The Best of the Housing Hour:

With winter weather just around the corner....its time to re-visit Home Energy Efficiency!

The Housing Hour is excited to have Dr. Roderick Jackson from ORNL as our special guest. We will be talking about many issues including the Zero Energy Building Research Alliance or ZEBRAlliance as it's also known.

The ZEBRAlliance facilitates progress toward DOE’s goal of maximizing cost-effective energy efficiency through a highly leveraged, public/private partnership that so far has built six extraordinarily high performing houses. The Alliance integrates new ultra-high-efficiency components emerging from ORNL’s industry partners and other manufacturers into the construction of research houses and subsequent retrofits. Several generations of retrofits (equipment, appliances, controls, etc.) are typically evaluated during the research period and then the homes are released for sale to the public. When these new components are proven, they will become available to serve regional and national, homebuilding markets, in addition to existing housing retrofit markets. The savings that they are seeing is 40% to 50% reduced cost for utility bills.

Our last segment is with The Housing Hour's own expert:

Dr. Michael Simspon, UT Professor and ORNL Scientist. Dr. Simpson continues our discussion on home energy efficiencies and sums up today's show with Dr. Jackson form ORNL,