In normal on-site construction, a crew spends up to a few days on just the foundation of a house. Anything can go wrong here, and frequently does. It’s very difficult to get the foundation perfectly level. If it’s too cold, you can’t even pour the concrete, and then you have to wait about a month for it to cure. Cutting in windows and holes for utilities all comes later. After it’s done, there’s all manner of pins to take out, and patch; a patch covers up a hole, but doesn’t get rid of it. The first mantra of energy efficiency is Seal, Seal, Seal: your basement is a gigantic energy sink.

PowerHouse basements face none of these issues. They come with raceways ready for utilities and outlets, finished windows, a bulkhead. Pretty much everything but the paint. It’s even thermally broken, so that the concrete forming the outside walls is actually separated from the interior walls. This means that temperature fluctuations are kept to a minimum inside the basement, taking pressure off the home’s heating and cooling system.

Standard hurdles in on-site construction are simply out of the picture in a factory, like the weather, or perfectly level pouring. When the prefab foundation gets to the building site, it goes in in literally hours. Two days on site from raw hole in the earth to finished basement. Contractors who have been in the business for decades have a tendency to scoff at the idea of modular, which is only natural (considering its history). But Quincy says, “when they see a foundation that uses less concrete, that’s preinsulated, engineered, preleveled on the inside, and goes in an hour and a half without the rigamorole of setting up forms, using form release agents, and a bunch of other things that have all kinds of problems associated with them over a number of days…their eyes light up. ‘I get it!’

And the foundation is only the beginning. The rest of the process is just as streamlined. From a cost perspective, it’s important to think of all the man hours being saved. Instead of months on the job? Weeks, and not many of those. John sums it up: “It’s not this is an orange, this is an apple. It’s, This is a beautiful glistening orange, and that’s a crabapple."

The original dream for PowerHouse was to build their own factory and processes from the ground up. But they took the more actionable approach of subcontracting out the actual factory work, and ensuring that the management teams they worked with knew exactly what they wanted and had PowerHouse processes down pat. It took a while to develop a good relationship, and involved a brief detour to Canada, but eventually they found a local factory whose management was eager to jump on board. Green prefab is sweeping the building industry, and they didn’t want to get left behind.

A learning curve was inevitable. But with most of the factory’s systems still in place—most of the difference coming from the materials—it wasn’t too steep. Some potential problems turned out to be not problems at all. For instance, PowerHouse wanted spray foam that was efficient and better for the health of the house than the fiberglass the factory generally used; it had the side effect of shortening the total process instead of bogging down the system.