good afternoon my name is roger cult and i'm chair of the belmont energy committee for the town of belmont in the last few years more and more communities around the commonwealth of massachusetts have been writing in adopting climate action plans through those climate action plans the communities are seeking to achieve a number of objectives reducing their their carbon emissions saving money reducing the  reliance upon foreign oil one thing that's become evident since communities have begun this process is that we need to reach into the building sector to be effective in promoting energy efficiency and the state of massachusetts the commonwealth of massachusetts has adopted a tool that will help communities promote energy efficiency in buildings the massachusetts stretch code and increase the number of local communities have been adopting the stretch and today we're going to talk about the massachusetts stretch code we have with us breslow mark is the director of transportation and building policies for the executive office of energy and environmental affairs for the state d can you take us through that certainly i'm happy too so we will do that and i have a power point presentation will do that with if you're looking at the slides so let me start with the first one this is a list that's a bit out of date from november of who'd adopted the stretch code in the state it's a local option so as of november and we've got a couple more now sixty four b discipline governments had adopted it throughout the state you see that on the map in the orange including many around belmont and around the state many of the states major cities including boston springfield will stir lol it cetera so it's spread pretty well and right now i think our estimate is that about forty percent of the population of the state is in a stretch coat community now the stretch code is in addition to the state's building code the state of mass is had a building code statewide since one thousand nine hundred seventy five which regulates all aspects of putting up a new building including fire protection  structural integrity of the building heating ventilating systems the plumbing electrical systems and also energy conservation was added a couple of decades ago so that even without the stretch code there are statewide requirements for how efficient a building has to be both residential and commercial and what the stretch code does is just add somewhat more to that to go beyond the basic energy efficiency requirements that we have which are already pretty good now when you talk about energy conservation under you the base building code or the stretch code you're talking about what uses energy in a building and what determines the energy use and that's affected by how large the building is how much air leaks out of the building so because we're a cold climate most of the energy use in our buildings is from he for a large portion of the year and if you've got your warm air just leaking out through the attic the basement the windows it's the walls then you're losing a lot of energy so early could use a big issue also even if you block the air holes pretty obviously he just gets out of the building through the solid surfaces it transfers to the walls the windows the roof the basement floor and then finally the efficiency of the equipment that uses energy has a big effect so that your heating system your hot water tank your appliances of all sort the building code in the stretch code are designed to regulate these except for the size of the building we don't regulate that but we attempt to regulate the rest of these items now the state adopted a new law in two thousand and eight called the green communities act which says that every time a new edition of the national model building code for energy efficiency comes out which is called the international energy efficiency code that massachusetts has to adopt it within one year of its coming out as a result of that the most recent version which is called i e c c two thousand and nine we adopted that statewide and that's actually fairly strict to begin with so that any new building going up in massachusetts is going to be pretty good on energy efficiency even without adoption of the stretch code and it's important to note that and for commercial buildings it's also similar to a standard that commercial developers are more familiar with called ashtray now the stretch code is designed to go somewhat beyond the base building code and on both the residential and commercial sides we estimate that's probably fifteen to twenty percent better meaning using less energy per square foot of building space on the residential side which is mostly what i'll talk about because most communities in the state the predominant concern is residential building there's only a few of the larger cities where commercial is a big issue for residential construction the stretch code is virtually identical to an existing energy efficiency option that builders have had in the state for a number of years and under that option the electric and gas utilities in the state give builder's money in order to improve efficiency beyond the base code and that's called the massachusetts energy star homes program and if you do that as a builder the utilities will give you at least say about thirteen hundred dollars as shown in this slide to be thirty percent better than what was called the reference home which is sort of the home according to the old base code so if let me see if i'm hearing what you're saying so it may cost a builder a little bit more money to me even if you're not in a stretch code community it's offset to a degree now by the by the utilities or the energy star homes program and the search code is almost identical to it  what's new and different about the stretch code is that and different from the base building code is that the base building code tells you exactly how you're supposed to build a building it tells you how you're supposed to seal the walls how much insulation to put in what kind of windows you can put in what kind of heating system and so on the stretch code is somewhat different it tells you you have to use reach an energy consumption level that's about twenty percent less than the base code so it doesn't see exactly how you have to build the building doesn't tell you you have to use better windows or more insulation it tells you if you combine all aspects of energy use of the building the windows the walls the roof the basement the heating system etc and you put them all together into a set of