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©The Hermiston Herald B2 Friday, April 21, 2006 Make your home a Castle
Castle Homes specializes in super-insulated houses By Karen Hutchinson-Talaski Staff writer HERMISTON — Saving money on heating and cooling bills is important in these days of high natural gas and electric bills. Tom Longley has the solution. Longley, who owns Castle Homes LLC, builds super-insulated homes and additions. Walls are 16 inches thick. He uses R60
insulation (the R factor is a measure of the resistance of the insulation to the transfer of heat) in the walls, and R76 in the ceilings of the homes and additions he builds. The higher the number, the less heat loss a home will experience.	Herald photo by XXX Top: Passive solar windows help keep super-insulated homes cool in summer and warm in winter. Below: Tom Longley of Castle Homes shows off the pre-built walls of the super-insulated homes he builds. Longley uses recycled studs in the walls, staggering them for maximum energy efficiency.
The ceiling insulation used is blown-in cellulose, economical and provides twice the heat loss-resistance of a Super Good Cents home, Longley says. The material is made from recycled newspaper that is treated with a fire and pest retardant, usually borax which is environmentally friendly. Castle Homes utilizes the sun for passive solar energy with south-facing windows and engineered overhangs. The sun’s energy is maximized in the winter and the deep overhangs keep the summer sun out. A concrete slab floor also acts as a heat storage unit to retain and slowly release heat gained in the daytime. Longley says in a 1,200-square-foot house, if the temperature was 10 degrees outside, it would only take the heat of a 1,500 watt hair dryer to heat up the home. Our houses use about 25 to 30 percent of what a regular house uses (in energy), Longley said.

    In his own home, Longley has one small heater which heats his whole house in winter. He uses the same type of heating and cooling units used in hotels in the homes he builds, ceiling fans and small baseboards.
    You don’t need much more than that because of the energy efficiency of the home, he said.
    Another unique feature of

Castle Homes is the fact each wall is built in Paterson, Wash., in a small factory.
This ensures that everything is exact in measurement, Longley said. We are trying to get certification from Underwriter’s Laboratory to be able to put the whole thing together, electric and insulation (on site). The studs are staggered so heat cannot

escape. Recycled studs are used which Longley says makes for stronger and straighter beams.
There is a savings of 10 percent in materials and it is a lot more environmentally friendly, Longley said.
The walls are numbered and given designation regarding whether or not the wall is an inside or an outside

wall.
Longley is building several homes in Hermiston, Stanfield, Irrigon and Plymouth, Wash. It costs about $70 a square foot to build an all electric home, he says.
For more information, visit Castle Homes™ on line at www.castlehomesinfo.com.

©Tri City Area Journal of Business/June 2005
Contractor uses energy efficient construction techniques to grow business

By Tayla Tovey news2@tcjob.com Bob McAffery’s 1,380 sq. foot home in West Kennewick has all the amenities of a new, stick-built house; large windows, rounded corners, even granite counter tops. But his house comes with something that most others don’t — an extremely low energy bill. McAffery pays around $20 a month in heating and cooling costs, while the average monthly energy bill for a home of comparable size is between $100 and $150, according to Benton PUD. The ambient temperature throughout the whole house is pretty consistent, McAffery said.		planned. Another reason Longley believes he’s one of the few builders to combine all of these techniques is because, as an engineer, his thought process is a little different than most contractors. As an engineer, you're kind of a puzzle solver and that’s what fascinates you — how to set a better mousetrap, Longley said. I don’t think most contractors come from the same mindset. But if you can show them how they can save money on these houses...I can’t imagine other contractors will ignore that forever.
McAffery bought his house from engineer and builder Tom Longley, who is the general manager of Castle Homes LLC.	Tom Longley stands in front of an energy-efficient home his company, Castle Homes, is building in Plymouth, Wash. Longley has plans to build at least 20 more of the energy-saving houses across the Mid-Columbia in the next year.	Rising energy costs have spurred many contractors and homeowners alike to consider a different approach to home construction. One example of this is a U.S.

    McAffery’s is one of the first of 20 homes Longley has built in the Mid-Columbia using specific materials and designs that keep energy costs low. While none of the concepts used in Longley’s design are original, few, if any, other contractors use all of these energy efficient processes in one home.
      Longley designs the houses and hires subcontractors to build them, using a type of framing called double-wall construction. This process basically consists of two, two-by-four exterior walls spaced 11 inches apart that are lined with fiberglass insulation bats.
      They’re R-30 (fiberglass insulation bats) and we use two of them backed up to each other and staggered so the cracks and the studs don’t line up in the wall, Longley said. We end up with an R-60 wall.       Longley also installs windows with passive solar glazing, a type of coating that maximizes the heat from the sun during the winter. These windows are placed on the south side only.
      Longley uses engineered overhangs to block sunlight from coming through those windows during the summer months, helping to keep the house cool. During the
winter, the overhangs allow

