House & Home
A happy home is a green home.
Whether you are planning to splash out on an eco-friendly habitat, or adapt your current house with natural products, creating a greener lifestyle is not as unattainable as you might think.
Simply by recycling more, insulating your loft and replacing appliances with more energy efficient models, you could be well on your way to ecological paradise.
Top tips
Long-term incremental changes and commitment will have a greater positive impact than one large change or investment over a short period.
Why not switch to energy-saving light bulbs? Or make a compost heap in your garden for waste food?
Feeling flush? Invest in a full photovoltaic solar energy system on the roof of your house.
There is no right and wrong when it comes to having a green home. The important thing is to research what you can do and act on it. Constant reassessment and minor changes will eventually make your home as carbon neutral as possible.
Green thinking
Many of the ideas behind ‘being green’ in your home merely depend on the environmental philosophies of you and your family.
Make sure that any dependants learn how to recycle for themselves. Avoid throwing out non-recyclable products; send them to a charity shop instead. Encourage everybody to take showers rather than baths; the money you save on your water bill will be a pleasant surprise.
The commitment to developing an environmentally friendly home is vitally important in the overall quest to becoming a more sustainable society.
Green living
The first step in getting your dream green home is to identify a suitable location. An ideal green home would be located in an area of recycled land or ‘brownfield’ sites. These are areas which have often been abandoned by industry and are available for re-use. This means that a site is located in an area which is not taking from an existing natural environment, such as the land found in the green belt around a city.
Ideally, your new property should be near to where you work in order to reduce energy consumption and associated environmental degradatation through commuting.
After considering location, remember that the design and materials of your green home should be from a sustainable source or recycled.
When sourcing the materials for the construction of your new home, search locally.
Finally, when attempting to turn a home into a green one, it is a very important to think about energy consumption.
Energy to your green home should be provided from renewable sources and if possible, actually generated within your green home.
There are many electricity micro generation techniques to achieve this; solar panels and wind turbines are currently the most popular.