calculations that the estimate is that this building will use about twenty percent less energy all right so it gives the builder flexibility now this is measured by something called the home energy rating system or her house and specifically the stretch code says as you see on the screen on the screen that if you're building not terribly large home  under three thousand square feet you have to get a hearse rating of seventy and that's relative to one hundred points where the lower you go the better your energy rating is a small number is good a small number is good if you were using energy any energy which believe it or not there are a couple of houses in the state which use no energy at all you get a hers rating of zero  if you're a larger building over three thousand square feet for a new home you have to do a little bit better you have to get a hearse rating of sixty five ok now the way this gets measured is that there are a new set of professionals out there in the world called hers raters they have to go through training they have to be certified they have to be attached to a company that certified and they utilize a computer program in which they input all the data relevant to a building energy use and then this computer program will spit out the herz rating which is the century of the expected energy use of the building and you have to hire this person or hers rater and pay them and they will work with you and tell you how they think your building will come out and they will give you a number now the first rater needs to check the building at least three different times the first time is before you do any work it's just looking at the design of the building or the building plans that your architect and builder of put together just based on those plans they will say they will put the numbers into their computer software and they'll say if you build this building according to the plans we think you'll get this hers rating and if they tell you you're going to get say a hers rating of sixty six and your building is less than three thousand square feet then you should be ok according to the stretch code if they tell you you're to be seventy five then your building is not going to meet the stretch code and you need to design something differently which could be something as simple as you got to put in a higher efficiency heating system than you were planning to so where does the building inspector fit into this i'm i'm from belmont and that has a budget shortfall this year and i don't think that the town is different from other communities but people certainly aren't eager to add staff or burdens to the building inspecting certainly and it is true for every community and we actually spect expect that this will mean less work for the building inspector because right now under the state under state law under the base code there are standards for air sealing and insulating a building and they have to be inspected to be sure it's been done correctly under the stretch code you're going to be paying their herds rating to do those the first rate or to do those inspections and the hearse rater will simply submit a document to the local building inspector saying this is what i found and the building inspector will no longer have to look at the building's insulation or air sealing so what had been done by the public sector will be done by the private sector in the future and that will be the professional certification of those inspectors that that's correct and of course it will cost money you have to hire that person and we expect the cost to rain somewhere for between about six hundred and twelve hundred dollars of which again the energy electric and gas utilities subsidize six hundred fifty dollars of that cost now the first rater has to do an initial calculation based on the design then they have to come back in after you've put up the insulation and they have to check the insulation it's sure it's been installed correctly and then they have to come a third time after you've sealed up sealed the exterior of the building up but before you finish the walls and check how much air leakage is from there is from the building and they do that with a special tool called a blower door they also check the leakage from heating ducts and air conditioning ducts and based on those that leakage and the quality of the insulation of the insulation they will give you a final hers number now that's on a new building people often want to know what happens with a an addition to a building or retrofit of a building or rehab of  building and the fact is that under the stretch code most of the impact is on new buildings that's where it's strict and where you're required to have a hearse rating on both additions and on rehab the stretch could really doesn't have much impact if you want to you can get a hers rating when you're doing either of those things but you're not required to instead of doing that you can simply go by the requirements of the base code which has fairly strict requirements to begin with and then there slate additions to that as to exactly what kind of windows you have to put in and how you do the air sealing but they're fairly minor additions and what happens if i have a furnace th breaks and needs to be replace that does that implicate the stretch kodachi it does not the only requirement for that kind of a situation is that you have to replace it with the furnace that meets the federal government's efficiency standards for the furnace of the boiler because we're not allowed to regulate our so that our cells the federal government does it so and so no matter where you live in massachusetts you can't sell a heating system that doesn't meet that standard ok so the only difference on the home edition from the base code to the stretch code is that you're required to put in energy star windows which are just slightly better windows which most people are putting in anyway and it's most of what sold in the stores now and you have to make sure that any air sealing on the  walls is done to a high quality standard which will be checked and the same thing for ducts that's really the only difference and if you did get her's rating it would be the same numbers required as if you were doing an entirely new building but we don't expect very many people will do that before renovations again you have an option you can get a hearse rating if you want to the numbers we require you to get are substantially easier than for a new home you need to get an eighty five rating on a small home in an eighty rating on a medium sized