More than a decade later, NIST’s home of the future is still ahead of its time

Back in 2011, the shift to green energy technologies was just starting to gain momentum in the United States. Homeowners were looking into those technologies not just to potentially help with the emerging threat of climate change, but also as a way to cut costs and high energy bills. NIST took advantage of government investments in green energy, specifically using The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — which provided $747 billion in funding to alleviate the so-called Great Recession of 2008 — to help build the home of the future.

Technically, the two story home, which is 2,700-square-feet with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, was designated as the NIST Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility. But because it looks just like a normal home which would easily fit in with any of the neighborhoods surrounding the agency’s tree-lined Gaithersburg campus, most people took to simply calling it the net-zero house.

And the design was no accident. NIST wanted to show that energy efficiency did not have to make a residence look like a spaceship, or be uncomfortable to live in. Bill Healy, a mechanical engineer at NIST who worked on the house explained that the goal was to show that “you can live in an energy-efficient home, and it doesn’t have to feel like a science project.”

At the time it was being built, the house gained a huge following online as people watched it be slowly constructed for over a year. Other than 32 solar panels mounted to the roof, the house looked just like a normal home. It was loaded up with all the amenities that one would expect to find inside a modern home, like televisions, central air conditioning and heat. It even had high-quality cabinets built into the living room and nice tiles installed in the kitchen. The construction was completed in September of 2012 after a 16-month build.

Once complete, its first mission was a year-long experiment to see if the home could generate more power than it needed, with the house pulling from the normal electrical grid when its solar panels couldn’t generate enough power to drive everything inside. But because conducting such an experiment with an empty house would not be very useful, a four-person family had to be simulated.

This was done in the days before generative artificial intelligence could be tapped to run such a simulation, so many of the activities conducted by the four virtual residents were manually programmed, although they followed normal patterns for a typical family, and one that was not too energy efficient. For example, meals were cooked every day and dishes were cleaned. The showers ran at different times throughout the day and evening, and the virtual human residents even watched TV and played video games late into the night. Resistance heaters and humidifiers were used to simulate the body heat and moisture that four actual humans would give off if they were living there.

The net zero home proved itself in its first year. Despite having a very cold winter where the solar panels were blocked by snow for several weeks, it was still able to generate 7% more energy than it needed. The following year, which was much more mild, showed even better performance.

The house of the future, today

Even with the original experiment complete, the house has not been abandoned. In fact, it’s still a very active laboratory for NIST scientists and others. In 2022, two dozen scientists from 12 universities worked at the facility. They installed new, modern sensors inside and around the home and turned the two-car garage into a makeshift computer lab packed with advanced technology.

It was all part of a new effort to measure how chemicals drifted around and lingered inside a home. Everything was measured, from the steam emitted from instant popcorn bags when cooked to the gasses given off by cleaning supplies. Even rare chemicals like the smoke from wildfires that might drift inside a home had their properties recorded. The goal with the new experiment is to record how those chemicals might affect residents. Since no other facility like the net zero house exists anywhere in the world, it has become a cornerstone of the Chemical Assessment of Surface and Air experimental efforts.

The home is also being used to help improve computer models, like the Department of Energy’s EnergyPlus standard, which is used to estimate the energy efficiency of buildings being constructed across the United States. And it’s currently helping to verify the findings of NIST’s CONTAN computer model, which is widely accepted as one of the best in the world at predicting how contaminants and pollutants flow inside multi-level buildings.

And so, the little home that was built to be ahead of its time continues to do so over a decade later, albeit with quite a few upgrades and improvements from the original design. It certainly seems like the little net zero house still has a bright future as one of the most unique laboratories in the world, and one of the most useful for conducting experiments involving residential buildings and modern living.  

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys