For quite some time now, we here at Energy Circle (and, particularly, Energy Circle's CEO, Peter Troast) have been championing a Deep Energy Retrofit of an historic home in downtown Freeport, Maine. Yesterday, we finally broke ground.
The project is unique in a number of ways: it's one of the town's historic "Mallett Houses," built in 1886 by the industrialist Edmund Mallett as worker housing. It's been neglected for some 20 years, and is still standing largely because of the generosity of our good friend (and office mate) Peter Warren of Warren Construction Group (who thankfully landed the contract for the deep energy retrofit earlier this month). It's also located adjacent to, and owned by, Freeport Community Services, a great organization and an instrumental part of our community.
It's been a long and arduous process getting this project off the ground (the historic preservation community isn't thrilled with the concept of deep energy reductions), but that made it all the more satisfying when ground was broken yesterday. Energy Circle's CEO Peter Troast gave a short speech about the significance of the building's age in the context of our increased dependence on fossil fuels over the past 125 years, and the necessity that we move away from them in the next 125 (we'll post the video later).
For now, we're psyched about the project and about the ceremony, which featured hard hats, shovels and champagne -- all the essentials. Here are a few pictures:
Comments
Hooray! I love hearing about - and seeing photos of - projects like this. Keep us updated on its progress.
And now, for the $64,000 question: Will the windows be innies or outies?
Posted by Allison A. Bailes III, PhD on May 25, 2011 6:01pmAllison--
Outies. Tough to tell from these pics, but the house exists in a row of 4 others, two of which were previously restored. We wanted to match the look as much as possible so as to maintain similarity within the streetscape. So sticking with windows in the same plane was the call (despite, as I'm sure you know, somewhat better thermal performance of innies.)
For those wondering what the hell we're talking about here: when expanding the insulation cavity of a wall, a decision needs to be made about where in the plane to place the window. In our case this was viewed by our consultants at Building Science Corp as largely an aesthetic question, with relatively minor impact on the energy model.
Now the choice of window is a whole nuther matter, but that's for a future post.
PT
Posted by Peter Troast on May 26, 2011 4:34pmActually, the $64K question is: What are you going to do with old c. 1875 windows? :)
Posted by John Poole on May 27, 2011 9:55amthe pride that I feel from this house being chosen as one for the project makes me feel even more respect for my great,great grandfather than I already had thank you
Posted by peter j mallet on Feb 16, 2012 2:56pmpete mallet
Pete--if you're in Maine, we'd love to give you a tour. In addition to a low energy marvel, I think you'll be proud of the restoration of the wonderful details of the original Mallett worker cottages.
Posted by Peter Troast on Feb 16, 2012 9:54pmI would be glad to have a tour. Please let me know how this might happen.
Posted by peter j mallet on Feb 17, 2012 6:07pmthank you
peter mallet
Peter--my email is ptroast at energycircle dot com. I'll be headed over to the project sometime this weekend to photograph the details of the shingles and clapboards, so if that works for you, I'd love to show you around.
Posted by Peter Troast on Feb 17, 2012 7:29pm