If there is something that makes our team smile it is getting a chance to lend their talents to a custom high-performance wood structure in a beautiful locale. Tucked behind hair pinned Catskill roads and well of the beaten path in Saugerties, NY is a deep woods site on top of a jagged escarpment of Catskill blue stone. This is the location for an eco-friendly and passive house build designed by Architect Barry Price and enclosed using New Energy Works high performance enclosure. “It’s not one of these properties that’s about getting the views, its more about making a place within it. The inspiration was the escarpment,” Price said.
Passive homes are intentionally insulated, purposely built, airtight structures that use the heat generated inside a house via habitants and appliances to maintain a comfortable climate inside the house. They are designed and built to maintain a consistent temperature regardless of orientation and external environmental factors. The goal, in the case of this Catskill project, is to build a high-performing panelized home that harmoniously lives in its surroundings…but with the least amount of discernable impact on them.
“The emerging scene in not only passive house building but sustainable building is carbon sequestration,” shares Price. “New Energy Works is a wood-based company which is one of the things that draws me to them, also because our obligation is to use wood and sequester carbon and try to make carbon positive buildings. My experience with traditional stick building is that its super inefficient, when you think about how many pick-up trucks come and go in a day, how many dumpsters are filled up with waste.”
New Energy Works pre-panelized high-performance enclosures help control waste, supplement labor, and fast-track the installation of the shell on a project, increasing the safety of the workers while also saving time and money. The panels are built off-site in a climate-controlled environment increasing efficiency of installation time on site. Most importantly this approach, decreases the overall environmental impacts of a build.
The base New Energy Works Matrix Wall is an open cavity with double framing, structural sheathing, continuous outboard wood fiber insulation, a weather-resistive and vapor-control layer, rain screen, and strapping all pre-installed. What this means for the Catskill project is that each panel is ready for the local trades to set, fit, and finish in far less time than traditional on-site framing.
“The control of waste, the purposefulness of building these panels for me, felt like we were minimizing the disturbance of the site. Panelization in my view, that’s part of the guiding principle of it, is to concentrate the efficiency in a single location.” says Price. “I’m looking at the net disturbance and the carbon sequestration, so panelization for me, is something that offers the opportunity to address those things.”
Based off of the jagged inspiration of the rocky escarpment on the job site Price explained, “The wall system was going to be super interesting. The stars aligned, I had the right client, I had the right site. I had shopped the project around with a couple of panel companies at the request of the homeowner…and a lot of them wouldn’t go near it because of the complexity of the form.”
“The customizability of New Energy Works’ panels allowed us to make a building that’s very specific to the site. The house has this cantilevered stair piece that’s a critical reference to the escarpment,” Price elaborated. “A lot of the rocks had fallen off of the escarpment and they don’t meet the ground squarely, so, there’s one corner lifted up because that’s how they landed. I just needed the house to have a couple of geometrical quirks to sort of have that feeling. But that made it very difficult for these panel companies to translate the building into a panelized form. Some of the panels would have been too eccentric for other companies, but not for this team, this New Energy Works was like, ‘Yea, we can do that.’.”
New Energy Works sent Max Wheeler to install the panels with Price’s team from Third Generation Builders and Sash and Frame. “This was a passive house build and of all of the tiers of home efficiency a passive house is the highest standard of that you can reach,” said Max Wheeler, part of the New Energy Works team.
The team was on the site for 5 weeks. “Four weeks of raising with two crane days a week. The last week was all punch out, tidying up, and making sure the air barrier was done, the weather barrier was done, and just going over all of the small details. There were a lot of parties at play, a triangle of figuring things out.” Wheeler recalled.
In spite of the challenges of the Catskill location and the complexity of the build a collaborative effort resulted in a project that is now a certified passive home. “It was a pretty tight site compared to what we are used to,” Wheeler shared. “We tend to see it all, but this site in particular was tight with trees and road access was all hard turns. On a project like this there are many moving parts that sometimes it forces you into solutions.”
New Energy Works has 30+ years of sustainable building history. Through this experience we have developed a unique insight into off-site fabrication that has inspired us to help others build to a high level of performance. We collaboratively adapt our enclosure systems to the design specifications of each project. We partner with architects like Barry Price to evaluate the schematic designs of a job so they can be optimized for panel fabrication, resulting in an accessible enclosure solution for high-performance and Passive House construction. With a finite focus on reducing that energy used on a project we can benefit the homeowners, craftsman and ultimately the local community and planet.
Project Partners:
Architect: Barry Price Architecture
Builder: 3rd Generation Builders
Doors and Windows/Installation Assistance: Sash and Frame
Enclosure: New Energy Works
Photography: New Energy Works
