The right home improvement products, techniques, and services:
Contractors, home improvement stores, and specialty shops in your area may not yet have a complete familiarity with the ‘green’ opportunities, products, system integration, and overall savings potential. So, you may get some resistance, since people in general are typically more comfortable recommending something that they are already familiar with rather than something new. To help break the inertia, use the information across this website like our Return on Investment Master ROI Table. Also feel free to post a question in our forum on the message board about a particular need for your home relative to your area. Our team has spent multiple years aggregating research from public and private sector performance reports and from manufacturers and homeowners across the country in order to provide you with the perspective you may need to see the initial payback and long term advantages. Environmental enthusiasts and leading institutions like the American Institute of Architects and the National Association of Realtors, see the value and link into our resources to support their members.
The Green Home:
For your overall home improvement, you can save money, improve your family’s health, and save the planet. Find out for free how much it will cost to do different types of home improvement in your home from a qualified and member approved contractor in your area. Get a FREE Quote . Plus, regardless of the size and scope of your home improvement project, save money and keep your home clean with the top rated chemical free and concentrated Green Home Cleaning Products .
Category Checklist:
Make sure to consider the latest Home Improvement products and services. If you are doing the work yourself or planning on working with a home improvement contractor use this checklist below as a guide to review and ask questions about the preferred products, details, and installation techniques related to:
Passive Solar for Additions:
Passive Solar Homes, Passive Solar Design, Passive Solar House Plans, Passive Solar Heating, and Passive Solar Cooling.
Tips on Passive Solar for Additions: The sun generates more energy on the surface of the earth each day than all of the fossil fuels, so leverage it. Remember you can use the sun to help heat your house, but also help cool it by designing ways to draft the warm air up and out of your home through heat chimneys.
Start with southern orientation. Properly sized overhangs can save you up to 40% of your heating and cooling costs. Naturally certain lots are more difficult for orientation, but the cost of aligning the angle on paper during the planning phase is marginal relative to making changes after initial construction or for remodeling. You, your architect, or builder can actually calculate the overhang based on the latitude of where your live to shade all of the summer sun and let all of the winter sun heat your house. As an example a minimum of a foot and a half works in Philadelphia where the sun is 85% off the horizon in the summer at noon and drops to 25% over the winter.
Proper shading strategies can reduce undesirable heat gain in summer and increase the desirable heat gain in winter. If you are not planning an addition or roof work, there are several good retractable awning solutions that are available. If you are undertaking exterior construction, then simply extending the overhangs is a very cost-effective solution because the added labor and material cost are not significant given that they already need to build the roof.
For an even greater ‘passive’ thermal advantage, use stone or ceramic tile on top of a masonry base layer that goes over the plywood sub-floor. Tile hold temperatures much better than wood, but due to the additional weight, for large rooms, you may need to increase joist sizes and/or put them at 12" vs. 16" on center. For the masonry layer, the additional cost of Gyp Crete vs. Concrete is worth the investment due to the easier maintenance especially if radiant coils are embedded in the base. Your thermal gain is significant since masonry materials holds the heat and the cool for up to six hours and re-releases it back into the room, thus reducing the demand on your A/C or Furnace during that percentage of the day. This works great in conjunction with radiant floors and/or rooms that have southern exposure and overhangs that shade in the summer and let heat in over the winter to warm the thermal mass. Similar benefits can come with thermal mass walls or even water tanks positioned strategically in the home.
Naturally, for your passive solar addition, make sure to look into other key elements like, high-efficiency windows, double insulated walls, five speed reversible ceiling fans, and programmable thermostats.
Home Improvement Basics:
When it comes to home improvement basics, look for interior home improvements like creating a clean, safe, and healthy home through sustainable ‘green’ furniture, home décor, zero VOC and Interior Paint, plus ENERGY STAR Appliances and Electronics. For energy and utility savings you can focus on insulation and air sealing, windows, doors, lighting and skylights, water saving plumbing opportunities, and high efficiency heating and air conditioning systems. On the outside of your house, look for exterior home improvement opportunities through landscape design and gardening plus solar energy, wind and other power sources. If you are undertaking a major home renovation, an additions, or building a new home, then take the lead to ‘go green’ in as many ways as possible to save money and the environment.
