This week long blog series is to help you understand how your choices effect the efficiency of your home. It will take a look at a breakdown of annual energy use in an average home and offer suggestions about how you can reduce your overall use in each category. Today we discuss appliance use, and how you can save money and energy even with older appliances.
This week long blog series is to help you understand how your choices effect the efficiency of your home. It will take a look at a breakdown of annual energy use in an average home and offer suggestions about how you can reduce your overall use in each category. Today we start by looking at plug loads.
Windows on the East, West, and South side of your home receive direct sunlight throughout the day and can cause your home to gain unwanted heat. During the colder winter, some of this heat might be welcome, but you definitely want to keep it out during the hot summer. Overhangs and awnings are green building solutions that achieve this result. Plus, nature has another solution that utilizes trees and plants to shade windows. What are the benefits of each of these ideas?
There are lots of reasons to consider bringing green techniques and ideas into your new home design or your existing home’s remodel. A lot of times the most discussed ones are about saving money or saving the planet—but, today we’d like to focus on three that center on what green building really comes down to: improving your quality of life!
As more and more green products develop, it becomes harder to compare them and choose between them. What does it even mean when a product is “green”? And what qualities should you look for when selecting products for your home? The following are some green product criteria that we felt would help clarify what really makes a product green.
Today’s blog is a shout out about a flame retardant product that is being developed and tested at Texas A&M. It’s made from natural and renewable resources: layers of clay and a polymer from crab shells. These layers are designed to help prevent a fire from igniting a surface instead of trying to extinguish it after ignition like most fire retardants.
Our green building tip-from-the-past for today is that a local material available to you is your existing home. In the past, families built on to their homes, or adapted certain room functions to make the building usable and comfortable as they grew. You can similarly be sustainable through managing and improving your “home resource” to ensure it continues to be your present sanctuary while having the ability to be available for future generations.
Today’s glance at the past to help with green building in the present is more about a building ideology than a building type. When most people built their homes and businesses a hundred years ago, they didn’t order bamboo flooring that took months to cross the pacific from Asia. Instead, they used the materials readily available around them. And we can do the same.
Let’s take a look at another vernacular house design and think about ways it relates to green home building for Bryan-College Station. Today’s building style under examination is the shotgun house.
What other building types and techniques from the past can direct our development of green building? Let’s take a look at the “dog run” or “dogtrot” house. This type of building contained two separate rooms or structures that were connected by a single large roof. The connection created a breezeway or “dogtrot” between the structures that pulled cooler air through the space and created a pleasant, covered outdoor area.
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Stearns Design Build
College Station Custom Home Builders
2151 Harvey Mitchell Pkwy S #219
College Station, TX 77840
Phone: 979-696-0524
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