Greetings!

I thought you might find the below good reading.  I requested a testimonial from one of our former clients who has been living in their home for almost one year - and boy did he respond.  Below is a series of e:mails received from him with only one follow-up prompt in-between. 

This gentleman lives in Raleigh, NC, and as you will read below his home was destroyed in a rash of tornadoes that swept through Raleigh in the spring of 2011.  We first met "Joe" when we were working on our New Orleans project with Brad Pitt's "Make it Right Foundation" as part of hurricane Katrina reconstruction.

Note that the conditioned size of their home increased substantially while the energy bills have decreased.  And final cost of construction turned out to be a "wash" compared to stick-built when considering our higher up-front costs.

Here are pictures of his destroyed, in-process construction and completed home.  The panels for each floor took just several hours to erect.  And note the favorable comments about the insurance industry and the damning comments about traditional construction.

BELOW IS THE E:MAIL EXCHANGE WITH THE CLIENT

From: Joe
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 6:16 PM
To: Charles Leahy
Subject: RE: Hello Joe! Greetings from Eco-Panels

Hi Charles - Happy New Year!
Ok. So we did lower our electric, BUT our entire house is conditioned. Our prior home did not have a conditioned attic or crawlspace, and our new house does.  (Half of the crawlspace is "Walk-space" if you know what I mean.) Plus, the heat pumps are almost half the size of the units we had before, and we added an ERV. For comparison purposes, our 1^st home was destroyed on April 16, 2011, and we moved into our new home on Feb 3, 2012. The Feb 2012 bill is high because we had a lot of "punch list" construction items that required the exterior doors to be off the hinges for awhile (Yeah, we probably moved in too soon, but we were eager to get back home!) 

The graph I attached details cost, not usage. Keep in mind that rates have gone up every year, and our new home has more conditioned space. We're trying to get data on usage, but that seems to be difficult to come by. We created the graph from our Progress Energy billing data. (The months are on the bottom, dollars on the left side.) The Excel sheet contains the actual billing data.

Using Eco-Panels makes economic sense in any number of ways. The construction costs for us ended up being a wash. All told it was about the same price, maybe a little more, but not much. It seemed like it cost a little more, but not anywhere near the 7% we talked about. The insurance rebuild meant the money was handled differently, and it exposed all the costs at the end. Our house is very comfortable, and the temps are steady. I imagine as solar technology improves we'll take advantage of it in the future, and we have an energy efficient house that will make the most of that technology when we implement it.

However, the comfort and efficiency were a bonus. The real reason I wanted to use Eco-Panels was because of the strength and the control of construction. My home was destroyed in the April 16, 2011 tornado outbreak, and the more I learned from the FEMA engineers the more upset I became at how poorly my home was originally constructed despite meeting all local and national construction codes. You can talk with the builder all day long about construction methods, but onsite he's far disconnected from the carpenter with the nail gun.  I also discovered that the insurance industry has taken some strides to promote home and business safety as well, and they are rewarding consumers with lower rates and enhanced coverage for building homes that will withstand greater perils. (Check out www.disatersafety.org) When I told my insurance company I was rebuilding with Eco-Panels they were excited and kept telling us how much more structurally sound the house would be. Yes, our rates fell significantly, but they treated us so well through the disaster that we bought a lot more coverage in other areas to maintain the premium levels we had before. [Joe told us separately that he was able to about double his insurance coverage for the same monthly premium amount.]  At any rate, I liked the idea that the walls were made in a factory under controlled conditions.

The building code creation process is a political process, a tug-of-war between the engineers of the inspection department and the lobbying interests of the home building industry. Both sides make good arguments and try to balance structural safety with keeping home s affordable. I had a pretty traumatic experience in April of 2011, and I set out to build a much stronger home. I investigated a lot of building methods and interviewed a lot of builders. I continually steered the conversation to structural integrity and they said, "We build to code," and changed the conversation to hardwood floors, crown molding, toilets and countertops. My family was home when our house was destroyed, so you can imagine what we go through when a thunderstorm approaches. "Built to code" isn't good enough for me anymore. The reason I used Eco-Panels is that my home is significantly stronger than before. The house has a solidity that's apparent to anyone who walks in, but it's very hard to describe. My neighbors even joked about me building a fortress! The building inspectors were impressed and kept commenting about how my home far exceeded the structural building code.

Lastly, I think Eco-Panels has the best system out there. Charles has made everything easy to assemble correctly so inexperienced crews can put a home together properly, quickly,  and with little training.

So, I got a house that is very efficient, cost about the same to build, and is much stronger than before.

I have a two-story home on a crawl space. The 1^st and 2^nd floor walls are Eco-Panels. The roof and pony walls of the crawl space are traditional construction.

We used a spray foam for the roof, gable ends, crawl space and banding. (The floor joists sit on top of the walls, and the banding is that space around the edge of the house between the ceiling and the floor above.)

What I'm going to do differently for my next Eco-Panels home:

1.       Get the electrical contractor more involved in the planning process. I think he would have had an easier time if a few more of the internal electrical runs could have used the outside walls. It wasn't a big deal, but I think it could have gone better for him. Keep in mind, everyone complained at the beginning at how hard things would be, but when they actually worked with the panels they said it was much easier than anticipated!