Green Homes

The way we plan, design and build our homes can play an important role in environmental preservation. Keeping them small, powering/heating them with the sun, insulating properly, using energy efficiently, conserving water and giving careful consideration to the materials employed are some of the key steps to create green homes. Our homes are significant sources of emissions mainly because they consume huge amounts of electricity. But the materials used to build them and our use of water also play an important role.

As larger portions of society becomes more concerned with the environment, there will be more green homes in the housing market. At a meeting of the National Association of Home Builders International Builders in Orlando, it was said that cost effectiveness will help green homes to take an increasingly large percentage of market because price is buyers’ prime motivation these days.

This indicates that residential developers are targeting eco-conscious home buyers and as technology evolves and costs fall, green homes very soon will no longer be seen as elitist.

In fact, the idea of affordability is at the core of 100khouse.com. The website is dedicated to Postgreen’s first development project, which is an attempt for prove green homes need not to be expensive to be properly designed and executed. As we can deduce from the URL name, it alludes to the target construction cost covering labor and materials. Social homes are also about to become green homes thanks to a pioneer retrofitting project in the UK. Unveiled in March 2011, the scheme will see improvements such as solid wall insulations and better heating systems to be made to 9,000 social homes in Manchester to make them more energy efficient. The housing association will pay for the cost of work upfront and tenants will meet the cost through savings in their electricity bill, estimated at $750 per year.