home but again we don't expect that on renovations most people are going to get a rating instead you can do what we call the prescriptive path which means you do it to the base building code requirements with a couple of additions which are again energy star windows and quality air sealing which is not much of a difference from what you'd be required to do anyway now this is one example of a way to meet the stretch code and remember that the stretch code doesn't say exactly how you have to build the building it doesn't say you have to do more insulation than a normal home or  super efficient boy or or that you have to put in a direct hot water system it just tell you you have to reach this overall efficiency level so what we've done is model one example how you could get to a hearse rating of seventy but you could do  it many different ways in this example we've specified seven things that you need to do the first one is just the quality of the insulation are thirty eight is a measure of how much insulation that's been put into the ceiling of the house or the attic floor and our thirty eight is the level that all new homes in the state are required to have what we've said here though is that you install it better than the typical house so it's grade one instead of grade two and the reason we specify that is that badly installed insulation doesn't work well so it makes a big difference to efficiency to have it installed grade one and into her software you're going to get a few points  reduced from saying that you've done a great one secondly and probably the biggest effect is you've put in a ninety four percent efficiency heating system where in this case the higher the number  better one hundred percent would be a system that didn't waste any heat where one hundred percent of the energy actually heated your building it didn't go out the chimney or out the side of the house the federal government's requirement is only for an eighty percent efficient system and we're not allowed to require more than that but to meet the stretch code if you go to ninety four percent it's going to get you a long way toward meeting in your water heating system at your water tank a little bit more efficient than normal but only slightly so another way you could get to a higher a better hers rating would be incentives having a regular water tank if you have what people know is an indirect system where the the reg your space heating system is used to heat the hot water so you don't have a separate heater for the hot water that will get you some more efficiency points but we haven't done that in this example next that the duct leakage if you've got hot air ducks that they're tight or they have less leakage than we normally expect and again air leakage for the whole building that there's less leakage then we normally think which is measured by this sort of jargony expression here five year changes per hour instead of seven air to changes so it's saying less air leaks out of the house because you've done the air sealing well and that would be measured by this specific technique that hers rater has called a blower door test and then you put in eighty percent efficient lighting which means fluorescent lighting normally either two or compact  fluorescents because the electric energy in the house makes a big difference and finally because you've made the house somewhat tighter and it's less leaky we require you to have some kind of mechanical ventilation if you need to increase the airflow in the house and that can be exhaust only ventilation which simply means a bathroom fan so i think i've always heard that this stretch code increases customer choice and what i'm hearing you say here is that people are required to do any one of these seven things it's it's the bottom line that matters people can choose whatever package they want to put together  the performance standard that's absolutely correct so you can mix and match among different things for example here we have an assumed any extra insulation in the house if you wanted to do a higher level of insulation in the attic and the exterior walls in the basement which would cost somewhat more money you could do that and that would allow you not to worry about other things as much so you could like have a looser air sealing not do as good a job in the air sealing and put in more insulation and you could probably still make it now you just hit on the the big concern on my part that you talking about the cost of  this right so looked at the costs we have we had a consulting firm do very extensive modeling of the energy use of a home before the stretch code and with the stretch  code and looked at both the costs and the benefits so the costs or the extra labor materials costs to make say this in this example the seven things happen and then the benefits are your reduced energy usage each year and how much that money that would save you based on what energy costs what electricity natural gas cost so we've done that modeling and what we found is that the extra cost at the beginning to build the house is far outweighed by the energy savings over time and specifically if you think about it for a new house you don't actually pay the whole cost up front right everybody's got a mortgage except some very rich folks  so if you have a normal mortgage say a thirty year mortgage and supposing you're paying six percent interest then what you do is you take that initial extra cost for it built for the construction according to the stretch code and it's going to turn into a much smaller number on an annual basis and you take that smaller number the amount by which your mortgage payment will go up and compare it to your annual energy bill savings and the bill savings are far greater and i'll show you the details so this is one example of what we think the costs and benefits would be on this slide i know many people have trouble with a lot of numbers so if you get lost in it just remember the bottom line is that we estimate that even after the extra cost you'll come out about four hundred dollars a head starting in the first year and i'll go through the numbers a bit but you can ignore them and just remember you'll save money so we estimate that the extra cost for the building will be about three thousand dollars altogether of which about twenty one hundred are the construction costs and nine hundred for the herds rater now you then get back money from the utilities about thirteen hundred dollars all together half of which is an incentive for the hearse rater and half of which is the energy