New Home Passes Energy Standards

In January of 2010 the Illinois legislature passed a law requiring all new homes to meet or exceed the 2009 IECC energy standards.  The law passed so quickly that most code enforcement officials did not even know what they needed to look for during inspections. A grace period of six months was granted to builders to figure out how to comply with these new highly restrictive standards.  The old building code required builders to build homes to control moisture transfers as moisture always wants to travel from a warm surface to a cooler one.  The new code also requires portions of the older codes but now also requires builders to increase exterior insulation values and prevent air transfers in or out of your house.

Gerstad Builders in the Liberty Tails  of McHenry closed on its first home built by the new standards at the end of October. The energy efficient house originally was design to exceed the code by 2.3%.  Upon final testing the home passed with flying colors.  The new code requires a test to check how often the air changes in the house.  Our test exceeded the standard by over 7%.  This house was the first test product to determine the most successful and economical way to build a new home to the required energy standards while still keeping the home affordabe.  This month a second home will be tested with a totally different building envelope on the same model home.  Those results will be available in a few weeks.

Gerstad Builders continues to build high energy effiecent homes in all of its projects — The Trails of Dawson Creek in Poplar Grove, The Trails of Pheasant Ridge in Richmond and Liberty Trails in McHenry area all projects are in Northern Illinois.  We also have a project in Williams Bay, WI, Bailey Estates those homes are built to the same stand along with the Wisconsin Building Code.

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