Better follow the Energy Star to your new home

Ahem. Sorry. My inner child wanted to go hide under my bed on the linoleum-covered hardwood floor of the 1940s-era farmhouse I grew up in, where the wind came sweeping out of the hills, through the walls and across the living room — and nobody thought too much about it — when Sam Rashkin was talking.

Rashkin is national director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program. He was a speaker at the Best of Building Science seminar presented Thursday by Guaranteed Watt Saver, which consults on Energy Star homes and other energy-efficient construction.

Energy Star is a program that helps people conserve energy and protect the environment while saving money.

All well and good. So why did my inner child, who grew up to become a homeowner, want to run back to his folks' farmhouse?

Because Energy Star homes are rising stars in the home marketplace, and rising standards eventually will cause new homes to outperform existing homes as much as a luxury bathroom in a mansion outperforms outhouses, wash pitchers and basins of yore.

In 2005, Guaranteed Watt Saver worked with builders in the construction of 486 Energy Star homes in Oklahoma; in 2006, the number of new Energy Star homes shot up to 2,600 even with home-building in decline; and this year, the company is on pace for 4,000 Energy Star homes, said Kelly Parker, president.

That's more than 700 percent growth in three years.

Let's say Oklahoma builders construct 14,000 homes this year, about 10 percent fewer than last year, an estimate that allows for some more settling from the record-breaking 2003-2005 boom.

That's more than one out of four new homes with the Energy Star label — and the proportion has nowhere to go but up. Over time, that means more and more fancy-schmancy energy- and money-saving houses to make headaches for those of us living in homes without the Energy Star label.

Rashkin said competition will be keen, especially after infrared cameras, which continue to drop in price, become commonplace among home inspectors and others whose job is to gauge the effectiveness of insulation, the sealing of walls and windows and a home's building envelope in general.

One glance at an infrared photo of a house in winter, with those bright spots and rays showing heat pouring out like — well, like the heat pouring out of a poorly insulated house — speaks volumes more than telling someone a home is losing heat and energy at a rate of so many pascals per hour.

"You can see it in two seconds,” he told building contractors, subcontractors and suppliers at Frances Tuttle Technology Center's Rockwell campus. "It's no longer invisible if you don't put quality in your homes.”

Rashkin mentioned lots of scary things.

The threat to national security posed by continuing to waste energy, when we're so beholden to fossil fuels from other countries, some hostile. Rising electricity prices that will come with increased hybridization of cars and trucks (see corn prices in response to the ethanol frenzy).

Home inspectors armed with infrared cameras. Lawyers armed with infrared photos in one hand and building codes in the other. Home buyers demanding perfection in energy efficiency.

Make the scary man go away!

My inner child grew up to live in a 22-year-old house, not a new one, and he wants to sell it someday and doesn't want it to be as obsolete as his grandpa's outhouse and wash basin.

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