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Rebuilding Our Building:
Going Green and Saving Green
POSTED BY LUCINDA CRABTREE ON 7/23/08
When I became the owner of C+C's current building in 1999, I had a powerful incentive to reduce energy costs as much as possible, thereby reducing our overhead and helping our overall profitability. Today, I see this form of "enlightened self-interest" as a driving factor in much of the green movement, and I have no quarrel with that: an economic motivation can lead to significant environmental benefits. And with energy prices likely to continue their steep rise, I'll bet there's going to be a lot more motivation out there.
So here's what we did to our 1966-vintage building:
- We gutted the interior to reconfigure the space, but left the perimeter interior sheetrock walls in place and added a second ½" layer of sheetrock atop them. That increased the building's R-factor without having to demolish the interior walls and replace the existing insulation. That also gave us deeper window boxes, providing the same thermal advantage as if we had extended the roof overhang outward (a far more expensive proposition).
- We tacked insulation batting to the inside of the roof and blew in an additional 12" of cellulose insulation atop the attic floor.
- We replaced all 102 single-pane windows with double-pane ones; the front and back doors with metal, insulated ones; and the old-style fluorescent fixtures with newer, and more efficient T-1 fixtures.
In the last 9 years, technology has given us even more energy-saving options and the price of fossil-fueled energy has given us even more motivation to save, so next entry we'll look at our plans for the building's future.
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