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Green Building News

Boulder County’s Modular, Low-Income Housing Experiment

The Paradigm Pilot Project includes an energy efficient single-family home and a duplex that could become models for future housing authority projects

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Test project. The single-family modular home built by Boulder County Housing Authority as part of its Paradigm Pilot Project, which is analyzing the cost-effectiveness and energy performance of the house.
Image Credit: Boulder County Housing Authority
Test project. The single-family modular home built by Boulder County Housing Authority as part of its Paradigm Pilot Project, which is analyzing the cost-effectiveness and energy performance of the house.
Image Credit: Boulder County Housing Authority
This modular-construction duplex, adjacent to the single-family home, also is part of the Paradigm Pilot Project. A factory photo of one of the modules, including an exterior frame. Solar and National Research Energy Laboratory monitoring equipment in the single-family home.

Public housing in Colorado’s Boulder County not only took a green turn in 2009, it took a turn toward energy efficient modular construction.

By late October, in the town of Lafayette, the county’s Housing & Human Services division had unveiled the tangible results of its Paradigm Pilot Project: a modular single-family home and adjacent duplex manufactured by project partner All American Homes and designed to deliver near net-zero-energy performance. As noted in a story recently posted by the Daily Camera, the long-term performance of the buildings and the collaborations and initiatives that brought the project to life could have significant implications for similar county projects in the future.

“This was an experiment to see how well this comes together,” Scott Simkus, developer for the county’s housing department, told the Daily Camera. “This is the first time the factory has built a near-zero-energy project.”

In addition to having well-insulated exterior walls and roofs, the Paradigm Pilot homes are sited to take advantage of passive solar gain and are supported by solar power and ground-source heat pump systems whose design allows the systems to be scaled up for larger modular-construction projects.

The county also used Paradigm Pilot as a training vehicle for unskilled workers and partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, HB&A Architects, Farnsworth Group, Lighthouse Solar, Major Geothermal, and All American Homes on a range of project priorities, from design to construction protocols to performance testing.

One Comment

  1. Anonymous | | #1

    expiremant huh?
    How about this for an experiment how about Boulder County housing Authority gives a very deserving family a nice home like that.A nice one they can afford,around 500.00 a month cause the housekeepers of Boulders finest places for the lucky and spoiled don't pay enough to support 1 person let alone 4 and take away sec.8 grants from people who do not deserve them and help a single mom who works very hard and lives in a dump with raw sewage running under the house and lead paint all making one of her asthmatic kids very sick and no one will help not even social services I need an education so I can help my kids too do the same now that would be an experiment and a miracle today.my apologize if anyone is offended I do not mean to be rude it just angers me that only the wealthy are allowed to have nice homes.

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