A new Maine facility will mass produce energy-efficient homes

A Belfast company that builds highly energy efficient homes is getting ready to open a new 16,000-square-foot facility that will use an assembly line process to manufacture the walls, floors and roofs needed to construct them.

GO Logic says the facility will ultimately be able to make 25-50 of its environmentally friendly prefabricated homes a year, reducing the energy that’s required for building them and helping the region to cut its reliance on fossil fuels that contribute to climate change.

The new facility at 52 Little River Drive will also be the first manufacturing building in the nation that itself meets the “passive house” efficiency standard, which means it uses thick insulation, tight air-sealing, solar panels and other features that can result in net-zero energy emissions, according to GO Logic principal Alan Gibson.

For more than a decade, GO Logic has specialized in building homes that meet that same standard, as determined by Passive House Institute U.S., or PHIUS, a Chicago-based organization.

“It’s an industrial building, and we wanted it to be at the same level of energy performance as the houses,” Gibson said. “That’s how we built it. It will allow for the manufacturing of buildings without using much energy at all. We’re bringing it full-circle.”

The new prefabrication facility took a year and a half to complete, costing roughly $2.5 million, and was funded in part by a federal Community Development Block Grant. GO Logic is holding an opening for the new building at 3 p.m. Friday.

It includes new equipment, a centralized workspace for the teams working on-site and room to expand in the future. A large space in the middle of the building will produce the prefabricated parts that will ultimately be delivered to work sites and pieced together. The new facility will allow GO Logic to hire up to four additional contractors.

“There aren’t many facilities like this around the state,” Gibson said.

GO Logic is one of a few different prefabricated home manufacturing companies in Maine, and Gibson said he takes pride in the work it’s doing to reduce homeowners’ dependence on fossil fuels for heating and power — and now to incorporate more of that efficiency into the company’s own processes.

“We’re building energy-efficient buildings in an energy-efficient way,” Gibson said.