With the cost of gas these days, you wouldn’t consider buying a new car without evaluating the MPG rating on the car, so why would you buy a home without knowing what its energy rating is?
When purchasing a new home in Sycamore, IL it’s easy to get caught up in the things that you can see. While the fit and feel of
the home is important to your enjoyment of the home, the real quality of the home is in how it’s built. Determining how it’s built is difficult unless you’ve been trained in construction and you’ve watched the entire process. That is why at Silverthorne Homes we use a third party verification system to make sure that certain systems of the home are constructed to the highest standards and then these systems are scored based on national criteria.
The scoring system is called HERS, Home Energy Rating System and we have a third party perform what’s called a RESCHECK report on each home we build. It identifies the home’s energy performance compared to new homes and older homes. The lower the score the more energy efficient the home. A typical new home built to 2004 energy codes has a score of 100. A typical existing home has a score of 130. An energy efficient home has score in the mid-80’s. Silverthorne Homes builds all of our homes to the rigorous Illinois Energy Code 2009 standards and we have an average HERS score around 70. This makes us 15% more energy efficient than a standard energy efficient home, 30% more energy efficient than a standard new home, and 60% more energy efficient than an older used home.
We’ve been experimenting with energy saving features that we use still today for years as standard features, even before Illinois enacted their energy code. Features like basement insulation, insulated foam exterior sheathing, advanced framing techniques and air sealing/infiltration techniques were being employed on our homes voluntarily before anyone required us to do so. We are in the words of a local building offical “still a step ahead” with our use of the RESCHECK reports to fully document the performance of each of our new home plans unlike many other builders in the Chicagoland area.
On all Silverthorne Homes feel free to ask for the RESCHECK report and compare our homes to our competition. For more information on how we build our homes, visit our website www.silverthornehomebuilders.com.