The Grow Community is built to make living a carbon free lifestyle easy and obtainable. This section of our blog is dedicated to all things energy and meant to catalog our pursuit of a carbon free lifestyle and the steps we are taking to achieve that goal.

Grow Solar Part 2: Solar Power and Energy Efficiency

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Click here for Part 1

So how can solar cover all our energy needs?

Well, traditionally it wouldn’t. Most houses you see around you draw more energy than solar panels could provide.

In our case, the homes of Grow Community have been designed from the ground up with solar in mind. This includes electric wiring specifically designed for easy installation of solar panels on the roof. If you take advantage of the solar option, the panels will be enough to meet the energy demand of your life due to the energy efficiency designed into every square inch of the house. You can click here to look at the options available to add onto it if so desired.

So just how energy efficient are these homes? Well, until we get people living in the homes full time we won’t know this exactly, but we’re happy to talk about how they have been designed. Plus having this option may give people some flexibility when they learn more about their utility options. Here are some of the features that make these homes as efficient as possible:

Heat pump: The ductless minisplit Greensboro heat pump by mitsubishi in each home is twice as efficient as a gas or electric water heater. There are many different types of water heaters available on the market, from electric to tankless, you have an array of options when obtaining a water heater for your home. Whether you’re moving to a new home, or just want to have your heater replaced, you can look online on sites similar to Water Heater Reviews and check out their vast catalog of water heaters. You can visit homepage for more information.

Ventilation system: Every home in Grow Community is outfitted with a heat recovery ventilator (HRV), which provides a great compliment to our ductless mini split heat pump by keeping the temperature range consistent within the home and allowing our heating system to work less and more efficiently. (This is very cool technology, and worth it’s own blog post in the future)

Lights: Most of the lights use high-efficiency LEDs, which are many times more efficient than conventional light bulbs. Almost all of our lights are LEDs and we’re pushing to have a 100% LED lit home in the future.

Windows: We use high quality energy-efficient windows, which are generally where houses lose a majority of their heat.

Appliances: All of the appliances in our homes meet or beat current energy star performance requirements.

Double Walls and Insulation: Walls in each home are twice as thick as standard walls, and are doubly insulated, reducing heat energy waste through the sides of your house.

All these energy-efficiency improvements greatly reduce the amount of power your home requires (saving 2-3 tons of coal per year), enabling the power created by solar panels to cover the rest.

Check out part 3, where we describe the incentives available to homeowners to help cover the costs of installation.

Grow Solar Part 1: How Grow Community Will Be Zero Carbon by 2020

/in , , , , , /by

Before we ever broke ground building Grow Community, we the Grow Team had a vision for the perfect neighborhood. We wanted to create a One Planet community that took environmental, economic, and social sustainability into account. Working toward this vision has been an adventure, and has helped us reach for our goal of being a Net-Zero carbon community by 2020.

A big part of achieving this goal is the option for each homeowner to install solar on their homes.

In the following blog series, we will explore this solar option start to finish. What makes this a viable option?  What are the benefits of solar? How much will it cost? Will financing be available?

So stay tuned and head on over to Part 2: Solar Power and Energy Efficiency where we answer the question “How can solar cover all our energy needs?”

 

5 Minute Lifestyle; Sustainable Transportation Options For Residents At Grow Community

/2 Comments/in , , , , , , , , /by

[The following is part of our Five Minute Lifestyle series. Living at Grow Community makes getting out your car easy with all of your local amenities and transportation needs met within a quick 5 minute walk or bike ride away. Our Five Minute Lifestyle posts are dedicated to spotlighting nearby local businesses, transportation options for residents, community resources and the spectacular local attractions of Bainbridge Island and our surrounding community.]

Building a healthy community takes more than just building energy efficient homes. Solar panels on your home and energy efficient appliances are a great start, but it’s only the beginning. There’s a much deeper story to be told. Whole communities are built on the understanding that sustainability is defined not only by physical impacts to our environment, but also by the experience of support, equity and connection for the community’s members. One Planet communities address all aspects of sustainability, from the ecological to the economic and cultural impacts, with social well being and quality of life as a foundation of the concept.

One of the principles behind Grow Community’s One Planet sustainable development model is reducing carbon from transportation. With this principle in mind, we set out to provide several sustainable transportation options for residents of Grow Community to make it easier to live without a car, or with only one family vehicle. Grow Community is a 5 – 10 minute walk (or leisurely bike ride) from downtown Winslow and the ferry to Seattle and the location of the development was carefully chosen to support a lifestyle that isn’t dependent on a vehicle. All of your in-town amenities and transportation needs are close by, and, if you work in downtown Seattle, commuting is easy from Grow.

