Thinking of renovating or building an environmentally friendly green home?  A green design to your home can have significant benefits to your health, your wallet and the environment. Understanding a few basic principles of green design is not difficult and will assist in achieving a low cost, healthy and comfortable home.  

Your immediate location and climate is your starting point. Whether you live in a tropical, arid, temperate, cold, or polar climate, there are different applications and solutions for all. Passive design of your home can be as detailed or basic as you desire, although a more thorough understanding will of course yield better results. For the purpose of this article, ‘A Basic Guide to Green Home Design’, we will focus on the basics.

Orientation, cross ventilation, thermal mass and insulation are some common terms worth understanding for your green (or passive) design. In summary, orientation is for heating, cross ventilation for cooling, thermal mass for storing and insulation for control.

Orientation to the sun can have a dramatic effect on the thermal comfort of your home. With the correct placement of glass, windows and eaves, the sun’s warmth and energy can penetrate your home, eliminating, or at least reducing, the amount of artificial heating required. The heat can also be stored in your home for use later at night with the addition of thermal mass. Natural light from the sun is also a benefit.

Living in the northern hemisphere, it is generally a good idea to place your living areas on the southern side. Living areas are where you spend the majority of time whilst awake therefore the desire to gain maximum comfort.  I personally like the idea of placing kitchens and bathrooms on the west side of your home, as the sun’s warmth and natural light first thing in the morning when we enter these areas are of great benefit and pleasure.  Place the areas of least importance such as the laundry and storage areas on the northern side of the house. It is the opposite poles for people living in the southern hemisphere. Use the sun to its full potential where possible for warmth and light, after all, it’s free!

Cross ventilation is the ability of natural air to pass through your home, cooling it as it does so. When designing your green home, think about windows and/or louvers at opposite ends of the home to allow for cross ventilation. For additional benefits, why not place a water feature in the prevailing breeze path to cool the air even more. It is also healthier for indoor air quality to have fresh air passing through the home.

Thermal mass are hard dense surfaces such as concrete slabs, brick or rammed earth walls etc that have the great ability to store heat and/or cold and release it slowly. Used in conjunction with orientation, the temperature variance in homes designed with thermal mass is far lower than those not.  A basic guide to thermal mass is; to keep your home warm, allow sun to penetrate your thermal mass storage and, to keep your house cool, shade the sun from your thermal mass storage. When sunny days turn to cool nights, your thermal mass acts like a huge heater, slowly releasing the warmth gained throughout the day. The opposite occurs in summer when your thermal mass has been shaded and acts like a natural air conditioner. The use of deciduous trees planted correctly can assist in shading and ‘sunning’ your thermal mass storage.

Insulation in a home adds control of the indoor temperature. There are various kinds of insulation and applications. Insulating ceiling and walls is often the single most effective way of reducing heating and cooling loads. Window glazing and draught proofing also come under the insulation radar.

Other effective ways for achieving a green home design is using recycled materials. Also, the use of energy efficient appliances, such as refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, televisions and small electrical items add to the success of a green home. Quite often, federal and state governments offer tax savings and incentives to go green in the home.

Not only are you doing the right thing by the environment and providing a healthier home for your family, green design can be cost effective and reduce your ongoing utility bills. In addition, green home design has increasingly immense possibilities of resale success with more buyers opting for health and well being assured by a green home.

Tags: Green Home Design

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