Posts Tagged ‘homes’

While some energy saving tips for homes are common knowledge, others are not so obvious. Every tip you apply on a regular basis will help to lower your utility bills in the long run.

One idea is to replace all of your standard light bulbs with energy-efficient bulbs. You can choose between fluorescent bulbs, also known as CFL bulbs, and LED bulbs. Whichever style you prefer, it will provide the right amount of lighting you need in your home while using less energy. Although they are equally suited to any size home, the more incandescent bulbs you replace with one of these other options, the more impact it will have on your energy bills.

Most people know that not allowing energy-draining products to run when they are not in use saves money, but some products are not as noticeable. You might think that leaving your television converter box on standby, or leaving the household’s power bars on overnight do not matter, but they do drain energy. It takes very little effort to turn all of these “extras” off when you will not be using them for many hours. It is a positive start in cutting energy costs.

Keeping your home in top-notch condition not only creates a nicer environment to live in, but reduces costs as well. One tip is to make sure your apartment or house is prepared for seasonal changes. Doors and windows which do not allow outside air to come into the home will make your air conditioning work better in the summer, and your winter heating will be more effective.

These few basic tips can lower your bills and make living in your house or apartment more comfortable and enjoyable.

Click to Learn more about Energy Saving Tips for Homes

How To Save Money At Every Step Of The Home Buying Process.
Cheap Homes – How To Save Thousands.

What is “grey water” and why should it be captured? Wouldn’t that be unsafe? What are the benefits? This article will try to answer these questions in our first of several “Focus on Green Homes” articles.

First, grey water is not actually grey-colored. After being filtered it looks just like regular water. However, it is not potable water and should never be used as such.

There are basically two types of grey water recapture. “In the Home” grey water is water from your sink, shower, and laundry that has been filtered and reused. “Outside the Home” is run-off water from your gutters/ground that has been saved and used. Each one will be described more fully below.

In the Home – Grey water in the home is water from your sink, your shower, and your laundry. Under certain conditions and with the right equipment, this water can be used again for things like flushing your toilet. Grey water usage may sound a little strange and at first glance appear disgusting, but with the proper equipment and filtering, non-potable water can be used again.

The grey water usage provides a recycling method that can greatly reduce your water bill and your community’s need for expensive giant waste treatment plants. It is estimated that grey water usage can reduce your water bill by up to 60%. Just imagine the reduction if every home in town recycled their grey water.

Outside the Home – Grey water outside the house is run-off water. This is the water that runs off your roof and ground into the storm sewer and usually runs into a river or drainage pond. This water is being wasted. Grey water recapture saves the water so that it can put to much better use. Have you ever noticed that your plants, flowers, and grass look much better after a rain storm than they do after you have watered them with city water? This is because city water is treated for human consumption and no longer contains the minerals and nutrients required by your lawn and flowers. The run-off water is saved on your premises and is available for your personal use anytime.

Using run-off water relieves the stress on city services. Have you ever been subject city restrictions on when and for how long you can water your lawn? These restrictions are necessary because watering your lawn with city water stresses the city water supply. If you’ve saved your run-off, your actions can alleviate the stress on the system. Simply by capturing the rainwater running out of your gutters or across your property in a rain storm and storing it for later use, you’ve conserved water while saving money and resources.

Most home use a lot of hot water and heating that water is usually expensive and inefficient. In this third in our “Focus on Green Homes” series, we look at how water is heated, kept hot, and delivered to your hot water faucet in a green home.

Heating the Water – A standard water heater has a major flaw. A conventional gas water heater has a tank with a tube in the center of it and a burner under it. The hot gas from the burner travels up the tube and heats the tube which in turn heats the water surrounding the tube. Now we come to the flaw. The problem is that the water heater is very inefficient since the gas entering the tube is very hot and remains very hot even as it leaves the top of the tube. However, when the gas reaches the top of the tube it is no longer heating the water. A new generation gas fired water heaters overcomes this flaw by using all the hot gas to heat the water.

Another way to heat water is solar water heating. Have you ever taken a drink from a garden hose during a very hot summer day and burned your mouth because the hose had been laying in the sun so long? If so, you have just experienced solar hot water heating. Similarly, a special solar panel (one that heats water rather than making electricity) can separate water into tiny little lines and run the water across the panel, heating the water. The sun heats the water very quickly and the result is pumped back into a larger line that leads to a water tank in the house that stores the hot water until it is ready to be used. On a cloudy day, the tank reverts back to a conventional water heater. Solar heating is only cost effective for very sunny areas of the country.

Keeping the Water Hot -Insulation is the key to keeping the water hot. The more insulation surrounding your water tank the longer the water stays hot.