sunlight to stream through the windows, helping to heat the house.
      As long as there’s even 20 to 30 percent sunlight (during the winter), you don’t need any auxiliary heating or anything, McAffery said.
      Longley installs small, energy-efficient windows, called low emissivity or low-e windows, sparingly through the rest of the house.
      To the extent that the clients will let us, if we’re doing a custom design, we try not to do any windows except on the south side, Longley said.
      Another component in Longley’s design is a concrete slab floor, which helps store solar heat during the winter. Blown-in cellulose insulation in the ceilings prevents further heat loss. The result is a house that exceeds Super Good Cents standards, Longley said. He estimates the value of energy savings in a 1,400-sq. foot home is around $16,000 while the estimated average added resale value using Super Good Cents standards is $1,000 to $1,300, according to the Washington State Energy Office.
      What that means is that our
house is worth $16,000 more than brand X up the road that doesn’t
have these energy features, Longley said.
          “That’s using today’s

energy costs. Energy costs are rapidly increasing. I could see, in ten years, one of our houses could have a value that’s as much as $50,000 more than the guy down the street.”
      And even though Longley’s process uses more insulation, his homes still cost about the same as those built using traditional methods. Longley uses shallow foundations, which cost less to construct than conventional ones, and applies the amount he saves to offset the cost of added insulation.
      So if using these energy-saving techniques costs the same as the methods used for any other stick-built house, why isn’t everybody building them?
      In order for the solar glazing and engineered overhangs to work together, the windows have to be placed on the south side in order to achieve maximum energy savings. If a house is in a subdivision, for example, and another building or house obstructs the sunlight from the south, the design won’t work as well. However, there are still cost savings from extra insulation.
      And while Longley’s design can be used in other regions besides the Mid-Columbia, a certain amount of sunshine is necessary for the system to work as

      Department of Energy-sponsored program called Building America, which partners more than 200 private companies to research and develop energy- and material-saving technologies and building practices. The Building America program’s research projects have helped build more than 20,000 energy-efficient houses nationwide.
      Energy is something that’s on everybody’s mind right now, Longley said. Everybody is interested in energy because of the price of gasoline and electricity and everything else.
      Longley hopes to use this increased focus on energy efficiency to help spur more growth in his business. Castle Homes has plans to build 20 more of the energy-saving homes in the next year. The company is working on an eight-home subdivision in Stanfield, Ore., and is also ironing out zoning issues for a subdivision in Plymouth, Wash., that would include at least 50 houses. Longley noted that his company has done as much business in the first quarter of 2005 as it did in all of 2004.
      I’ve heard some news that (the housing market) is slowing some in the Tri-Cities but our business hasn’t, Longley said. I think that’s because of our niche and our specialty.

©Tri-City Herald
D Saturday, June 25, 2005

Tom Longley of Plymouth builds houses that have walls nearly 2 feet thick, leaving room for extra insulation. His homes have
saved him and his customers hundreds of dollars in heating and cooling expenses.

Savings

are in the

walls

Super-insulated homes can cut energy bills year-round

Story by Loretto J. Hulse ♦ Photos by Rajah Bose
Herald staff

    Imagine walking in to pay your monthly electric bill with a $50 bill and having the clerk hand you back $20 in change.
    Impossible?
    Not for someone like William Scott of Plymouth. Six months ago he moved into his new, three-story, 7,400-square-foot house. His power bills aren’t that low yet, but he said they will be.
    And he isn’t being overly optimistic.
    His home was built with extra insulation in the walls and attic and passive solar features including a thick cement floor to soak up heat from the sun in winter and overhangs to shade the windows in the summer.
    His power bill runs about $50 a month now. But after his landscaping is completed and he’s not running the pump in his well as much, Scott expects to see that drop significantly.
    My guess would be ... that I’ll be looking at a power bill of $20 to $30 during the cold months, he said. Right now I have to irrigate a lot to keep the sandy soil around the house from blowing. I know I’m using far more power to run the pump than anything else in the house.

      Scott’s estimate is likely to be on the money. He served
   on the board of Energy Northwest for nearly a decade
   beginning in the mid-1980s. Scott also was a Chelan
   County PUD commissioner for many years.
      As Scott says, I know power.
      Scott’s home was built by another Plymouth resident,
   Tom Longley, owner of Castle Homes. Longley, a builder
   and developer with a doctorate in civil engineering, has
   had an interest in energy-efficient homes for decades.
      Longley’s first home, built in 1982 in Aberdeen, Idaho,
   incorporated many of the energy-saving features he now
   includes Castle Homes. That first home also had extra
   thick exterior walls to accommodate more insulation than
   called for in standard construction guidelines.
      But instead of the 9-inch thick fiberglass batts Longley
   uses now, that house was insulated with wood chips
   treated with borax to discourage rodents and insects.
      I got the idea from Mother Earth News, Longley said.
   "I’m sure (the house in Aberdeen) has been
                    See Walls, Page D2

