What is a Green Home Improvement?
For many contractors Green Building is a fad that they will jump on and off depending on whether or not they think it will make them more money. For everyone on the Energetechs team Green Building is just what we do everyday.
For you, the homeowner, it means improving the energy-efficiency, comfort, health, and durability of your home. We are the expert green home improvement contractors to turn to when you are ready to make your home green. Our staff have a combined total of well over 100 years in the Green Building field and we love to help our clients save money, improve their health, and help the environment.
So what is Green Building?
Green Building is better building.
It includes the processes of designing, building, operating, and maintaining buildings that are better for the environment, better for the owners and occupants, and better for society as a whole.
For a long time now we have been building homes and commercial buildings that are simply “up to code”. Building Codes serve a very important purpose in our society by setting minimum standards of design and construction to protect the health and safety of the occupants. They ensure that buildings are structurally sound, solidly built, sanitary, reasonably comfortable, and possible to get out of in the event of a fire. But the problem with setting minimum standards for construction is that you end up with minimum standard construction.
Green Building has emerged over the last twenty years with the goal of going above and beyond these minimum standards to create buildings that are significantly better. A typical Green Building will have many of the following features. It will often…
- be more energy efficient to operate
- use fewer resources and less embodied energy to construct
- have better indoor air quality
- be more comfortable
- be quieter
- be more durable
- require less maintenance
- cost less to operate
- use less water for operations and landscaping
- enhance infiltration of rainwater and reduce runoff and erosion
- be made of local, natural, and/or renewable materials
- produce less waste during manufacture and operations
- require occupants to drive less by providing walking or biking access to necessary services and public transportation
- be built in such a way as to preserve or enhance natural habitats, wetlands, biodiversity, agricultural land, public open space, and parkland
- help to reduce urban sprawl
- include reclaimed or recycled materials in its construction
- encourage recycling in its operations
Building Codes are written primarily for the purpose of protecting the health and safety of people from immediate and catastrophic problems like fire and collapse. What has become increasingly obvious over the last forty years is that these same codes sometimes do a poor job of protecting people from longer-term and less obvious problems like Sick Building Syndrome, mold, or greater environmental destruction. If we take a bigger look at “health and safety” we realize that a healthy environment is essential to the health and safety of the people in it.
Healthy Environments
On the single-building scale this means that the indoor environment should enhance the comfort and well-being of the people inside. This can be achieved by maintaining really good indoor air quality, natural light, pleasant views, individual control of thermal comfort, as well as protection against mold, allergens, and toxic chemicals.
On the neighborhood scale it means that, by building in previously developed areas (preferably by renovating existing buildings), and by utilizing existing services such as sewer, water, gas, and electricity, we can preserve existing natural habitats, agricultural land, and community open spaces and reduce urban sprawl.
If every building is within easy walking or biking distance of necessary services like grocery stores, schools, restaurants, etc, as well as close to where there are jobs, then people will seldom need to drive their cars. And, if there is easy access to public transportation for longer trips, people may not need cars at all. This can dramatically reduce fossil fuel use and has the added benefit of creating urban areas that are much more pleasant to live in with less traffic, less pollution, and more community interaction between people who are healthier, less stressed and have more contact with the natural world.
By preserving the agricultural land close to urban areas communities have the ability to produce the food they need close to where they live instead of transporting food over thousands of miles. And, if the food is grown organically, it can greatly reduce the amounts of fossil fuels and other chemicals required to produce it, at the same time providing agricultural jobs close to people’s homes.
On the larger scale, by far the biggest impact of most of our buildings on their environment is the energy used by the building over its lifetime. For this reason energy conservation should be the highest priority in any Green Building project. The exact strategy for minimizing the energy consumption of a particular building will depend on its purpose, location and climate. However, in all buildings the first and most important step is to reduce the amount of energy required to heat, cool, and operate the building to the absolute minimum by using appropriate Passive Solar Design and high-performance components such as windows and mechanical equipment.
Energy Efficiency
Passive Solar Design incorporates the principles of site selection, orientation, window placement, floor plan layout, roof overhang, insulation, air-sealing, ventilation, thermal mass, and landscaping. This holistic approach ensures that the heating and cooling loads on the building are kept to the absolute minimum. Energy efficiency is further enhanced by the use of highly efficient heating and cooling equipment, energy recovery ventilation, high performance windows, and energy conserving fixtures and appliances.
Once the energy requirement is minimized, only then is it time to consider ways of meeting the remaining energy needs from renewable sources such as solar, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, and biological systems. Unfortunately there is a growing trend to view Green Buildings as ones that just use alternative energy systems. While renewable energy development plays an important role in the future of Green Building, it is energy conservation that is the most important piece of the puzzle and should ALWAYS be addressed first and foremost.
To this end, the golden rule of Green Building is to Keep It Small and Simple. The easiest and best way to limit the impact of any building on its environment is to make it as small as possible. This reduces the amount of material required for construction as well as the energy required to heat, cool and operate the building. It also helps to keep costs down for both construction and operation.
