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Jeffrey Dinkle has become a recognised leader in Atlanta’s green building scene. After originally training in economics and sociology, Jeff founded Eco Custom Homes. He’s served on the board of the National Passive House Alliance and is passionate about efficient, healthy, high performance homes.
Like a few of my guests, Jeffrey started down the sustainable and energy efficient design route to set himself apart. He’s continued down this path to stay ahead and now really believes in producing high performing, near zero energy homes.
Building Your Best Last Home
As a trained economist, Jeff understands about the ongoing cost of a home. He explains that the biggest and most unknown living costs are utility bills. Increasing power and gas prices can be enough to ultimately push people out their home.
Healthy Homes
It’s not all about reducing costs costs, increasing airtightness and optimising ventilation also lead to significant health benefits.
Standards and HERS Ratings
Across Georgia, home building standards keep tightening up, requiring homes to have higher and higher Home Energy Ratings (HERS). Jeff predicts that soon the standard will be getting close to net zero.
From Economics and Sociology to Building
Jeff trained as an economist, but got into real estate investing, flipping houses as a source of income. As he renovated and sold houses, he started upgrading them to a higher and higher standard. Seven years ago he started incorporating Passive House standards into his projects.
House Size
American homes (along with Australian and New Zealand ones) are often criticised because of their large size. There are usually at least two rooms in a house that don’t get used very often. In the last ten years, Jeff’s designs have reduced from upwards of 7,000 square feet (650 square metres) to around 4,800 square feet (445 square metres), still very large by my standards, but these are pretty high end homes.
The Charrette Process
Jeff references and uses the Charrette Process for designing and building. This involves getting the whole team together early on to discuss the project, rather than coming up with a grand design and then ‘value engineering’ out, all of the good stuff once the builder comes along with a price. There’s a good resource for this process available from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
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