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    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home
    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home
    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home
    Ebook153 pages1 hour

    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home

    By Anthony Gilbreath

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    About this ebook

    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to green your home. It is perfect for people with home greening experience and for those who are just beginning.

    The guide includes information and tips on over 40 different home greening categories. Also included is a Tax and Appliance Rebate guide which will help you identify government incentives.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnthony Gilbreath
    Release dateOct 26, 2010
    ISBN9781301830701
    The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home
    Author

    Anthony Gilbreath

    Anthony Gilbreath is a sustainability expert that has been working in the industry for the past 15 years. In 2010 he founded Caelus Consulting - a consulting firm that provides a variety of sustainability consulting services. The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home is the first book to be published in the Green Guides series.

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      Book preview

      The Ultimate Guide to Greening your Home - Anthony Gilbreath

      Chapter 1 - What is a Green Home?

      A green home is energy-efficient, uses water and natural resources wisely, creates minimal amounts of waste and provides a healthy and safe environment for your family. However, for a home to be truly green, your family needs to live a ‘green lifestyle.'

      What is a green home? A green home must not only be energy-efficient and have an eco-friendly structure, but the people that live in the home need to live a green lifestyle.

      Energy-efficient and eco-friendly structure

      Energy-efficiency is a key component to any green home. Energy-efficiency can be achieved by ensuring proper levels of insulation, making sure your home’s envelope is well sealed, fitting your home with energy-efficient appliances and using intelligent control systems to eliminate the unnecessary use of electricity, heating fuels and water.

      Eco-friendly structures are built from sustainable and/or high-recycled content materials. The use of these materials should be closely managed to control waste and to ensure that they are sourced and manufactured locally. Finally, eco-friendly structures are made from natural materials which do not release dangerous chemicals into your home’s air and local water supplies over time.

      Green Lifestyle

      A ‘green lifestyle’ refers to the choices residents make on a day-to-day basis. At the core of any ‘green lifestyle’ are the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.

      Reduce - The easiest way to reduce your impact on the environment is to reduce the amount of items you purchase and consume. This includes not only household and personal items, but also electricity, fuels and water. Learning to live with less is not only good for the planet, it is also good for your pocketbook.

      Reuse - If there is something that you cannot do without, consider buying it used or borrowing it from someone else. By reusing items, you not only extend the useful life of these items, but you also eliminate the need to put them in a landfill. Additionally, before throwing anything away, try to reuse items for a different purpose (repurposing). An example of this is using old bath towels as rags.

      Recycle - By recycling, you not only reduce the need to grow or extract raw materials, but you save the energy it takes to make the products and the fuel required to distribute them. When you have finished using something and you are ready to throw it out, (and it cannot be repurposed) find a way to recycle it. A majority of household items can be recycled. Finally, when shopping, try to purchase goods which include recycled materials.

      A green lifestyle also includes well informed buying habits. Priority should be given to goods that are local, organic, free of toxins, energy-efficient, durable and made from recycled materials.

      The benefits of a green home

      There are many benefits to living in a green home. Green homes can be significantly healthier, more durable, more energy efficient and have a higher resale value than a traditional home.

      A healthier home- One of the most important ways to make your home a healthier place is to eliminate your household toxins. At any given time, the typical home is filled with dozens, if not hundreds, of household toxins. They exist in cleaning liquids, in the paint on your walls, in the pesticides you use in your garden, in the food you eat and even the air that you breathe.

      A more durable home- By using eco-friendly building materials in the construction of a new home or the renovation of an existing home, your home will be more durable. Green building materials are built to be longer lasting and made from natural or recycled content. A green home is a home that is built to last.

      A more energy-efficient home- People who live in green homes save money by consuming less energy and water than typical homes. Over time, this adds up to big savings.

      A higher valued home- The value of green homes is often higher than that of a comparable standard home. As the market demand for green homes continues to rise, this trend will likely accelerate. Additionally, an increasing number of insurance and mortgage companies are offering policy and lending discounts for green homes.

      Chapter 2 - Measuring Your Home’s Impact

      Two popular methods of measuring your home’s ecological impact are the Ecological Footprint (EF) and the Household Carbon Footprint (HCF).

      Ecological Footprint (EF)

      The EF has emerged as a leading measure of humanity’s (and your personal) demand on nature. It measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes, using prevailing technology. Your EF is broken into Consumption Categories and Biomes.

      Consumption Categories- Consumption Categories show where you consume resources and generate waste. The categories include Carbon Footprint, Food Footprint, Housing Footprint and Goods & Services Footprint. This is usually represented in a percentage breakdown, all categories together adding up to 100%.

      Biomes- Biomes describe how many ‘global acres’ are required to support your lifestyle. Biomes include energy land, crop land, grazing land, forest land, built-up land and fishing grounds.

      There are many EF assessment tools available online that can help you determine the EF of your home.

      Household Carbon Footprint (HCF)

      Your HCF describes the total volume of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the activities of your home over a period of time. The concept of a carbon footprint is important because it creates a relationship between your actions and the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted because of them.

      Common greenhouse gases include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. For simplicity, the total volume is measured in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e), which combine all the greenhouse gasses together. CO2e is a quantity that describes, for a given mixture and amount of greenhouse gas, the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential (GWP), when measured over a specified timescale (generally 100 years).

      Greenhouse gasses, which are primarily created from burning fossil fuels and by raising livestock, are released into the atmosphere where they absorb solar radiation. This radiation takes the form of trapped heat that would otherwise escape back into space. This process is the fundamental cause of what scientist refer to as the Greenhouse Effect. The term Greenhouse Effect is used because, much like a greenhouse, when solar radiation is trapped, it will cause a rise in temperatures.

      Global annual temperatures have been rising since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when factories (and later automobiles) began emitting high volumes of CO2. The rise in global temperatures has increased exponentially over the past several decades. It is predicted that if left unchecked, this rise in global temperatures will have catastrophic economic and ecological effects in the coming century.

      Calculate your Household Carbon Footprint - There are many online resources available that can help you calculate your HCF. They will generally be in the form of an online survey. The survey will require you to submit information about your home (size, location, number of windows, etc.), appliances, driving and flying habits and other carbon factors.

      For a more detailed analysis, you may want to consider the GreenHouse Home Audit by Caelus Consulting. This audit will not only measure your HCF, but it will provide you with carbon reduction and green upgrade recommendations. More information can be found at: http://www.caelusconsulting.com.

      Take direct steps to reduce your HCF - Once your HCF is known, you will be able to take steps to track and reduce it. Increasing the energy-efficiency of your home and living a ‘greener lifestyle’ are excellent places to begin. Steps such as driving less, reducing your home energy consumption, buying locally grown food, and buying ‘green energy’ from your utility company are some examples.

      Consider buying carbon offsets - Despite the direct steps you take to reduce your HCF, some volume of CO2e will remain. In order to bring your HCF to zero (carbon neutral), consider buying carbon offsets. Carbon offsets reduce your carbon impact by ensuring that somewhere else on the planet, an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide is reduced as a result of your offset purchase. Except for reforestation projects, which can sequester emissions currently in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide isn’t removed from the atmosphere; rather emissions of new carbon dioxide are prevented. In either case, the environmental benefit is the same.

      Because carbon offsets are fairly intangible, you need to take precautions to ensure that your purchase is having the intended impact. Try to make sure that the offsets follow one of the major industry standards. A variety of standards such as the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism, Chicago Climate Exchange, Environmental Resources Trust, California Climate Action Registry, Voluntary Carbon Standard, Green-e Climate and Gold Standard provide assurance that projects

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