Mark Johnson Custom Homes Blog

Jacksonville, NC new home builder Mark Johnson Custom Homes has had experience building Green homes in North Carolina. Our Energy Star home in Wilmington, NC received the highest LEED for Homes certification from the U.S. Green Building Council earlier this year. But it seems the Energy Star Program, which is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, has received criticism lately for not keeping up with the latest in energy efficiency improvements. According to a Custom Home Online article by Stephani L. Miller, the EPA has promised to strengthen its program to maintain its benchmarking role. Below is an excerpt and to read the complete article, click here!

 “EPA will implement several enhancements to the Energy Star products program that ultimately will benefit consumers, including:

• Setting specifications that will ensure consistent application of the Energy Star logo to identify the top 25 percent most-efficient products within a category.
• Expanding product coverage to include new consumer product categories that have high energy-saving potential.
• Increasing verification of compliance with program requirements and improving efforts to identify and address product performance issues. All products will be required to submit product performance testing results to EPA from an accredited laboratory before a product can be qualified under Energy Star.
• Implementing measures that will ensure Energy Star performance specifications are tightened as necessary so that the program consistently represents top-performing products and doesn’t fall behind performance improvements in the marketplace.
• Developing an Energy Super Star program as a higher performance tier within the Energy Star program to help consumers more easily identify the top-performing products within a category. The Super Star tier will comprise approximately 5 percent of products within a category and will include advanced technologies and products that have a longer payback period than those qualified under the main Energy Star program.”