Simple Solutions for Green Building

The low-hanging fruit of green building are the low cost low tech building techniques which reduce energy consumption and increase energy efficiency mankind has utilized many of these since our beginning on this earth we started to mass produce houses stick building and started to standardize the building processes then it became... they became less indigenous if you go back you know a hundred years they were probably practicing better green building practices than we have been in the last 50 years they're using local material they were trying to capitalize on as much of passive means of energy as they possibly could. When we first started looking for a home one of the things I knew was the fact that the American home had already doubled in size since around 1960.

Get your home energy-efficient before you move on to some of the other more romantic or sexy green things there are many tried and true not very exciting things that have a very high return on your investment. siting the house properly to capture solar benefits make sure that the building envelope is airtight as you can get it the second thing would be the amount of thermal insulation you put in the wall ceiling and floors.

Actually, one of the first green features...this was insulation. one of the single most beneficial things you can do is to tighten up the envelope of a home reducing draft basically add more insulation or better windows or pay attention to air sealing because draft is a huge source of heat loss in a building. caulk and weather stripping very simple things for people to do don't necessarily need a contractor but that's one of the highest by far payback items. clients install like LED lighting there are a couple of companies to make very high quality LED lights these are products that use about eighty-five percent less energy than a conventional incandescent bulb the same like quality another area that people need to take a look at more aggressively is natural lighting one of the products that we've been using with a high degree of success in the last few years or what are called sun pipes. another skylight that really permits me on a sunny day to work here in the office without having any artificial lighting another tried-and-true technology that should be considered in most climates is the installation of ceiling fans as the ceiling fan can reduce the need for air conditioning.

Showerheads, sinks, toilets you know, all of them have you know have the low-flow saving features preventing is just education we've been doing builders remodelers have been doing things by tradition so to speak rather than basing it on science to encourage the low-hanging fruit would be probably marketplace driven how can builders incorporate this because it is a step in the direction of being able to build better. it's the most cost effective steps that's why it's the low-hanging fruit so if you can get them to recognize that they can deliver a better product at low or no additional cost that's a huge incentive some of the other ones would be to aggressively pursue zoning changes that could increase density to create more open space I think you start out with some of these less exciting technologies and techniques then you lead into geothermal or solar because basically if I can build a building that uses fifty percent less energy than a conventional structure which we commonly do if we take that building and then there's room within the budget with or without incentive money and we can afford to put in say a geothermal system for example.

Well, that geothermal system is half the size of what it needed to be, so I've somewhat exponentially increased my impact on my energy bill and my environmental friendliness you.

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