Articles

The RC-3 plan, with only 5.6KW of PV on the roof, WILL POWER A full sized electric car MORE THAN 19,500 MILES PER YEAR!!! We now have a full line-up of home plans up on this site that will power your car as well as your house! We call them our Positive NRG Homes™. Watch […]

A Positive NRG™ Home will produce more energy over the course of a year than it uses.  It is our goal that our newer designs will not only power themselves, but will also provide enough surplus energy to power your electric car.  Eleven of our Positive NRG™ Home plans have already been built, and are meeting or exceeding expectations! […]

By Eric and Alex Exciting news! Despite the unseasonably cloudy summer we’ve been experiencing here in Seattle until recently, we achieved net-zero almost three months ahead of schedule. Our net meter (the one that goes forward or backward depending on whether we’re using more power than we’re producing at any given moment) now reads 99,690. […]

Completed just over a year ago, our ZEP RC-3 home has been tested, rated, third-party verified, and now has a full year of actual energy bills (credits) to prove it is capable of powering a Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf (electric cars) more than 18,500 miles per year, in addition to powering the entire house. […]

CVH Inc., using a plan provided by Zero-Energy Plans LLC, has just completed a full-house High Performance Energy Remodel of a typical 1960s house, achieving spectacular results. The completed before & after HERS rating comparisons show that the house now will use only about 16% of the energy previously required for heating and cooling. When […]

The RC-3 plan, now available for purchase from this site, will produce up to 50% more energy than it uses, providing you with enough power to operate a small electric car. We have also now posted several other plans that will power your car, including the MB-1, MB-2, Positive NRG™ 1415, Positive NRG™ 2100, and […]

We have just completed a study of home costs, resale values, and energy savings, comparing a code-built home to a near Zero-Energy Home. Our study shows that in just one year, the near Zero-Energy home will provide a return on investment of almost 1% of the original purchase price, over and above financing costs. All […]

Many of our customers from hot climate and mountainous areas have asked about using Crawl Space Foundations with our plans. This will work fine with most of our plans, but you should almost always use a Closed Crawl Space, not a traditional Vented Crawl Space. By using the ZEP Closed Crawl Space Calculator you will […]

The Home Energy Rating System (HERS) is a system designed by the US Department of Energy using highly specialized software to model the Energy Efficiency of a home. The more efficient the home, the lower it’s number on the HERS Index. A true Zero-Energy Home would rate Zero. The average existing home today rates about […]

A majority of the highly energy-efficient homes you see on Earthtechling’s pages cost more to build than the average new US home. Builders and architects of passive houses will tell you, however, that upgrading a plan to PH standards only adds 10 or 15 percent to the cost, if you’re careful—and over the years you’ll […]