[Related: 5 Minute Lifestyle; Five Local Food Havens Minutes From Grow Community]

We know that residents will still need a vehicle on occasion, and there is room for each resident to have their own car. But what if you would prefer not to own a car, or need a second car only once in a while? That is when Grow Community’s car-sharing program for residents comes into play. For a small monthly fee residents can opt-in to our Nissan LEAF car-sharing program and book our electric car for trips around town or into Seattle. The car is charged by it’s own dedicated solar panel array and is a 100% emissions free transportation option for Grow Community residents. If interest is high, we will add a number of cars to the car share program, making this a choice that residents can depend on. For those that decide later down the line that they would like their own car but want an electric vehicle, it would be worth consulting with an electrician like those at aardvark-electric.com/areas-we-serve/marietta/ to see if they can have an EV charging station installed.

For the more casual outings, we have community bikes available for our residents. We are providing the bikes as a healthy option to easily get around Bainbridge Island, and we are hoping the bikes will help people explore the community. The bikes, made by Public Bikes, have already been popular with our own project team-a great way to get around town. We hope that no serious incidents occur, but if anyone was to have an accident there are a few things we’d recommend. The main thing would be to call an ambulance or paramedic if it was a serious accident. The second being the need to contact a lawyer if you had a bicycle accident, as you would need someone to represent you if you had a serious injury from someone else’s mistake. Hopefully, no-one will have an accident, but this is just to be on the safe side.

By providing a number of different options for Grow residents to choose low-carbon transportation options, we hope to reduce our overall carbon footprint, create healthy options for getting around town, and demonstrate how sustainable transportation choices can be easy on the pocketbook.

Scroll down to check out some pictures of our new Nissan LEAF and community bikes!

In the picture above you can see Grow Community’s new LEAF with it’s EV Station (on the right) and the solar array which is charging the station (the structure just to the left and behind the vehicle). In the background you can see our three solar powered model homes, now open for public tours. From left to right: The Aria, Ocean and Everett. Read more

First solar panels installed at Grow today, one step closer to a zero-carbon community

/in , , , , , , , /by

The first of many solar panels are being installed today on the model homes! These are the first of thousands of panels that will be installed on the homes, apartment buildings and community buildings at Grow, helping us to create a zero-carbon community, with the goal of making all buildings zero-carbon by 2020. This means that both homeowners and renters at Grow have the opportunity to reduce their overall annual cost of living by paying little or NO energy bills! Imagine that.

Using solar panels is not anything new, as they are becoming more and more common on homes and the buildings of businesses. There are even brewers, winemakers and distillers who are gaining attention for their efforts to be more “green” (click here to see how). However, having a zero-carbon community will be quite amazing. Not to mention that if all goes as planned, this will be the largest residential solar community in Washington State.

The solar package, supplied by BlueFrog Solar, includes all Washington manufactured components: Itek photovoltaic panels – manufactured just 100 miles from here in Bellingham, Washington; APS Microinverters, also locally manufactured in Poulsbo, Washington, and racking from Sunmodo Corp. in Vancouver, Washington.

Reporting from the Grow Community, our architect, Jonathan Davis of Davis Studio Architecture & Design, had this to say:

It wasn’t a blue-sky day, but it made it easier on the installers. When the micro-inverter was plugged in the lights lit up showing we are making power!! Read more

Keeping you in the loop: 5 things taking place on Grow Avenue this week

/in , , , , , , , /by

Wondering what’s happening at the construction site on Grow Avenue this week?

A lot has been happening at the Grow Community construction site this week. You may have noticed how quickly the model homes are going up and been wondering what exactly is going on along Grow Avenue. Read on for your weekly digest of Grow Community construction news and let us know in the comments if you have any questions. Read more

This week at the Grow site: Building energy efficiency (and savings) right into the walls.

/in , , , , , , , /by

A lot has been happening at the Grow Community construction site this week and we want to make sure you’re kept in the loop! Last week we talked about the air barrier being put up on the Aria which left some residents wondering if we were painting all of the homes at Grow black. We know that with a project this size there will be lots of questions
and general curiosity from the community, so read on for your weekly digest of construction updates at the Grow Community and please let us know in the comments if you have any feedback or if there’s anything specific you would like us to address in a future blog post.

Energy Efficiency is the Name of the Game at Grow this Week 

Energy efficiency is about more than turning down the heat.  And we have always said that living at Grow isn’t all about warm beers and cold showers.  While residents will need to be mindful of their energy use in order to achieve net-zero energy in their homes, we have put an incredible amount of thought into how we can design homes that will be inherently energy efficient, and even more than that, homes that will be comfortable. You won’t be chilly in these homes. We promise.

In order to achieve this, it’s necessary to build the savings right into the walls. Creating enough solar energy to power an entire home with the amount of space available on most roofs’ is very difficult, so the goal  Read more