Getting Hot Water to Your Faucet – To get the water to your faucet while it is still hot, an alternative to copper pipes is needed. Copper pipes conduct heat, removing heat from your hot water while on the way to the faucet. Using materials that don’t conduct heat as well, such as inexpensive Pex tubing, is one way to solve this problem. In addition, a smaller line can get the water to the faucet faster. Pex tubing can be used in green homes to get the water there now, while increasing the efficiency of the entire hot water system in your green home.

What do windows have to do with a green home? Windows are a big part of your green home, since most of the heat lost from your home is lost though the windows. A set of inefficient, leaky or badly installed windows can defeat any efforts at energy savings or conservation. How can we stop the money from flying out the window? In this “Focus on Green Homes” edition, we explain how to keep the windows from allowing the heat out of your home.

Through new technological breakthroughs, techniques are now available to build attractive, but energy efficient windows that retain heat a lot better than the old way of building a window. First, energy efficient windows have two panes of glass instead of one. And, in addition, newer windows have had the air space between these two panes of glass filled with argon gas that dramatically slows the heat transfer through the glass panes.

Heat is also lost through the air space between the window frame and the window space in the wall. Most people have had the experience of feeling a draft from leaky windows and doors. This gap around the window frame should be filled with quality insulation to reduce the amount of heat escaping from the home. There are several ways to apply the insulation. One effective way is to fill this gap with expandable foam and then cover the nailing flange of the window with special tape to seal the gap completely.

By doing all these steps, you can greatly increase the energy efficiently of the traditional window. Usually windows cannot be eliminated or reduced in size due to building codes and builder’s rules of thumb. Windows are pleasing to the eye and provide ventilation and safety features that are important to any home. Therefore, windows have to be made more efficient in order to make your home truly green.

When choosing windows for a green home it is a good idea to look at many window manufacturers and their window prices because the most expensive windows are not always the most efficient. Calculating the energy pay-off time is an important tool for choosing the most efficient windows for the money.

A “green” home is a home that is highly energy efficient, has excellent indoor environment, and is built to exceed local building codes. So are they ugly then? Look like the Jetson’s space-age house? So obvious they would stick out like a sore thumb? No. No. and No. A green home looks just like conventional construction inside and out.

The beginning of a green home is a set of plans that starts with a conventional floor plan and elevations. Then an experienced green home building will modify the systems of the house to accommodate green home features and energy saving devises - A geothermal system rather than air conditioning; in-floor heating rather than a conventional natural gas forced air system; a grey water recapture system; energy efficient windows, doors, appliances, and water heater; and high quality, high ‘R’rated insulation.

The best part is that these systems work very different from their conventional counterparts, but are invisible to the homeowner and their guests. The home will be quieter and cleaner without the dust and noise of conventional forced air heating. And the energy cost savings are substantial, depending on your particular situation.

Energy Star appliances sip electricity but are similar or identical to your current appliances. And cabinets and trim can be identical to conventional houses or use recycled material or earth-friendly woods for a more eco-friendly alternatives.

The cladding and shingles on the outside of the home are no different than a conventional home making the home blend in to its neighborhood seamlessly. However, the market value is probably higher than the surrounding homes due to its energy saving advantages and tax incentives.

So a green home is a beautiful swan, not an ugly duckling, at all!

Methods used to heat a green home are cleaner, more efficient, less expensive and more comfortable than conventional methods. The heating systems are simple for the home owner to operate and maintain. However, since the system is basically custom-designed for each home, it is very complicated for the contractor to calculate the exact heating needs of every home and is based on an enormous amount of variables. A green home takes a lot of things into consideration when it comes to heating your home.

For example, variables such as the direction the house faces, how many windows are in the home, what is the solar heat gain of the window, the amount of shade, the insulation value of the home, and the ceiling height of the house need to be taken into consideration. Then owner preferences about the type of system desired are factored in. Choices include forced air heat, radiant heat (hydronic systems), gas, propane, or electric.

Third, another consideration in designing your heating system should be how clean the system is. For instance, radiant floor heating has a couple of major advantages over forced air, since it more efficient than forced air and does not circulate air back and forth spreading germs and bacteria throughout your home.

The efficiency in radiant floor heating comes from three sources. First, a thermostat on a forced air system might be set at 72 F while a radiant floor heat system thermostat may only need to be set at 65F or less and still maintain the level of warm comfort. Imagine your entire floor of your green home warm all the time! Second, heat rises. By heating the floor, the heat rises over the entire length of your body keeping you warm no matter where you are in the home. No more cold corners or freezing cold bathroom floors.

