The Crescent House Demonstration Home - New Orleans, LA

The ?Crescent House? demonstration home is a project for Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans Operation Helping Hands in New Orleans, LA. Operation Helping Hands (OHH) organizes a large volunteer corps to clean, repair and/or re-construct homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina or the ensuing flooding of the city. OHH supervises the work of five pre-selected builders on re-construction projects. The Crescent House is a prototype home built from Building Science Corporation (BSC) plans that will provide an example of affordable, durable and energy efficient housing for homeowners re-constructing their house in the New Orleans area. For OHH, the plans developed in this project will become a standard house package that will be offered to 200-400 homeowners over the next 2-3 years. The house package has been designed to meet Building America?s (BA?s) 40% energy savings level for Hot Humid climates. Initial EnergyGauge analysis by BSC indicates that the energy savings will be about 42% compared to the BA Benchmark. The focus of the field test will be the short-term and long-term performance of an AAON advanced dehumidifying heat pump designed in cooperation with BSC.

The Holy Cross project is one of the first new home construction projects to be built in the Lower 9th Ward. The home, whose solar panels are expected to generate enough electricity to power the home, will be LEED Platinum certified. The Holy Cross Project consists of 5 single-family homes, an 18-unit apartment building, and a community center/sustainable design and climate action center. By using solar panels, high performance building design, HVAC systems, energy and resource monitoring systems, and energy efficient appliances, the buildings in the Holy Cross Project are expected to achieve an energy reduction of at least 75% compared to typical buildings. Completed in 2007, the test house is the first house built as part of the Holy Cross project, and is occupied by a key participant in the project. Energy efficiency savings is expected to be 38% compared to the BA Benchmark, and 83% when the PV system is included. The focus of the test will be the ground source heat pump (GSHP).