Many people's dream homes today include the dream of low utility bills. People also are beginning to care about the impact they are making on the earth, and most realize that building a home is one of the most resource-intensive activities that a person can engage in. By creating an efficient, eco-friendly design, you can build a green home that will ultimately save you money while leaving a smaller ecological footprint. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Make a preliminary sketch of your floor plan using quarter-inch graph paper, and then proceed to eliminate as many extraneous square feet as possible. Any truly eco-friendly house is not going to have thousands of square feet. To be eco-friendly, a house has to use as few resources as possible, and every extra square foot beyond what is absolutely necessary increases the consumption of wood and other materials. Plan rooms that are designed to meet multiple purposes. This will enable you to reduce the overall square footage of the house.
2. Place the kitchen, bath and laundry room in a configuration where they are adjoining one another or facing back to back. If these rooms share common walls, then the amount of plumbing that must be used will be dramatically reduced.
3. Plan for your hot water heater to be near the kitchen and bathroom. The water heater will conserve more energy if it is kept inside, as opposed to in a garage. The hot water will also have less distance to travel, which means the tap will waste less water as you wait for the water to warm up.
4. Place the rooms of the house that you spend the most time in on the south side. According to the Vancouver Business Journal's article "Designing for the Sun," 60 to 70 percent of the windows in your home should face south. This allows heat and light to enter the rooms, warming them naturally. Rooms requiring less heat should be located on the other side of the house.
5. Design as open a floor plan as possible. This will increase the air flow through the rooms of your house.
6. Create a space in the middle of the house where you will put your furnace. Putting the furnace in the center of the house allows the heat to radiate outward, while putting a heat source next to an outside wall will cause heat to be wasted.
7. Include the height of your ceiling in your plan. High ceilings can be an ecological boon or bust, depending on the climate you live in. Heat rises, which can make you feel cooler in a warm climate. Likewise, this same phenomenon will cause rooms with high ceilings in cold climates to require more heat, as heat will be wasted as it rises to the top of the room. As you plan the height of your ceilings, remember that you will use more resources building a taller structure.
Tags: allows heat, eco-friendly house, floor plan, height your, square feet