The last source of efficiency for radiant floor heating comes from the source of the heat. What does the heating of the water for this type of system? There are lots of options, some more efficient than others. One option is using a boiler or hot water heater, however efficiency is sacrificed. The best option is a secondary heat exchanger plumbed off a very high efficiency water heater. Another option is using a geo-thermal ground loop with a heat pump. Currently this option is too expensive for affordable green homes.

When considering your heating system for your green home, it is important to look at the pay-off time for your system. Some systems can be extremely efficient, but costly, costing tens of thousands of dollars to install. Why pay a dollar to save a penny? By carefully designing and building an affordable, practical green home, you can save utility costs immediately since it will not cost more than a conventionally built home.

Air conditioning is possible in a green home. Read all about it in this installment of our “Focus on Green Homes” series.

Air conditioning in green homes is cause for much debate among green enthusiasts. Certainly, the best way to save energy on air conditioning is to not have it or use it. But this is just not practical for everyone.

Without a doubt, air conditioning of the past was anything but green. It used very damaging chemicals and consumed large amounts energy for what it produces. Even more efficient units in use today still use lot of energy causing enormous electricity bills in the summer months. Can a system be designed for a green home that uses much less electricity and no damaging chemicals? Yes, indeed.

Size Matters – The first consideration when designing an air conditioning system for your green home is the size of the system. Air conditioning systems should be sized correctly for the space to be cooled, considering the number, location, and type of trees, the number of window, the arrangement of the house, and size of the living space. Care should be taken to right-size the system – it should not be too big or too small. Then we need to look at all the renewable resources we can use to accomplish this.

Cooling from the Earth – For the system to be truly green, renewable resources must be considered. One of the best renewable resources is called geo-thermal. Geo-thermal is literally heating or cooling from the depth of the earth. It is the reason that most caves are the same temperature (around 55F) all year round. We can use this constant temperature of the earth to cool air for air conditioning.

To accomplish geo-thermal cooling, water (or other liquid) is pushed through a tube in the ground buried at an appropriate depth. The water is cooled to the ground temperature. Air is then passed over the tube and the warm room air is transferred to the water in the tube, removing the hot air from the home. The heated water is then pushed back though the tube under the ground and the heat is transferred into the ground effectively cooling the water back to 55 degrees and the process starts all over again.

Clean and Efficient – Using geo-thermal air conditioning is clean and quiet. For systems that do not use forced air to distribute the cool air, there is far less dust and noise.

This system uses much less energy to create cool air for the home than conventional air conditioning and is much better for the environment. This system can also be used to heat the home. The cost of the system and the depth to which the tubes must be buried depends on the part of the world in which you live.

Though concern for the environment might be why more people are buying green homes today, Austin buyers are definitely falling for the way they save them money on overall operating costs and maintenance.

In 2007 there were more green homes built, bought and sold in the US than ever before. And why wouldn’t there be? Green building techniques and standards have improved dramatically over the past decade, making environmentally friendly houses an attractive alternative. Consumers and builders are learning that a green home doesn’t have to be a geodesic dome or pit house, it just has to meet certain standards and be kind to the environment. Similarly priced and designed, today’s green homes also promise significant savings on utility bills, lowered maintenance costs, a healthier indoor environment and increased peace of mind. Naturally, all these benefits are also translating into a higher resale value when it comes time to move on.

Austin’s Green Home Building program is the oldest in the country and has a lot to do with the predominance of green buildings in this part of Texas. Launched in 1991 and now under the wing of Austin Energy, the program supports builders and homeowners to make Austin homes more energy efficient by allowing them to tap into information, rebates, loans and free upgrades.

This New Austin House

This past year, Austin’s green homes were in the spotlight again when “This Old House” featured a green renovation to one of Austin’s drafty old character homes. Taking an old fangled little bungalow and adding eco-friendliness with features like photo voltaic cells on the roof, rainwater collection for irrigation, spray-foam insulation, recycled-glass tile and counter tops, and formaldehyde-free wood managed to garner Austin Energy’s coveted five-star rating for the finished project. For the house’s owners this added efficiency translates into $720 less in utility bills every year and a $10,000 rebate from Austin Energy’s Solar Rebate Program. For the city or the world for that matter, it means 3 tones less carbon dioxide, 14 pounds less nitrogen oxide and 20 pounds less sulfur dioxide.

Buyers interested in purchasing a new green home can expect to see more of them on the market in years to come. Early in 2008, the National Association of Home Builders will release the National Green Building Standard, an ANSI standard for green home building based on guidelines the NAHB released in 2005. The soon to be released standards cover a range of green factors including lot prep and design, resource efficiency, energy efficiency, water conservation, comfort and indoor environment.

