Path To A Green Home offers both step-by-step guidance on how to evolve your house to a ‘greener’ house for those DIY’ers as well as a personalized, turnkey Home Sustainability Plan for those that may not want to take the time to work through their personalized plan themselves.
Whether you take the DIY route or the turnkey Home Sustainability Plan route, we’ll evaluate all 5 resources that go into and come out of our homes: heating fuel, electricity, food / food waste, product / product waste, and water.
Before diving into the DIY steps or the turnkey Home Sustainability Plan, let’s explore the benefits and motivation for wanting a ‘greener’ home. If you already know your reasons for wanting a ‘greener’ home, feel free to jump directly to the Homeowner DIY page or the turnkey Home Sustainability Plan page now.
Different people have different reasons for wanting a greener home. We’ll explore some common reasons and provide examples to help you decide if these benefits are important to you.
There are many reasons to achieving a greener home; the four most common are:
* Reduced Cost (utility bills)
* Increased Home Comfort
* Increased Home Value
* Reduced Environmental Impact
Different people will prioritize these differently. And, depending on your ‘reason’ or goal, the path to a green home may differ slightly. The exciting part is that there is a lot of overlap, so you can end up getting more than one benefit from your actions. For example, if your primary goal is to reduce your utility bills, you will at the same time increase the comfort of your home, increase the value of your home, and decrease your personal impact on the environment.
Let’s explore these 4 ‘reasons’ or goals further so that you can start to decide which reason(s) you would like to focus on.
Reduce Cost
Depending on where we live in the country (or world) we have different utility needs and costs. Some of us have long winters with high heating bills. Some have long, hot summers with high cooling bills.
Most of us, unless you’ve already achieved a net zero house, would love to reduce our heating, cooling, electric, water, and/or garbage expenses.
Increase Home Comfort
Increasing your home’s comfort is often thought of as counteracting the reduction of utility (heating/cooling) bills. However, by implementing more efficient methods of heating, cooling, air quality, air humidity, noise control, etc. we can achieve both – lower utility bills and increased home comfort.
Home comfort is often difficult to quantify. With utility bills, it’s easy to set a goal of reducing the bill by 25% (for example) and then it’s easy to measure progress against that goal. With home comfort, the goals and measurements are a bit more subjective. You can say that you want a warmer house, or a ‘less drafty’ house, or a dryer house, or a quieter house, etc. Some of these are easier to measure than others, but I think you get the idea.
To help you prioritize your items related to home comfort, one exercise is to pretend that you have $100 to spend and to allocate a certain dollar amount to each of the primary home comfort topics:
- Warmer Home
- Cooler Home
- Less Drafty Home
- Dryer Air
- More Humid Air
- Quieter Home
- Fresh Air
The results will show how you prioritize the main home comfort groups in your house.
Increase Home Value
Like many other home improvement projects, different ‘green’ projects have different rates of return and, if looking at this from purely a financial standpoint, they might not all make sense. Also, like many home improvement projects, a factor in this decision will be how long you plan to keep the home. The longer you keep the home, the more value you get in increased comfort, lower utility bills, and reduced environmental impact.
However, it’s clear that people are starting to value ‘greener’ homes when they are looking to buy a home.
A recent Boston Globe article includes a few studies showing that ‘greener’ homes are selling for a 5.8-9% premium.
A Washington Post article points to a 2011 study from Earth Advantage showing that “newly constructed homes with third-party certifications for sustainability and energy efficiency sold for 8 percent more on average than non-certified homes in the six-county Portland metropolitan area. Existing houses with certifications sold for 30 percent more.”
In addition to the amount of ‘green’ (shades of green) in your house, there are many other factors that go into the increased home value (size, location, etc.), so it’s also advisable to speak with a certified green real estate agent that can help to refine the potential increase in home value of your specific home.
Reduce Environmental Impact
Maybe you don’t care about lower utility bills or increased comfort in your home or increased home value – but rather, you’d like to do your part to protect the environment – to slow climate change. The good news is that this is not an either/or decision. You can do your part in protecting the environment AND reduce your utility bills, increase your home comfort, and increase your home value.
Many ask: “I’m just one person (or one household), is there anything that I can do that will really move the needle on global climate change?”
If you were the only person that was making efforts to protect our environment, probably not. But, the good news is that you are not alone. Many individuals, households, cities, states, and countries are making big strides to protect our environment and planet for future generations. By supporting this cause, you CAN make a difference!
According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, residential emissions account for 19% of total emissions in the US.
And, according to Mass Audubon, the energy that we use in our home accounts for 29% of our personal greenhouse gas contribution. The remaining contributors are transportation, food that we buy and products/services that we buy.
Lastly, a report from Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection shows that the residential sector account for 23% of greenhouse gasses in Massachusetts and 16% of greenhouse gasses across the US.
I find it very enlightening to understand where individuals can have the biggest impact. The calculators on our Homeowner DIY page will help you to understand where your biggest emission hogs come from.
As an example, below is the carbon footprint of my household (prior to incorporating ‘green’ aspects into my house).
So, those are the four primary reasons/benefits to incorporating ‘green’ into your house. What are your primary reasons or goals? Can you identify with some of these benefits?
Is it worth it?
Unfortunately this is not a simple yes/no answer. As you can imagine, some of the solutions are more expensive than others. On the Homeowner DIY and the turnkey Home Sustainability Plan pages we’ll discuss how to get some relative costs and relative ROI (return on investment) that can be used to help you make this tough decision.
However, we also want to be very clear that this journey is not an all or nothing proposition. There are many ‘shades of green’. If you have a very limited budget, do not despair, there are many free or low budget things that can be done to help with all 4 reasons/benefits above. Or, if you are in a position with more time and money to invest, you can generally achieve more. But we also want to be clear that simply spending more time and money does not guarantee an equivalent benefit. That is where the ROI calculations come into play. We want to find the solutions that provide you with the ‘biggest bang for the buck,’ so you can work efficiently towards your goals with whatever resources you have.
If you are ready to explore your Path To A Green Home feel free to visit our Homeowner DIY and/or turnkey Home Sustainability Plan pages.