Green Building

For eco-friendly homeowners, green living is a way of life. For those looking for green house plans, here’s how to build a sustainable house design with minimal carbon footprint.

If you like to live green, consider including eco-friendly features into a custom home design. Here are the top features to include in green custom house plans.

If you're considering going green with sustainable house design, here are the common features of green house plans.

Concerning environmental standards, the sustainable home design field has an effective system for rating green house plans: LEED certification. Here are the benefits.

Houseplans.co offers a set of tools and resources to help you build a more energy efficient, sustainable and healthy home. Whether you're planning to build a new home or remodeling your current home, the efficient living package makes it a breeze to build green.

When evaluating systems to incorporate into your green home, it is easy to get caught up in direct cost comparisons of similar products. For instance, it is easy to compare the costs of an 80% and 90% efficient gas furnace. There are up-front costs, and then there are operating costs. Even though the 90% furnace will undoubtedly cost less in the long run, the extra up-front costs can often be disillusioning.

I'm always interested in seeing what ideas builders and designers come up with, and how they implement some of the more fun elements of building science - and this example certainly caught my eye. Built in Wisconsin by designer Shane Black uses solar thermal panels to heat a bed of sand beneath the house, keeping the interior temperature comfortable throughout the year.

Increasing incentives and product options abound, solar thermal water heaters offer one of the fastest paybacks in the solar world. Of the may types available, implementing different technologies, one of my favorites continues to be vacuum tube type systems, like this kit from Kingspan.

I was recently at a meeting between local leaders, discussing how the newly released National Green Building Standard (NGBS) fits in with existing state and city level green building programs and incentives. There were a number of interested parties involved, including builders, designers, local utility companies, performance testers, city departments and state non-profits. I was extremely happy that we had such a wide range of perspectives present; the conversation was most interesting and I’d like to quickly share some of the thoughts that came from the group.

Living in a 'green home' is great, but your home isn't going to stay that way for long if you don't maintain it properly, or you don't lead a lifestyle to go with it. In the interests of helping you maximize the benefit of living in your efficient, healthy home - we've compiled a list of tips to help keep you in top form.