Green Building Materials
Having more eco friendly homes is not just about the way in which people live inside them. It is also about what technology is used within the home itself, and encouraging the use of this technology wherever possible when building new homes, expanding old ones or simply adapting your home to a new eco friendly standard.
There are some great technological advances that really make a difference for eco friendly homes. Installing solar panels for instance can be a great way of reducing your electricity bill. More often than not the solar panels you encounter will be hot water panels. These heat the water directly around the system and then pump it into your hot water tank for use. These can however be costly and cost can go into the thousands.
For a more available alternative why not check your house insulation? There is a large range of housing insulation available that can dramatically reduce not only your heating bill but also your carbon footprint as well making an excellent first step towards eco friendly homes.
Switch your normal bulbs for energy saving ones! This technology got off to a rough start as the bulbs had problems with both price and the time it takes them to reach full brightness. This is no longer the case, they are still more expensive then regular bulbs but they last much longer and will save you money in the space of just one year. The bulbs available today react speedily and reach full capacity quicker then the original energy saving bulbs.
Make your self a compost heap at the back of the garden. Getting into a regular routine disposing of your kitchen waste to the compost heap will provide you with nutrient rich soil for growing your own home grown fruit and vegetables.
Organic Garden Composting
What do you do with your vegetable scraps? Don’t wrap them up and throw them away. A better option would be to make some space in your garden for a compost bin or heap.
Turn your vegetable scraps and grass clippings into compost that can be added to your garden once it has decomposed affording your garden soil an organic boost.
Old tired fruit and vegetables that are past their prime and are starting to deteriorate can be composted. Grass clippings, stale eggs, Used egg shells, stale bread, old flour and flour products, shredded newspaper (don’t go too overboard with paper) uneaten food scraps excluding meat and even dog droppings. You can also add horse or cow manure to your compost heap thus introducing further nutrients.
You will need to have a hose long enough to reach your compost bin or heap because the composting materials need to be kept moist. The addition of garden lime, used occasionally, will help in the decomposition process. The decomposition of the contents of your compost bin or heap will attract garden worms that add aeration plus the nutrients contained within their castings to further benefit your compost.
I have read that a large wheelbarrow is ideal for composting. Being made of steel it is a lot sturdier than the plastic compost bins and it allows you free access to get a garden fork into the compost for turning it over and further aerating and redistributing of the contents. A wheelbarrow also affords you being able to wheel your compost to where you want it to be dug into gardens.
If you add pumpkin, watermelon and tomato seeds to your open compost heap you may be fortunate enough to have a pumpkin or water melon vine and tomato plants take root enabling you to pick fresh produce from your own garden.
Should you be lucky enough to have a larger property on which you keep laying hens and manure can be placed in a large bucket of water and can be used for watering your garden and pot plants at the same time as supplying them with totally organic fertilizer. Or, if you wish, just add it to your compost heap and when you turn the contents over with your garden fork the chook manure will be evenly distributed to allow its nutrients to permeate throughout your compost.
Eco Friendly Gardening
How much time do you spend relaxing in the garden as opposed to working in it? Or maybe you find gardening a relaxing and rewarding hobby.
Do you have a garden full of exotic plants, shrubs or trees? Did you know that the planting of native shrubs and trees require less water? There is also another benefit although you may not have thought of it.
Our native birds and wildlife are attracted by the flowering of native shrubs and trees and you can contribute to the welfare of your local wildlife by planting native food trees as a food source for them.
Visit your local Garden Centre and make sure it is local because they will know what flowering shrubs and trees do well in your locale.
You can also put out bird feeders containing Wild Bird Mix or just plain budgerigar mix. Please ensure in the drier months that you put out birdbaths or ceramic pot plant trays containing water for the birds to drink.
Do you use fertilizer on your garden or lawn? Be careful to ensure that anything in your garden that requires fertilizing or requires that you use pesticides or weed control is environmentally friendly. Not just for the birds and animals that may visit your yard but for the safety of you, your family as well as your pets.
Maybe you would like to build a frog pond which would be great to include the children initially and to later educate them about how frogs are initially tadpoles.
There are various fertilizers available that are environmentally safe eg: seaweed emulsion, fish emulsion, blood and bone, horse manure, cow manure (for digging in to garden beds) Garden-Ville Soil Food, CG40 Bradfield ìLuscious Lawn.î And of course, last but not least, chook manure which is best soaked in water to dilute it before applying it to anything. There are also ìorganicî garden pesticides available on the market.
Let me share this homemade totally organic fertilizer recipe with you,:- 3 parts seed meal and 1 part blood meal. This fertilizer mix is particularly beneficial at the start of Spring. Otherwise you can try:- 4 parts seed meal, 1 part Dolomite Lime, ? part bone meal and ? kelp meal.
Do you enjoy garden barbeques? If you do then having a garden that attracts birds and other wildlife is going to be a bonus for you.
Do you have garden lighting to highlight particular area of your garden as night? If not, you should look into it. There are now solar powered garden lights available, that can be used to great effect ñwithout being detrimental to the environment. You can have the garden you have always wanted if you have the space for trees and shrubs to provide you with shade and privacy.
Make your garden a place where you retreat to sit, watch and ponder.
Passive Solar Energy
Solar energy is a renewable resource that is environmentally friendly. Unlike fossil fuels, solar energy is available just about everywhere on earth. And this source of energy is free, immune to rising energy prices. Solar energy can be used in many ways - to provide heat, lighting, mechanical power and electricity.
Passive solar heating represents an important strategy for displacing traditional energy sources in buildings. Anyone who has sat by a sunny, south-facing window on a winter day has felt the effects of passive solar energy. Passive solar techniques make use of the steady supply of solar energy by means of building designs that carefully balance their energy requirements with the building’s site and window orientation.
