was twice as powerful as necessary for a Habitat house.
Leffers says they took note of the fact that developing a unit that will serve a smaller square footage might be necessary to serve market needs.
WaterFurnace is donating a top-of-the-line Envision unit to the project, which is one way the students were able to meet budgetary constraints.
Students also learned the realities of construction when ICFs turned out to be too expensive for entire walls and they returned to conventional stud construction.
But several say they were surprised to find so many local resources for the materials they wanted to use.
To design the interior of the house, the students worked with the Habitat family, Hilliar and Hti Belloc, who are Burmese refugees and had requests specific to their culture and habits.
The family has asked designers to separate the cooking area from the rest of the house's living areas to contain food odors and to place the master bedroom at the far end of the home because Hilliar Belloc works nights and needs quiet to sleep during the day.
Don Cross, exeuctive director of Habitat for Humanity, says the class expects to break ground for the house in early March, with completion scheduled for May. Habitat has completed 115 other houses in Fort Wayne, he says.
Only a handful of Habitat affiliates have ventured into green building, Cross says, and a DVD is being made of the local project to serve as a training resource.
Class members say only a few members have hands-on building experience, but they are not daunted by the prospect of wielding hammers, hanging drywall and building forms for the countertops.
“I'm not worried about it, but I think we'll all be learning a lot as we go,” says senior Adam Sordelet, noting that Habitat provides trained construction crews for its projects.
For him, the payoff comes in participating in a cutting-edge project while still in school.
“I guess it's like the new wave of the future,” he says of green building. “It's good just to be ahead of the curve.”
rsalter@jg.net
