Month: March 2014

Going green before you even break ground is one of the most effective ways to make sure your new house is as environmentally friendly and energy-efficient as possible. From the foundation to the roof, there are plenty of ways to aim for efficiency during and after the construction process. The following six building tips will help turn you new house into a green home.

Plot Out the Lot

There’s a lot more to deciding where you want to build your new home than the lot location, especially if you want to build green. Environmental impact and local zoning codes aside, there are many factors that will affect the future of your home and its green potential.

First consider the climate, as in median yearly temperatures. If you are building in a generally warmer climate, then a lot that provides more shade is your best energy-efficient bet. For colder climates, an open, sunny lot will offer the best exposure for natural home heating and lighting.

Use Sustainable Building Materials

Once you’ve found the perfect lot for your green home, it’s time to think about earth friendly building materials. Sustainable means any materials that are either recycled or have a rapid regeneration. For example, recycled plastics are commonly used to make composite wood for trim and decking.

Likewise, recycled and crushed glass is also used as an alternative to granite countertops. As for naturally occurring green building materials, bamboo is a great alternative to wood flooring because it regenerates faster than commonly used hardwoods. In addition, longer lasting products like cement board siding is more durable, earth friendly, and energy-efficient than regular wood siding.

Keep Your Home’s Size in Perspective

The size of your new home has a huge impact on its overall green potential. It’s important to keep in mind how much space you actually need as opposed to how much space you want. Every square foot you add to the construction translates to more materials and increased energy usage in the long run.

Before you chisel the blueprints in stone, think about your new home in terms of your own lifespan. Will your family expand or are the kids heading off to college? Do you need a spare bedroom and an office, or is that space sharable? When it comes to building a new home, experts are there to help you build a house that’s inspired by you and your square footage needs.

Think Energy Efficient Heating and Cooling

Size, lot location, and building materials all work together to make your new home green, but so does the home’s heating and cooling. Not all HVAC systems are built the same, so if you’re going for peak energy efficiency, then an ENERGY STAR® heating and cooling system can help reduce your home’s energy costs by 30 percent or more.

Heating the water in your new home is almost as expensive as heating the living room and bedrooms, so it’s important to choose an energy-efficient water heater as well. Tankless water heaters only heat the water you need when you need it, so there’s no wasted energy involved with continuously heating standby water. Turning your home green is good, not only for the environment, but for your wallet as well.

Choose Quality Insulation

One of the biggest efficiency pitfalls during the home building process is energy loss due to poor insulation; especially if you’re going for green energy efficiency. So, make sure all exterior walls are properly insulated. In addition, your attic plays a major role in heating costs due to the potential energy loss, so insulate your attic and crawlspaces properly as well.

Post Construction Green Efforts

Just because you built an earth friendly, energy-efficient home doesn’t mean your green efforts have to stop there. From energy-efficient appliances to compact fluorescent light bulbs, it’s easy to go green. Monitoring your water consumption, scheduling your thermostat to heat and cool in moderation, and even planting shade-providing vegetation are all great ways to make your home energy-efficient and green.

Keep in mind these earth and energy friendly pointers during construction, and you’ll have the greenest new home on the block. What’s your biggest conservation concern as you’re building your new home? Please share with us in the comments below.

Bamboo products have become really popular recently, and why wouldn’t they?  Bamboo is beautiful, and most of the bamboo products being sold are really high quality.  You can buy bamboo sheets, bamboo blankets, bamboo cutting boards, bamboo flooring, and even bamboo bicycles.  Bamboo is everywhere.

Is Bamboo Green or Not?

There are also articles everywhere telling you whether bamboo is actually green or not.  You can easily find content supporting both sides of the issue, and plenty of it.  So, what is really true?  Is bamboo green?

How Bamboo Isn’t Green

If you’re talking about the process used to manufacture a bamboo product, then bamboo really isn’t all that green.  Bamboo is a woody grass, and to turn its fibers into fibers that can be used to make sheets, blankets, and bicycles, the bamboo fibers have to undergo a chemical process. This process isn’t any less green than the process used to manufacture other products.  For instance, the processes used to make bamboo sheets and cotton sheets are very similar and so are their effects on the environment.  So, while the bamboo manufacturing process isn’t all that green, it also isn’t any less environmentally friendly than other manufacturing processes with which you’re familiar.

Bamboo Grows Fast!

Not only can it grow up to three feet a day, it reaches maturity very quickly, anywhere from one to three years, depending upon the species.  For bamboo lumber products such as flooring, this makes it a greener and more quickly renewable crop compared to lumber.  Trees grow for a minimum of 20 years before they reach maturity; most don’t mature before they are 40-60 years old.

Choosing Bamboo Means Choosing Water Conservation

Bamboo requires no irrigation when grown in its natural habitat.  When you choose bamboo products, you are helping with water conservation.  This is in stark contrast to crops like cotton. To produce enough cotton to make a single T-shirt, you need as much water as a single person drinks over a three-year period.

Bamboo Doesn’t Require Harmful Chemicals to Grow

Bamboo doesn’t require pesticides or insecticides.  This makes bamboo products safer not only for you and the farm hands who cultivate and harvest it, but for all the wildlife and water sources that are killed or polluted each year because of these chemicals.

Bamboo Makes Soil Healthier

Bamboo keeps the soil healthy thanks to its root system.  Bamboo roots are structured like a net. Because of this, they keep the soil together and reduce runoff and soil erosion during heavy rains.

Bamboo Has a Negative Carbon Footprint

A forest of bamboo the same size as a forest of trees will produce 35% more oxygen, giving bamboo a negative carbon footprint.

Bamboo Is and Isn’t Green

So, the next time someone tells you bamboo isn’t green, you can agree with them to an extent.  And when someone else tells you bamboo is green, you can agree with them as well.  Because now you know the truth about bamboo:  its manufacturing processes are no more or less green than other processes, but its growth process makes it one of the greenest and most sustainable resources found on earth.