Eighty Years of Operating Energy.
The house you build will operate for eighty years, at least. The car you buy next month will be on the road for twelve. Of the choices a household makes about its environmental footprint, the building decision is the one that compounds the longest.
Eighty years of heating. Eighty years of cooling. Eighty years of hot water. The energy a house uses across that service life is decided when it is designed and built. The lever is the design.
Three principles do most of the work. Airtight. Insulated. Well ventilated. A house built to those three things uses a fraction of the energy of a code-minimum build, holds temperature through multi-day power outages, filters the air the family breathes, and runs entirely on electricity. As the grid decarbonizes, the house decarbonizes with it. The investment pays back in operating savings over decades, in resale value, in a quieter and cleaner home, and in eighty years of avoided emissions.
Our Mt Airy Passive House measured 7kBtu per square foot per year before onsite generation. (With a rooftop solar array, that number is now zero!) Most homes in the neighborhood use two or three times that. Multiply the difference across eighty years, and the gap is the size of a climate decision.
At Trilobite, every new-construction and deep-retrofit project starts at those three principles. Pretty Good House sets the floor. Passive House verifies and pushes further. Both reach excellence. Both run on less.
Earth Day is one day. Your home runs every day for a lifetime.
