Yikes! It’s nearly 100 degrees here in North Carolina and the humidity nearly matches it. It was still over 90 degrees at dinnertime! I, for one, don’t find solar energy all that welcome this time of year. Maybe if I was generating electricity from it I would feel differently. But the solar energy I’m talking about makes me roast whenever I step out of the shade and it makes my attic a veritable furnace. But, I’ve found a building product that comes to the rescue. (more…)

    Do you want to know that your new house design is “green,” or as I prefer to call it, energy and resources responsible? There is now a way to certify that it is so. (more…)

      Sustainable building materials are more and more available these days. “Sustainable” means the materials are manufactured in environmentally responsible ways. They may be made from recycled materials, such as tile or wallboard. (more…)

      An energy management system can reduce your electric bill and help reduce energy demand at peak times. This system monitors and controls what equipment can come on during certain hours of the day. It may block an electric water heater from starting until an air conditioner that is already running has completed its cycle. (more…)

      When it comes to “building green,” There are other energy-saving measures that can occur behind the scenes. Proper insulation, including draft blocking to prevent convective loops of cold or warm air within walls and ceilings will reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer. (more…)

      Are your windows locked? We don’t tend to think of air leakage in the summer like we do in the wintertime. When it’s cold, we can feel the cold drafts wafting through the house. (more…)

Here’s a discussion that came up today on one of my projects. We were making a brick selection for the exterior of the house. The brick companies readily provide sample boards that have thin pieces of actual bricks, not just photos, for you to see. That’s very helpful, but the problem is that the cardboard sample boards do not have any mortar between the bricks. If there are sample boards with “mortar,” they use a synthetic mortar substitute because real mortar would break out on a board like this. It may or may not be the color of the mortar you will be using. Either way, the true, final color that your brick wall will produce is not readily apparent. (more…)

    Last week, at BookExpo America, I was discussing my book with a young woman and I mentioned that it concerned me how there is such hysteria and fanaticism surrounding anything touted as being green or environmentally friendly and often these things are not very “green” and maybe have negative environmental implications that are not readily appreciated. I pointed to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, known as CFL‘s, as an example. (more…)

        An even simpler way to think about how to situate parts of a house with regard to climate and weather is to imagine yourself standing outside on your property on a sunny, windy winter day. To stay warm, you would naturally turn away from the north wind and face the southern sun. You might even turn your collar up. By making this simple adjustment, you would be sheltering yourself from the wind and maximizing the solar heat gain from the sun. Well, that’s exactly what architects do for houses when they place the garage in the path of the prevailing wind and position the windows toward the sun. The house is responding to the climate in the same way you would. These ideas are the first steps in passive solar design. And best of all, there’s no added cost for any of this. By merely acknowledging and responding to the climate of the site, the house will live in harmony with the nature around it. (more…)

These days, it seems like everything anyone sells is energy efficient, green, or sustainable in some way. Those are the words plastered on the products we buy because without those claims, a product is virtually unsaleable in this climate (pardon the pun) of environmental zeal. This is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say, but sometimes it’s a bad thing. The good thing is that energy efficiency can save you money and possibly the planet, if you buy into that hysteria. Even if you don’t conserving resources is simply a responsibility we all have. (more…)