verticle boards

Walls: Higher cost of extra insulation offset by less expensive concrete slab

Continued from D1
re-insulated with standard materials. Over time, the chips settled, leaving gaps."
   The wood chips didn't work. But the idea of enfolding the exterior walls of the house, including the attic floor, with thick layers of insulation was a good one, Longley said. It was one he kept in the back of his mind over the years.
   In 2003, the builder persuaded Bob McCaffrey of Kennewick to allow him to use the super-insulated, passive-solar building technique in his new home.
   He’s completely sold on it, Longley said. Bob’s become my biggest supporter.
   Longley also incorporated those same energy-saving techniques into his new home built just a short walk from the banks of the Columbia River.
   His framers build two conventional 2-by-4 walls parallel

to each other with a nearly 24-inch gap between them around the perimeter of the building. Between them goes a plastic vapor barrier and two layers of thick insulation.
   These are R-30 floor joist batts placed back to back, making the walls R-60, Longley said. A material's R-value is the measure of its resistance to heat flow. The higher the number, the better it insulates.
   According to the Bonneville Power Administration’s Super Good Cents Builder’s Field Guide (www.bpa.gov/Energy/ N/Reports/Builders_Field_Guide/): Wall cavity insulation values in Super Good Cents homes usually are at least R-21.
   Attics in Longley’s buildings are insulated with a nearly 2-foot layer of blown-in cellulose insulation, giving ceilings an R-value of 76. The BPA recommends at least a value of R-38. Longley admitted that the one drawback to a super insulated

   home is you do lose some square footage of living space. In some smaller homes, to maximize usable living space, he's reduced the exterior wall width to about 12 inches.
   It’s not as energy efficient but still better than the industry standard, he said.
   Increasing the amount of insulation does add to the overall cost of building. Longley estimated adding the double layer of thick batts runs somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000 for a 1,400-square-foot house. But much of that cost is offset by building on a concrete slab poured directly on the ground-slab on grade-instead of a block and mortar foundation. The slab is less expensive, Longley said. Plus, if the house is designed to take advantage of the sun’s energy, it acts as a thermal mass, soaking up heat during the day in winter, and

slowly radiating it out into the living area at night.
   Taking advantage of passive solar heating-the sun-is one of the key factors in building an energy efficient house, Longley said.
   It’s free, he said. It’s like Mother Nature putting money in your pocket.
   Scott agreed.
   I understand science and can tell you for sure that what Tom (Longley) is doing works, Scott said. I don’t know of anyone else around using these building techniques, and I don’t know why not. They don’t cost that much.
   To take advantage of passive solar heating, buildings need to have large, nontinted windows on the south face to let in as much sunlight as possible during the winter.
   Ideally, you want the sunlight to hit on the back walls of the house during the colder months, Longley said.

   "On the flip side, you want to shade the windows with a roof overhang during the summer."
   Using extra insulation and passive solar, it’s possible to have your home stay a comfortable 70 to 75 degrees year round for just pennies a day, Longley said. His home, all 3,400 square feet of it, is cooled when necessary with a small 5,000 BTU window air conditioner he bought for less than $100.
   But I only run it a couple times a year, when it gets to be really hot, in the 100s, he said.
   For supplemental heating, some homeowners opt for radiant heating, which is

installed in the concrete slab. But Longley has found it’s not as economical to operate as a heat pump, which pulls heat from the outside air--there’s some warmth available, even in the winter--and transfers it into the house.
Building costs and energy savings vary according to the square footage. But by using these building techniques, Longley said homeowners will typically use only 30 percent to 50 percent of the energy necessary to heat and cool a house built to Super Good Cents standards.

•Reporter Loretto J. Hulse can be reached at 582-1513 or via e-mail at lhulse@tri-cityherald.com.

Minimize Your Home's Energy Costs
By Maximizing Construction Design

Tap into the sunlight,
insulate well and select
materials with an eye
toward efficiency
By Pam Blair

    If Bill Scott lived in a typical 7,500-square-foot home, he could expect to pay more than $200 a month for energy.
    Instead, his monthly bill tops out at $50 a month-and he expects that to go down, once the landscaping is done and he can cut back on his use of the irrigation pump.
    I’m probably paying less than $40 a month for lights and power for my house, said Scott, who recently finished his three-story home in Plymouth, Washington. There is no need to pay a very high electric bill. Insulation doesn’t cost that much.
    Scott worked with builder Tom Longley, a civil engineer who owns and operates Castle Homes LLC.
    By carefully considering design details and materials, Longley advertises his homes as an estimated 30 percent more energy efficient than Super Good Cents homes.
    Longley built his first home in Aberdeen, Idaho, in 1982, incorporating the key components he still uses: double-wall construction that allows for extra insulation; slab floors to increase thermal mass; and passive solar window glazing, with engineered overhangs, to capitalize seasonally on heat from the sun.
Nothing with the Castle system is proprietary, Longley said. It is not original. I saw the double-wall concept in Mother Earth News 25 years ago.
    Savings from using a shallow foundation and slab floor offsets the

