It began as a one-of-a-kind house, a partnership between the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and a Folsom home builder, to test the newest green-building techniques.
It turned into one of the greenest, most energy-efficient homes built in the United States.
Tuesday, SMUD announced that a new 1,940-square-foot Mormon Street House near Folsom's historic downtown received a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum designation from the U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, D.C. The Davis-based Davis Energy Group inspects and verifies materials and practices that lead to the certification.
The highest honor in green home building, the designation is thought to be the third for a new house in California and first in the capital region. The other two are in Santa Monica and the Oakland Hills.
The honor comes weeks after industry flagship Green Builder Magazine picked the Folsom house above 56 others for its December cover, dubbing it 2008's "Green Home of the Year."
SMUD, which has subsidized area builders to install solar systems, calls the experimental Folsom home a new step toward "zero energy" housing that is a state goal for 2020. The utility estimates the home's energy bills will be about $24 monthly, compared with $140 a month for homes built to current new-home standards.
As a bonus for Folsom custom home builder Robert Walter, the home with its 720-square-foot guesthouse in the backyard, has an El Dorado Hills buyer in escrow for $625,000.
The two-story main house is styled as a 1920s Craftsman to blend into an old Folsom neighborhood.
"I've been doing this since 1991, and there are few homes I felt the way I did about the Mormon Street home," said El Dorado Hills real estate agent Jane Layton. "I would have loved to live there," she said after showing the house in recent months to hundreds of curiosity seekers, advocates of green building and would-be buyers.
Inside the home are recycled glass countertops and oak cabinets from sustainable forests. Thicker support beams allow less wood and more space for the newest style of insulation, the spray-in or blow-in cellulose and foams that better keep out heat and cold.
Walter said he's told by the city of Folsom the house will use half the water of a normal home with its special landscaping and high-efficiency toilets, shower heads and faucets.
The platinum designation, which tops other less stringent LEED categories of silver and gold, reflects how efficiently the house was built.
"We recycled just about everything that came off that job," said the builder, who spent years as a corporate home builder in the region before beginning to build solar homes, a desire he had harbored since graduating from college in 1982. The Folsom home has a solar unit twice the normal wattage, said SMUD, which spent $70,000 to help Walter build the house to specifications suggested by Boston-based consultant Building Science Corp.
"That was the purpose of this house – to try some of these things, examine them and see what issues you run into when you actually build them," said Mike Keesee, SMUD's project manager in customer research and development. "We're trying to take some of the lessons learned and put them into the commercial market, and into existing homes as well," he said.
What's next? Walter said he is already retrofitting two homes in Sacramento using some of the same methods from the Folsom house. Another couple plans to build a similar house in Rocklin this year, he said.
Keesee said SMUD is partnering with Sacramento architect John Packowski to build another LEED Platinum house in Sacramento.
"We're also going to try to do this on a retrofit basis as well," Keesee said.
Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.