Benefits of Building Green Houses
- Building green is good for the planet, but it's also becoming good for the home builder's budget. Adding environmental features to a new home can be more expensive upfront; yet, better techniques and materials are reducing those costs, letting you recoup the expense through reduced energy bills.
- Structural insulated panels are finding a place in home construction, offering higher energy savings. The panels are rigid foam laminated between two pieces of oriented strand board. The panels, for walls and roofs, have a very high R value, a measurement of heat-flow resistance. Kevin Flemington, whose company, Flemington Construction in Indiana, specializes in green building, says there's the added benefit of taking only a few days to frame a house with SIPs compared with weeks for standard "stick" construction. SIPs have been around for a while but used to be more expensive, he said. An increase in the number of SIP manufacturers has dropped their costs, increasing their use.
- Windows used to be a major source of energy loss, but new windows have greater energy efficiency and provide an added benefit of passive solar energy during cold months. According to the Old House Journal, the most common windows for American houses are double-glazed, with two panes of glass separated by an airspace to reduce heat and sound transfer. Some manufacturers produce triple-glazed windows for super-insulated homes in cold regions and improve thermal performance in the space between the panes with a low-conductance gas.
- Home builders can reduce their carbon footprint by buying their materials from local and regional providers. Buying local reduces the fuel it takes to bring materials to the building site and reduces shipping costs that are passed on to the homebuyer.
- The burst of the housing bubble may have ended or at least stunted the growth of the era of the "McMansion." CNNMoney.com reported in August 2009 that the size of new homes in the U.S. shrank for the first time in 15 years--7 percent smaller, about the size of one room, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Reducing the physical footprint reduces materials and the carbon footprint during construction, reduces energy costs after homeowners move in, and reduces the mortgage.
- Use enough green building techniques, add some energy-producing functions such as solar panels, and your yearly energy costs can be zero. The power company may even end up paying you. The architectural firm Farr Associates designed the Yannell House as a "net-zero" home in Chicago, and it was named one of the 10 Coolest Houses of 2009 by Builder Magazine. Solar panels on its V-shaped roof, passive solar-heating through triple-paned windows, geothermal heating and cooling, and gray-water recycling produced a striking private residence that is predicted to produce 140 percent of its energy needs, with the excess to be sent back to the power grid.