How to Build an Eco-Friendly Home on a Tight Budget

How to Build an Eco-Friendly Home on a Tight Budget

Did you know two NY based designers designed an asymmetrical residence with fixed cost of $250,000?

Architects and Jersey City citizens Richard Garber (assistant professor at Nj Institute of Technology’s University of Architecture and Design in Newark) and Nicole Robertson of GRO Architects in New York rose to the challenge of designing and overseeing the construction of a single-family house that’s a real testament to both innovative design and environmental-friendly technologies.

Denis Carpenter not long ago invested in a compact vacant lot and, to attempt his concern for the ecosystem, desired a residence that was environmentally friendly and easy to maintain.

What's so particular about this home?

• In the home, on the floor level, radiant heating beneath the exposed cement floor gets warm the full bathroom and two sleeping rooms.
• In the loft-like second level, sleek aluminum and stainless steel railings accent the bamboo stairway to the mezzanine, family room and an artfully designed kitchen made with salvaged home appliances and cabinetry.
• Passive a / c strategies like ceiling fans and clerestory windows make it possible for occupants to stay cool during summer and warm during winter months.
• The roof includes 260 sq ft of solar panels that provide nearly 2,000 kilowatts of energy every year to a battery stored in the basement.
• The root have a 2-foot-square area planted with drought-resist to collect rain.

This single family 1,600-square-foot home was built in 6 months and won a 2009 American Institute of Architects merit award and the 2010 Green Building of the Year Award from the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency.

Now what? How could you transform your home into an environmentally-friendly home without paying too much dollars?

If you're redesigning a home, do an energy audit first to help you establish what energy efficiency advancements should and can be made to your home. In this way you'll calculate how much energy your home utilizes.

My personal favorite eco-friendly technique is the passive solar cooling/heating design.

Passive solar means that your home's windows, walls, and floors can be developed to collect, store, and distribute solar power in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer.

Existing buildings can be adapted or "retrofitted" to passively collect and store solar heat too.

The following 5 elements constitute a complete passive solar home design:

1. The Collector - The area through which sunlight enters the building (usually windows).
2. The Absorber - The hard, darkened surface of the storage element. Sunlight hits the surface and is absorbed as heat.
3. The Thermal Mass - The components that retain or store the heat produced by sunlight below or behind the absorber surface.
4. The Distributor - The system by which solar heat circulates from the collection and storage points to different areas of the house.
5. The Controller - Roof overhangs can be used to shade the aperture area during summer months or Thermostats that signal a fan to turn on.

About the Author - Cynthia Booth writes for the Architecture Careers Advice blog. It's a nonprofit blog dedicated to offer help for beginning architects who need resources for their careers. With this she would like to enhance the attention on eco-friendly home design and change the general public conception of energy efficiency.