28 MAY 2005

additional cost for energy-efficient design, Longley said, noting his homes cost virtually the same per square foot as traditional homes.
    But the savings on energy is upward of $16,000 in present dollars--and that doesn't take into consideration the steep rise in energy costs, Longley noted.
    Framing for Castle homes is different than for traditional construction. Longley uses two 2x4 walls on the outside, staggering the studs to prevent leaks and heat seepage along the edges. That accommodates two R-30 batts of insulation, which gives the walls an insulating value of R-65--nearly three times the insulation value of a conservation-oriented Super Good Cents homes.
    For the ceiling, R-76 cellulose insulation is blown in--double the heat loss resistance of a Super Good Cents home.

    We use as much glass as we can on the south side, said Longley.
    Specially engineered overhangs block sunlight from overheating the home in the summer, but allows the sun in during the winter.
    Longley uses clear glass on the south side of the house to avoid interfering with the full heating potential of the sun, but incorporates low-e glass elsewhere.
    Shades, blinds or curtains help retain the heat at night during the winter and reduce conductive heat gain during the summer.
    The concrete floor allows the solar heat to be stored.
    Due to an increase in costs, radiant heat and an air-to-air heat exchanger have become options, rather than part of Longley’s standard design.
    The radiant heat system uses flexible polyethylene tubing laid out in a grid pattern on the floor before the concrete is poured. A 12-volt thermostat system--which can be operated by a car battery, if necessary--controls a small pump at the water heater, delivering hot water to heat the floor.
    The heat exchanger removes stale air from the home--usually from the laundry room--and replaces it with fresh air from the outside, which is important with the tight construction of the home.
    The greatest benefit from this device is that the heat from the clothes dryer can be captured in winter, with the result that for every hour the dryer runs, no heat is required for three hours in the house on the coldest days, Longley said. This is all accomplished without elevating the relative humidity in the home, because the moisture from the dryer goes out with the stale air.
    His super low energy home system is adaptable to any size home, Longley said.

Tom Longley built his home in Plymouth, Washington, with large south-facing
windows, providing not only a spectacular view of the Columbia River, but allowing
the sunlight to stream in and provide free heat.

    "We are getting the maximum of               While such design characteristics
what we have," he said.                             are most cost effectively done with
    Scott spent a couple of years                  new construction, rather than remod-
working with Longley on his home.          eling, any home can be made more
    "I oriented the house directly                 efficient, Longley and Scott said.
south, and have dark granite on the              "If you want energy savings, you
floor to absorb the heat," Scott said.           can pursue all sorts of little things,"
     "I consider the sun my primary heat      Scott noted. small bullet square

source. I can run a wood stove for a
day to get the same effect as 24               For more information about Castle
hours of sun, or I can use the heat           Homes LLC, contact Tom Longley at
pump, if I am too lazy."                           (509) 737-8016 or (509) 948-2689.

Existing Homes
Can Improve
Efficiency, Too

    Even if your home is not perfectly oriented to the sun, you can conserve energy. Here are some money-saving tips:

    • Set the thermostat to 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
    • Add an extra layer of insulation to accessible areas, such as attics and crawl spaces.
    • Check heat ducts for leaks. Insulate ducts in unheated areas. Keep vents unobstructed, and clean filters
monthly.
    • Turn off unnecessary lighting
and switch to compact fluorescent
bulbs in fixtures used the most.
They use just 25 percent of the
energy and can last 10 times
longer than incandescent bulbs.
    • Close drapes to keep warm air in; open them to allow the sun’s rays to warm rooms.
    • Apply weatherstripping around doors and windows, and draft guards beneath doors. Caulk smaller
gaps.
    • When appliances wear out, replace them with energy-efficient Energy Star® models.
    • Paint and decorate in light
colors. Dark colors absorb light.
Light colors reflect light. The
lighter the colors, the less artificial
lighting is required.
    • Since warm air rises to the
highest areas, a ceiling fan at a low
speed helps distribute warm air
in the house.
    • Use energy-efficient faucet
aerators and showerheads to reduce
water usage up to 50 percent.
Repair leaks promptly. A dripping
faucet can waste six to ten
gallons of water a day.
    • As soon as the fire is out, close chimney dampers, which pull warm air out of the house.
    • Turn your water heater off when you plan to be away more than five days. small bullet square