Not all design-build firms feature Mother Nature as their leading lady, but Envinity of State College, Pennsylvania does. The company has grown and evolved significantly since its early days of straw bale construction two decades ago. Since it focuses on carbon offsetting while delivering quality projects, its clients are typically drawn to long-term value rather than quick returns. For this reason, Envinity delivers turnkey, net-zero, passive building systems, taking projects from preconstruction to completion and beyond. Customers also benefit from the team’s 18 years of solar array and carbon offsetting expertise.
Envinity has always been a trendsetter, known for pushing the boundaries of construction in Center County. The team creates homes that leverage the power of nature through engineering, mitigating their carbon footprint and giving customers quality that lasts. Passive construction minimizes the amount of energy that homes draw from the grid, making these homes largely self-sufficient.
In its time, Envinity has built the region’s first Energy Star-certified home. It was also responsible for North America’s first office building retrofit that turned a traditional building into a complete passive system for peak energy efficiency, winning the project some noteworthy accolades and awards. More recently, the company was also responsible for Pennsylvania’s first multi-family duplex energy retrofitting project, being completed at present.
Envinity provides project owners with comprehensive design-build services; industrial, commercial, and residential solar installations; and industrial and commercial building energy solutions that recognize that merely adding a clutch of random energy efficiency solutions into a construction project does not necessarily result in what clients really want. Instead of surface fixes, Envinity’s nationwide mechanical engineering division offers recommendations, improvements, and new development expertise. It approaches such buildings as complete systems to be meticulously developed and fine-tuned to supply maximum energy efficiency and carbon offsetting.
This approach has made the company especially popular with project owners of healthcare and tertiary education facilities. “It’s a whole unit; you cannot look at any one component separately,” says Chad Owens, President of Design Build Energy at Envinity. To ensure that customers have a smooth experience, the team anticipates customers’ needs, guiding them through each process with invaluable industry wisdom.
While many of the company’s clients prefer to forgo certifying their buildings as net-zero due to the red tape and cost involved, they are happy to know that their buildings make good environmental sense. Typical customers range from individuals and business owners to industrial companies that understand the importance of environmental sustainability in construction and energy generation, making their building footprints gentler on the Earth compared to mainstream building technologies.
To accomplish successful projects, Envinity employs careful data analysis, saving customers energy expenditure for decades to come, and this pragmatic take on the cost of ownership of its buildings has garnered many loyal clients. “We’re blue-collar people who respect science, nature, and physics,” Owens says. “We let that drive what we do and the decisions that we make.”
The company’s model of creating high-value, net-zero homes that remain on the electrical grid gives its team great satisfaction with every sign-off. By adding solar panels to airtight buildings, the company builds supremely energy-efficient homes that are highly sought-after thanks to solid engineering skills and high building standards. “We’ve built multiple true zero energy homes that create as much energy as they are using,” Owens adds. “We offset the carbon that we are putting into the atmosphere in a real way.”
To attain optimal building health through good ventilation, each home is equipped with an energy recovery ventilator so that fresh air circulates. Depending on the season, the air is heated or cooled for ideal indoor temperatures. Part of the objective is to regulate energy costs in the process, which means air flow systems are often installed independently from HVAC systems, typically running around 40 minutes out of every hour.
While it is not always possible to choose natural over synthetic materials, the team chooses Earth-friendly products as much as possible. These decisions are based on careful consideration of carbon impact and analysis of product performance versus the lifespan of its buildings and the quality of the products it uses. Therefore, while it is impossible to avoid using plastics entirely, the company is open about the fact that it uses these materials where no other choice is possible—for now—and that the natural materials it uses are ethically sourced and make sense, like the cellulose it uses for insulation.
Data guides the entire construction process, and as a result, Envinity’s projects typically involve a significant amount of energy analysis prior to construction. By making the correct adjustments to the systems that make such buildings energy-efficient, the company can save some customers “millions of dollars over the years,” in energy, carbon offsetting, and other savings, Owens explains.
To help achieve these outcomes, Envinity adheres to the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home program, with a wide selection of services on offer including data analysis, systems installations, construction drawing and engineering, energy modeling, and much more. Naturally, clients can opt for environmental certification should they prefer, but are not obliged to do so. To minimize waste, even rubble and lumber off-cuts generated by construction are diverted from landfill since the company is a green community partner at its local recycling center. Ensuring that all materials are disposed of as wisely as possible through reuse is important, as consistently making the most intelligent decisions possible in any given moment to help protect the environment is imperative to good stewardship, something Envinity’s leadership takes seriously.
Driven by the quest to create buildings that are environmentally friendly and innovative, Owens strongly believes in his mission and his affinity for nature. “It all started with a couple of educated environmentalists and some disorganized carpenters that just banded together and started out building some straw and timber frame homes,” he says. As a small-town boy, Owens was raised with a strong awareness of protecting his little corner of the planet.
The company has come a long way since those early days, motivated by idealism, hard work, and even harder facts. “We like to say that we are boots on the ground, calculators in hand, powered by data,” he says. As a firm believer in continuous education, the company prioritizes employing well-educated people who are passionate about their niche. “We’re creating crews here; we’re not creating jobs,” he adds.
And he could not be more pleased with the company’s team. “Our people care about what they do… Everybody cares to create good homes for good people. Everybody has that passion, care, and pride; it ties us together,” he says, highlighting that the company searches far and wide to find the right people and then helps them grow professionally.
The team works with purpose and diligence, and all its superintendents are fully certified to excel at what they do. The company also takes advantage of all the trade programs available in its state, and nurturing close relationships across its local industry has secured it the respect of many.
As it perpetually seeks to evolve, the company’s next move includes branching out into the solar battery market and perhaps more commercial work. Sound decisions also mean keeping a finger on the pulse of environmental and technological developments. To this end, maintaining growth has meant doubling its size over the past half-decade, to 80 employees.
Considering current geopolitical shifts, the company is sufficiently agile to adapt. With a past filled with avant-garde building methods and many awards to show for it, there is no doubt that Envinity’s future brims with even more trailblazing as it welcomes more like-minded customers in search of intelligent environmental building systems.
