Huntington Builder Completes Long Island's First LEED Certified House

Stokkers & Company Brings Green Home Construction to Huntington Bay

 

 

Stokkers & Company, Inc., a Huntington building company has harnessed the standards that constitute The Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System and used them to energize the reconstruction of a Huntington Bay home destroyed by an electrical fire in April of 2007. This is Long Island’s first LEED certified home.

Michael and Wendy Busby, owners of the single family home, had often discussed the benefits of green building with Wendy’s brother Sandy Wiggins, a sustainable architect with Consillence, LLC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and, then, chairman of the U.S. Building Council. The Busby’s engaged Sandy as the owners’ representative to guide the project.

The Busbys’ LEED certified home, Huntington Bay

The Busbys hired architect James N. Keller of Northport to design their new 5,300 square foot, five bedroom home using green building strategies. They hired Dale Stokkers, president of Stokkers & Company as the builder.
Stokkers & Company Inc. is an experienced, national award winning, custom homebuilding firm serving the New York area super luxury home market. Although they’ve used green building strategies in other home constructions, the Busby project was Stokkers’ first experience with building a home that met all of the stringent requirements of LEED certification.

The biggest challenge with this project, according to Stokkers, was building a fully sustainable traditional home on an existing site and foundation. “The owners wanted a traditional style home that maintained the heritage of the area where the house is located” explains Stokkers. “Very ‘green’ homes can tend to be a bit edgy, but the architect was able to maintain the traditional look and we all worked hard to incorporate the essential green standards for LEED certification.”

Wendy Busby says everything came together because everyone was working as a unit to accomplish the touchstones she and her husband had compiled in creating a vision about what their new home should be. Through monthly team meetings, they assessed the progress they were making toward those goals. The results, she says, “are above and beyond our expectations.”

Wendy admits that it’s too soon to determine the cost effectiveness of the construction having moved back into the house less than six months ago. “We made a decision to go forward with this knowing the initial outlay would be 10 to 15 percent more than other construction,” she says. “We haven’t had enough time to assess what our savings will be, but we’ve created something we’re very proud of.”
The house, which has been certified by third party inspectors, has a verified HERS index of 48. This rating reflects an energy savings of 52% compared to the same home design if built to meet the current building code. The index measures energy loss through the building envelope, duct leakage, insulation efficiencies and how well the home is sealed. Stokkers says, “We sealed everything and anything that could possibly leak.” This allows for the house to be cooled with approximately half the tonnage of air conditioning and use far less energy for heating than a code standard home. “If you build a really efficient envelope,” he explains, “you can heat and cool it with a lot less energy.”

A sustainable building, or green building, is an environmentally responsible, high performance structure that’s built to exceed the requirements of the building code. Green buildings are designed to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by efficiently using energy, water and other resources; protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity and reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation.

In the rapidly growing public consciousness of the energy saving and cost effective benefits of green construction, LEED provides the standards for environmentally sustainable construction. LEED Green Building Rating System was developed by the U. S. Green Building Council (USGBC) which encompasses thousands of projects in 50 U.S. states and 30 countries.

LEED for Homes measures green homebuilding performance based on eight categories: site selection; water efficiency; materials and resources; energy and atmosphere; indoor environmental quality; location and linkages; awareness and education and innovation. A checklist of what constitutes a green home can be found on the USGBC’s website: www.greenhomeguide.org/what_makes_a_green_home/green_home_checklist.html