Product Description
Authors Avrim and Vicki Topel have created an engaging and meaningful way for readers to learn about and understand green homes with their Green Beginnings book and video/DVD Set. GREEN BEGINNINGS: The Story… Home shares the true story of the husband and wife authors experience planning and building a LEED Silver and Energy Star Qualified home to teach others about green homes. This experiential-based eco-memoir reads like a novel and provides an enlightening lear… More >>

Green Beginnings Green Homes Educational Package

Green homes have become the trend of today’s life. They are less expensive and eco friendly. The materials used in the construction of such homes are natural. Green homes are long lasting and don’t cause environmental pollution. There are many builders who can guide in building green homes. These kinds of homes are very natural.

Green homes are also available for rent and sale these days. Approaching green home builders can help get the best deal. It will help the cause of nature too. Environmental friendly houses will help bring down pollution level to a large extent. These kinds of homes are ideal from every point of view. The houses can be designed to suit the needs of every person. Various aspects that go into the construction of a house are explored. Green design, from ecological point of view and economical benefits all help in the environmental cause.

While building a house, one must take into consideration various factors such as choosing right type of materials, how much energy will go into construction of the house, the long term utility of the products, and so on. Solar energy can also be used for various purposes. There are many green home consultants who can guide you to get the required details on construction of houses.

You can also get related information online. You can get the latest eco news about various issues affecting global warming, climatic change, latest eco-friendly technology as well as the initiatives taken by the government on climatic changes. This will help make a right decision on the types of houses that should be built. You can build environmental friendly houses.

How much money goes into construction of a green home depends on the size of the house. Not all the green homes are alike. The materials used in the construction vary to a large extent. Each of the green homes contains different levels of green characteristics. If you plan to have a house that is fully solar powered, with an underground rainwater system, bamboo flooring, solar water heater, and sustainable harvested products – you can surely find such kind of a house. The design of the house, the type of materials used, house and site layout, all play a crucial role in deciding the cost involved in building a house.

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Enjoy a look at a fascinating variety of homes and the creative people who built them! Discover how passive solar design and environmentally low-imapct materials can be used to create comfortable and economical homes.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com’s standard return policy will apply…. More >>

A Sampler of Alternative Homes: Approaching Sustainable Architecture

A “green” home is a home that is highly energy efficient, has excellent indoor environment, and is built to exceed local building code. Sounds expensive. Right? Absolutely not! You may have heard that building a green home is more expensive that conventional construction, but this is a myth. Using an experienced green home builder, a green home can be very affordable to build and can save a homeowner thousands in energy costs annually. And the homeowner could qualify for thousands in tax incentives.

A green home can be built for no more than regular construction, and has greater market value when it is completed. It is important to hire a builder that has built green homes before. A builder that has retrofitted existing homes has no experience with the type of building techniques that make green homes more affordable. In addition, an experienced green home builder can help educate the potential homeowner about green techniques, their options, and energy efficiency.

While some green home features can be expensive and retrofitting existing homes can be quite high, building a green home from scratch is very affordable. Your experienced green home builder knows that getting advice from LEED’s engineers and reorganizing the building process to save time, energy, and waste are key steps to starting the project off right. Generally speaking,the green home elements are not expensive items and since they are installed as the house is built, with no demolition of existing concrete foundations and landscaping, the cost of installation is kept lower.

In case you have been wondering what green homes look like, they look just like conventional homes (except for the solar panels) and are quieter and cleaner than conventional homes. Green home features are maintenance friendly and work just like conventional home features.

Energy efficiency savings can be substantial. Using the weather and energy costs in Illinois as an example, and comparing an affordable green home to conventional home with conventional natural gas forced air heating and central air-conditioning, typical homeowner annual bills of nearly $3,000 per year could be lowered to $700 or less – a savings of $2,100 per year. These figures are for illustrative purposes only. Your actual savings depends on the size of the home, the number of people you have living in your home, your electricity usage, and the green options you select.

With tax incentives in the thousands, energy savings worth thousands, and greater market value, building and living in a green home is an affordable option for everyone.

• ISBN13: 9780061348266
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
GREEN HOMES presents the latest innovations in sustainable architecture in design. After an introductory interview with an international specialist in green building, the book features 35 projects, including houses, apartments, offices, sports facilities, and factories. It explores various aspects of green design, from its ecological and economical benefits, to factors considered when choosing materials: how much energy went into manufacturing the product, whether i… More >>

Green Homes: New Ideas for Sustainable Living