star homes incentive so on net your costs will be say seven thousand nine hundred dollars extra to build the house then if you put that into a thirty year mortgage at six percent interest it only comes out to one hundred twenty seven dollars a year extra on your mortgage payment which is not a whole lot of money meanwhile we estimate that you'll save five hundred sixteen dollars a year in your energy bills so when you take five sixteen in savings and subtract one hundred twenty seven costs your next gain is three eighty nine to year now of course don't take the precision of these numbers too literally because things will vary from house to house but in general we can say you're going to save a few hundred dollars a year and it's from when you say from year one that means that on a cash flow  basis that that i would have money in my pocket starting in the very first year after having right now that's not and that's because you're doing it with a mortgage in which you spread out the cost over thirty yes i understand ok  now how much time do we have left about five minutes ok so i won't go through the details but i'll just tell you that we've modeled both larger and smaller homes and also got rehab of a home  this these are some numbers for a much larger home and we find that the cost to make that homey to stretch total larger but the energy savings are also larger so again you come out well ahead and then we also model the gut rehab of a triple decker so this is more of an urban building and this is if you tore out all the walls on a triple decker and redid everything on the inside of the building which means you'd be spending a lot of money to rebuild the building to air seal it put in new insulation in the walls and so on and again we find that it's going to cost a substantial amount of money in this case because a gut rehab just does cost a lot of  money but again you're going to come out a little bit ahead due to the stretch code it only shows a little bit here because on a rehab the stretch could actually doesn't change things very much so the base code is responsible for most of the impact of the energy savings  so we've tried all these different types of buildings and we found that for residential homes no matter what the situation is we expect that you'll save money due to the stretch code and that's pretty much the basic requirement for all changes to the energy efficiency code whether bass or stretch so i don't want to really talk about the commercial stretch code today because i think that that's almost a program unto itself but what i do when they ask you is it seems like we've been talking about that this stretch code from the consumer's perspective so the consumer will save money is the message that i hear we not only get energy reductions and emissions reductions from an environmental perspective but people have more money in their pocket as well could we flip the perspective for a minute and talk about it from the contractors perspective only go back to the list of measures so if you look at this list of things some of these don't really require any extra effort at all so for example your heating system you just go to a store and you buy heating system and you have the plumber install it it's very straightforward every sperm or the state knows how to do that same for the water heating system there's no difference putting in for us and lighting is a piece of cake putting in insulation is not hard to do the only stuff that's tricky here is putting in the insulation right and doing the air sealing right and whether that's harder not depends on whether you've done it before if you're an experienced builder and you know how to do air sealing insulation it's not going to be hard at all and we've spoken to many builders in many communities around the state who do a quality job and they say this is what i do anyway if you're completely inexperienced and you've been doing a lousy job of installing insulation and sealing up the walls then the first couple of times this is going to be hard work for learning to do it and we have just a minute left or or so it sounds like it's a good economic deal if it's such a good deal why does it need to be done by regulation it's a very good question and i would say the general answer is the same reason we need regulation on lots of other things you could argue why do we need a building code at all if somebody is constructing a building and getting somebody to people getting people to pay for it  don't they have an interest in making sure they've built it well in all respects but the fact is we know that people aren't able to evaluate the construction techniques in the building so we have a very large building code that tells exactly structurally how you build it's own fall down tells you exactly how to put in the pipes so that plumbers don't skimp on doing that tell you exactly how you've got to run the electrical wires so that there's no danger of fire and it's told you for many years in the base code what energy efficiency measures you have and it's because a typical homeowner can evaluate that for themselves so as we end up here i think people are getting used to looking for information on  on the web is there any place that death folks can go if that if you've piqued their interest in the stretch card yes you go to the website for the state go to mass dot gov slash d o we are which is the state department of energy resources when you go to that page look down the page for the green communities program and click on it and then when you get to the green communities page will for the green communities grant program and on that page scroll down and you'll see the stretch code and you'll see a variety of information well thank you very much this has been wonderfully informative if i would like to thank our viewers for for tuning in today the stretch code is an effort on the part of the state and on the part of multiple communities to bring energy efficiency to that the state of massachusetts  if we are to reach emissions reductions objectives by the year two thousand and twenty and then ultimately by the year twenty fifty i believe that we do need to get into new construction and rehabilitation and the stretch code is is a way to do that so that we would welcome you back another day to talk about the commercial buildings thanks very much roger it's been a pleasure to be here and i would just mention that we do have a staff of people who can appear in communities around the state if any community is considering the stretch go so individual climate action