He builds trusses and covers them with structural insulated panel systems, called SIPS, which are attached directly onto the frames.



Steve Rundquist hoped to use the sun to help him build in the state’s most remote places.

It’s hard to get heavy equipment and sufficient power to the mountainous locations where he builds custom timber-framed homes, so he and a friend, Mel Wright, dreamed up a solar generator to help them out.

Little did they know the hand-made, trailer-pulled generator would also please discerning customers who wanted a “green” footprint on their custom-built structures.

“The last frame I did was a white oak kitchen in Greenwood Village, and that was all cut with this solar generator,” Rundquist said last week, standing in a sawmill lot in Laporte, surrounded by dogs and post-thunderstorm mud. “They didn’t know until I was done that it was solar, and they were pretty thrilled. I’d like to do it all the time—it could be a good selling point, but the basic concept was to take this up to remote sites.”

Rundquist is among a group of custom builders whose sustainable practices align nicely with the kind of green ideas so trendy right now. But, like others in his field, Rundquist isn’t doing it because it’s trendy. Note that in conversation, at least, the generator’s selling points are secondary to its utilitarianism. To builders like Rundquist, sustainability is the right thing, the only thing, to do.

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Rundquist uses the solar generator to power his tools during construction, but he’d just as gladly give it to the owner of the new home, who could use it to power everything from light bulbs to appliances.

“It could run power to a cabin, especially if you pay attention to energy conservation,” he said. “If they wanted to keep it, they could keep it, otherwise I’d just take it back with me and use it on the next project. But I’d probably build them a new one.”

The small generator is built into a trailer that sits in a lumber yard and sawmill Rundquist uses to cut his timbers. He shares the space with Timberwize Construction Services Corp., and he subcontracts with them, but his specialty is his own business, Brewster Timber Frame Company.

In a brochure, Rundquist talks eloquently about the environmental footprints of home construction and what can be done to ameliorate them.

“We’re not looking to solve all the problems instantly. It took a while for us to get to this point. It will take a while to clean things up again,” he wrote.

During the course of a year, he and Wright talked about how to build remote cabins while keeping a low environmental footprint, and wondered how to do it efficiently.

“Mel started talking about this solar stuff, and we thought there was a nice tie-in,” he said.

It only took a few days to build once they had all the parts.

Two panels soak up the sun’s rays, and electrons that are excited when the sun’s rays hit them are harnessed into power. A small wind turbine acts as a secondary generator and can supplement battery power at night.

A charge controller acts as a battery charger and monitors the amount of direct current going into the battery, which can hold 27.7 volts when it’s fully charged.
That’s a lot of power, but some tools draw more than others, so Rundquist has to plan carefully to make sure he doesn’t drain his batteries before the sun and wind can recharge them.

“You need to think about energy conservation throughout the day,” he said.

The system cost about $5,000, with the panels $700 each and the wind turbine about $800, which he got on eBay from an owner who lives up near Owl Canyon. The biggest cost was the inverter, which converts energy to alternating current and cost about $3,000.

“The rest is regular electrical equipment you can buy at Home Depot,” Rundquist said. “With all the stuff I do, I try to make it as simple as possible.”

Simplicity is key in the timber frames Rundquist fashions from various kinds of wood. He builds trusses and covers them with structural insulated panel systems, called SIPS, which are attached directly onto the frames. The tightly enclosed system is energy-efficient and as simple as can be. It will last far longer than some of the more common construction styles—in fact, timber frame structures still exist in Europe dating back to pre-colonial times.

Using the solar generator, Rundquist can cut the frames and joinery for a 24-foot-by-32-foot cabin in about a week. It requires patience and precision, however.

“It kind of gets my stomach in a knot. I don’t know how it’s going to be until I get it together,” he said with a laugh.

Rundquist is able to get any wood a homeowner desires, from Tennessee to Canada. But he likes using Colorado lodgepole pines killed by bark beetles—they have a nice blue tinge thanks a fungus that kills the tree along with the beetles, and they’re already dry when they’re harvested. And in another nod to sustainability, what’s greener than taking already-dead trees from a local source?

Ryan McBride, who owns Timberwize, knows all about that.

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While working in the logging industry, McBride started using standing-dead timber 23 years ago near Missoula, Mont.

“There’s a prevalent log-home industry there, so it was easy to get started,” he said.
He said standing-dead trees are better than green trees, or freshly cut ones, because they’re already dry, which helps in processing them.

Timberwize is federally certified to grade dead trees for their use in construction, and provides timbers to other companies as well as for the company’s own use.

Timberwize gets its lumber from lodgepoles killed by the mountain pine beetle, which is ravaging forests west of the Continental Divide. The lumber comes from Jackson County, where thousands of trees have already succumbed to the insect infestation that leaves them dry and red.

“Every stick that Timberwize builds with comes right from the Walden region, that whole area that’s dead,” McBride said.

Though the supply lines are heavy as of late, the use of dead wood is nothing new.
McBride said his company uses historic construction processes that fell out of vogue in modern times after the advent of “green lumber” construction—not green in the pro-environment sense, but in that the trees were still alive when they were harvested.

The construction industry evolved along those new supply lines, and dead-wood use fell by the wayside. But McBride always advocated its superiority, in environmental and structural terms.

“All Timberwize has done is taken a historical ending and reapplied it to an application in this time with all these dead trees,” he said. “Some of these processes go back 1,000 years. Timberwize is bridging that gap between industrial change back to practical change, to the best utilization for the forest resources coming on due to disease impact.

“They’re not alternatives; this is what we did, before we did what we are doing today.”

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Rundquist and McBride seem poised to capitalize on the convergence of green ideas and an influx of lumber. But they can only do so much. Thousands of acres of forest are dying every year, and each log home built by McBride, or each timber frame built by Rundquist, only uses a couple hundred trees at most.

Though McBride has been ahead of the curve, he said it will be hard for others to catch up in a way that will have any meaning. Standing dead trees are only usable for a couple years before they start to rot or degrade.

McBride said he wishes the construction industry had not abandoned standing-dead timber use, so the institutional knowledge and infrastructure would be in place to absorb the trees now becoming available.

“Here’s this gargantuan natural opportunity lying before us, and we don’t have the application platform before us to be able to tackle it .. to do something more sustainable for humanity and the environment, simultaneously,” he said. “I would hope there would be a strong paradigm shift, so we can create a balance between all of our housing needs based on all of our available housing materials.”

“We can only hope for baby steps, because these processes are big.”

In Laporte, at least, it seems the new paradigms are already in place.

via Fort Collins Now