The embodied energy of each product or process in the building is important in the decision making process. Embodied energy is the sum total of the energy necessary to produce a material or product (from raw material extraction, transportation, manufacturing, assembly, and installation to disassembly, deconstruction and/or decomposition). Obviously, in a Green Building, the idea is to choose products that have the lowest embodied energy possible. This will become easier as the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools becomes more common in the building industry. LCA rates different materials according to their cumulative environmental impacts over their expected life span and will help building designers choose the Greenest materials and products to include in their buildings.
Green Building Rating Programs
Dozens of Green Building Certification Programs are currently in use throughout the US and the world. One of the first and most popular is the US Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED program which awards points for:
- Sustainable Site Development
- Energy Efficiency
- Water Efficiency
- Materials and Resource use
- Indoor Environmental Quality
- Education and Innovation
As opposed to Building Codes that are compulsory and require a minimum standard of construction that is enforced by law, most of these programs are voluntary and encourage higher standards of design and construction by awarding points for the Green strategies used in the building. The more Green Strategies employed the more points the building gets. This fosters competition in the building industry to create Greener and Greener buildings. And the certification programs themselves are constantly improving so the bar is being set higher and higher.
However, it is important to remember that Green Building Programs are not the only way to build green. Thousands of buildings have been built with no checklist or guidelines to follow yet their footprint on the earth is minimal. One factor that greatly affects how Green a building will be is the motivation of the building owner.
Integrated Design
If the owner has a true commitment to environmental stewardship, then the building will be constructed and used in a way that respects the earth. If they employ a team of experienced individuals who are equally committed to environmental responsibility, the process will be much easier and the product much better. This team will often include the owner, the building designer or architect, the builder, energy consultant, engineer, interior designer, landscape designer, and the mechanical engineer and/or specific sub-contractors such as the plumber, electrician, and HVAC installers. Ideally this team will be involved from the very outset of the project in an Integrated Design process that draws on the knowledge, skill, and experience of all of the team members to help guide the building towards meeting its environmental, social, and financial goals.
In order for this to happen it is important that these goals be clearly set from the very beginning, ideally before a site is even chosen for the building. The first meeting of the team should be a “brainstorming” session aimed at clarifying and prioritizing the goals of the project. These should include the specific functional, aesthetic, financial, spatial, social, Green certification, environmental, and energy-efficiency goals for the building. These should then be arranged in order of importance so that the priorities for the project are clear to all of the team members. Once the goals are firmly established then the right site can be chosen and the team can start designing the building. During the design process, every decision should be made with reference to the project goals in order to ensure that these goals are met in the end.
Performance-Based Design
In the case of energy efficiency it is important to establish specific energy performance targets at the outset. For example, to meet the 2030 Challenge’s 2010 Imperative a building must be shown to use 60% less energy than a standard building. Or for Passive House certification a home must use no more than 4700 bTU’s/sf/yr. These are very specific energy performance goals that are set from the beginning and help to guide the design process. This is known as Performance-Based Design. In this process the building is designed to meet the energy goals rather than the typical process in which the goals are too often compromised to fit the design of the building.
Are Green Buildings sustainable?
In my opinion the answer is no. Green Buildings are typically more sustainable than average buildings but, while it is theoretically possible for a “Green” building to be truly sustainable, I have yet to see one that was.
The UN defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” I take a much simpler and more practical approach. I believe that what has made our culture unsustainable is our use of fossil fuels. So the simplest test of whether something is sustainable or not is to take away fossil fuels and see if we can keep doing it. According to this test I have yet to see a modern building that is sustainable.
Take, as a simple example a Passive-Solar, straw-bale house with solar panels on the roof. By Green Building standards this might be considered pretty sustainable. But according to the no-fossil-fuel test it isn’t. Without fossil fuels how could you make the glass on which the passive-solar design depends? Or how could you make a solar panel? Or even a straw-bale for that matter?
True sustainability can be found in indigenous architecture. Throughout history, people all over the world have found ways of living in harmony with their environments without using fossil fuels. And many still do to this day. They build with natural materials that are close to hand. In Africa it might be mud and thatch, in Indonesia it might be bamboo, in Tibet it might be stone, and in the Arctic it might be ice. They eat what they can catch, gather, raise, or grow in their surroundings. And they find ways to keep themselves comfortable without needing electric gadgets or central heating or air-conditioning systems fed from gargantuan utility grids powered by fuel-gobbling and/or environment-destroying energy monsters.
How do we know they are sustainable? Because they have proved it. In most cases, indigenous cultures survived for thousands of years (in the case of Australian aboriginals, for 60,000 years) without harming the environment on which they depended. We have been using fossil fuels for a couple of hundred years and we have done irrevocable damage to the planet in the process.
So, while Green Building has a vital part to play in reducing our fossil fuel use and environmental footprint, it’s important to keep in mind just how far we have strayed from, and how far we still have to go to return to true sustainability. When we can, once again, live harmoniously without fossil fuels then we might be getting close. Perhaps Green Building will be the path that gets us there, only time will tell
For now we can say with confidence that a well designed and built Green Building is a lot better than the average building. So it’s a good start.
Call Energetechs and Save Heat Now!
(406) 721 2741
615 Oak St, Suite 101, Missoula, MT, 59801