As a relatively small homebuilder, I don't often get the chance to have a repeat customer. But a project this year in Greenville, S.C., turned out to be the exception.
This latest project is all-electric – a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,300-square-foot home that when complete will be DOE Zero Energy Ready (ZERH) Certified. The home includes on-site power generation through solar panels and ducted heating and cooling with an air source heat pump, and it should come in at about $400,000 for design and construction costs. Owing to these features, we've dubbed the project "Attainable Zero" – a net-zero-ready home at an attainable price.
Building homes that exceed basic code requirements and deliver maximum value to our clients has been our passion at Addison Homes for over 20 years. I started my career in chemical and textile manufacturing, and learning from my environmentally conscious employer, I found that doing the right thing for the environment doesn’t have to be at odds with doing right by the customer. The opposite is true. The more I learned about quality sustainable construction practices, the more I connected the overall benefits to my customers, employees, community, and the planet to my business.
Building Addison Homes
My first time swinging the hammer on a construction project was toward the end of my corporate career when I dabbled in real estate investment. Around 1997, a business partner and I purchased several homes as rental units, and I found myself diving into small remodel and repair projects on the weekends. I soon discovered two things. First, I enjoyed working with my hands and the process of building. I also realized that many homes were built poorly and, with just a little extra effort and thoughtfulness, there was no reason a home couldn’t be durable, comfortable, energy efficient, and healthy for the occupant.
My thoughts were further solidified after attending my first EarthCraft House training session in Greenville in 2002. EarthCraft House was a pioneering green building program dedicated to creating sustainable, energy-efficient buildings in the Southeast. The program was exactly the quality standard that I was looking for and helped me define the Addison Homes standards for durability, energy and water efficiency, indoor air quality, and resilience.
We built to EarthCraft House standards for a several years, then when the DOE rolled out the ZERH program – the federal government’s most rigorous new-home certification – it was the obvious path for us to continue building beyond code with the support of a national program. Addison Homes delivered its first ZERH certified home in 2015. The ZERH standard raised the bar for us while providing the backing of modern building science along with tools that allowed us to better communicate the goals and benefits of our building practices to our trade partners and clients. As we navigated the ZERH standard, hitting the mark each time became second nature. More importantly, the idea of delivering a house below the standards, “just” to code, became unacceptable.
One of the appeals of the ZERH program is that it combines the requirements for a comfortable, healthy, resilient, energy-efficient home under one standard. The program requires that a new home is constructed to Energy Star and the EPA Indoor AirPlus certification as well as the latest energy codes as its baseline. Other ZERH requirements ensure water savings; HVAC and water-heating efficiencies; and third-party-verified air sealing to minimize drafts and keep out bugs, dust, smoke, and other pollutants. The certification gave us the confidence that we were meeting or exceeding all the key promises we made to our clients – energy efficiency, healthy indoor air quality, and comfort.
On top of that, ZERH promotes incorporating the Fortified Home building program developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). Living and building in Greenville, S.C., puts our customers in the path of hurricanes and tropical storms as well as increasingly at risk of a high-wind event. We adopted the Fortified Roof standard for our homes and, with the Attainable Zero home, are designing to Fortified Gold, which ties the entire structure together using a continuous load path and creates a much more storm-resistant home.
Over time, our reputation in the Greenville area started to attract more and more clients like the Abels. Developing and clarifying our messaging to explain not only how but why we build to a higher standard than the building code has been critical. Most of our new clients find us through our website or YouTube videos, and much of that language was leveraged from the support of the ZERH program.
Clients Make a Difference
Dan and Mary Abel first came to me about eight years ago with the hope of designing and building their retirement home. At the time, Dan was a professor at Coastal Carolina University and a global expert on sharks and rays. He was also a published author. His book Environmental Issues: Looking Towards a Sustainable Future explores the use of math and critical thinking as tools to understand and address sustainability issues related to climate change. Doing their part for the environment came naturally to the Abels, and they wanted to incorporate environmentally forward aspects into their own home.
For us at Addison Homes, the Abels were the ideal client. Their personal philosophy and goals squarely matched our company values. Our philosophy is that homes should be built with environmental responsibility, longevity (durability), and occupant health in mind. The challenge we’ve found when building to a higher standard is how to define and quantify those goals. Clients often are quick to say they want an energy-efficient home and healthy indoor air quality but, without a standard or metric to measure against, that is a subjective request. To that end, to quantify high-performance goals, we have always looked to high-performance building programs like ZERH to provide guidance.
We completed the Abels’ first home in 2020 and, by all accounts, it is everything they had hoped. It is small, quiet, comfortable, energy efficient, built to last, and designed for them to stay in long in life.
The Attainable Zero House
In 2024, when Dan and Mary came to me again with a new project, I was delighted to help them get started. They had purchased a plot of land not 10 minutes from their home and were looking to design and build a house for their son.
With the same expectations of quality and high-performance, specifically adhering to the ZERH program standards, we started the design process again but this time for a comfortable three-bedroom, two-bath unit.
While specifying the details to ensure a tight building envelope, efficient HVAC system, and durable/resilient structure fell to my team, Mary took the helm on the floor plans and layout. The 1,300-square-foot two-level design meets her exacting demands of maximizing natural daylighting, opening spaces, and providing functional flow. A near perfectly aligned southern exposure to the main living space is utilized for maximum daylight during the shorter days of winter and affords passive solar heating. The roof was also optimized for southern exposure for solar PV.
The Attainable Zero project has about a six-month build schedule, and it falls comfortably into the custom but not high-end price range of the local market. With a few more years’ experience under our belt as well as our decision to build to the ZERH v2 level, this house looks to outperform the Abels' first home.
Stay tuned. As we complete the design, make selections, and get this home out of the ground, I will be reporting monthly on our progress throughout the remainder of this year.