The term “passive” indicates that no additional mechanical equipment is used, other than the normal building elements. All solar gains are brought in through windows and minimum use is made of pumps or fans to distribute heat.
All passive techniques use building elements such as walls, windows, floors and roofs, in addition to exterior building elements and landscaping, to control heat generated by solar radiation. Solar heating designs collect and store thermal energy from direct sunlight.
Another solar concept is day lighting design, which optimises the use of natural daylight and contributes greatly to energy efficiency. The benefits of using passive solar techniques include simplicity, price and the design elegance of fulfilling one’s needs with materials at hand.
Passive solar heating of buildings occurs when sunlight passes through a window, hits an object, is absorbed and converted to heat. The most efficient window orientation for heat gain is due south, but any orientation within 30 degrees of due south is acceptable. Once the heat has entered the building, various techniques come into play to keep and distribute it. Prevention of overheating in the sun space presents one of the biggest challenges.
To let the sun in, a ratio of roughly eight per cent window to floor area is recommended for south walls. Although this number may seem small, it is important to remember it comes from the floor area, which is much larger than the wall area. Again, the control of overheating is a significant issue.
Once the heat is in, a well insulated and air-tight building envelope helps prevent heat loss and allows the solar heat to provide more of the heating needed. A crucial component of the energy-efficient building envelope is the window system. Where common double-glazed windows let heat escape, high performance windows, with insulated frames, multiple glazing, low-e coatings, insulating glass spacers and inert gas fills, can reduce heat loss by 50 to 75 per cent.
High efficiency windows, together with R-2000 levels of insulation and air-tight construction allow passive solar heating to cover a large proportion of heating needs in many locations. With the heat contained, often a simple ceiling fan or a forced air furnace fan (furnace burner off, of course) is all that is required for heat distribution. Using building envelope upgrades alone, up to 25 per cent of a building’s heating requirement can be gained with passive solar techniques.
A helpful technique to control overheating and extend warm conditions in the sun space once the sun is down, is to employ the use of heavy mass materials within the construction of walls and floors. Quarry tiles or stone on floors in a mortar bed, and one withe of brick or double layers of gypsum board on walls, will absorb solar radiation, smooth out the peaks of solar gain, and slowly radiate heat back into the room when the sun is gone.
Some solar homes use a centrally located masonry wood heater to store heat. The bricks and stones surrounding the firebox absorb the solar gain or heat from short but intense firings and slowly radiate it into the room.
Obviously, a lot of work and attention to detail has gone into making passive solar heat an optional and cost effective way to heat your home and it has the added bonus of being environmentally beneficial.
Lower Your Electric Bill
How to save money on electricity bills can be beneficial for both your wallet and the environment. Try some of our top money saving tips towards both an eco friendly home and to save money on electricity bills.
Upgrade your heating system to an energy efficient one. Many companies now offer upgrade schemes so you can exchange your old boiler for a new one. Energy efficient boilers mean savings as well as reliability, lower maintenance costs and of course less energy waste.
Turn down your heating by 1 Degree Celsius. Just taking the temperature down one notch will potentially reduce your energy bill by up to 10%.
When buying appliances, check they are energy efficient. A rated appliances and above are the best efficiency you can get and recommended for a less wasteful home and a smaller bill.
Stop the draughts for the winter. Draught excluders and sealants can eliminate cold draughts running through your home which increase your need to turn up the heating. Cutting out the draughts will make your home warmer and you won’t need to turn the temperature up so high next winter.
Have you got double glazing? Installing double glazing will save money on electricity bills in the long term. This is an expensive option in the short term but will save you money in the long run.
Use energy saving bulbs where ever you can around the home. These use the electricity more efficiently meaning they use less and last for much longer reducing your bill.
Turn it off, don’t leave it on standby. We are all tempted to use the stand by system but try to turn things off when you aren’t using them. This will save a little money on electricity bills and is safer.
Buy a Wood Pellet Stove
A pellet stove is a zoned heating appliance much like a wood or gas stove which burns wood pellets as a fuel source. Most pellet stoves are easily vented through a wall as compared to their wood counterpart. There is also a wider flexibility of installation options since the venting pipes are smaller.
When compared to wood heating, pellet stoves are fully automated. A hopper on the back of the stove can hold up to 60 lbs. of fuel, which is then automatically fed to the combustion chamber, according to how much heat is required.
Pellet fuel is easier to load and store than wood and has a much longer burning cycle, thus requiring less restocking of fuel pellets. Pellet stoves have the technology of convection heating integrated into them which is a bonus as opposed to conventional wood heaters. Instead of a typical “heat you out of the room radiant wood stove.” There are pellet stoves available that are equipped with blowers, which force hot air into the room through a heat exchanger located on the front of the stove. And because these stoves use the principal of convection heating (blowing hot air) clearance to combustibles (sides and back) is much less than wood stove installations.
Environmental Benefits
Pellet fuel is a renewable resource, unlike oil and gas. The degree of efficiency (measured by particulate in the exhaust) is the key to the stoveís environmental friendliness. EPA certified - these stoves are the cleanest heat burning appliances today, with the lowest emissions of any wood, or fossil fueled combustion system (including natural gas).
Wood Pellets
All pellets are not the same. Pellets are made with different combinations and types of wood. There are over 70 different companies in the United States that manufacture pellets and each one has a different formula - trying to make the best pellet. The Pellet Fuels Institute, the industry’s trade association, regulates the size and content of pellets. Most important of these tests is the ash content analysis. Ash content determines whether a pellet is considered premium (less than 1% ash content or standard (less than 3% ash content.)
Corn Pellets
North America produces about 300 million tons of corn, enough to heat over 115 million homes. Shelled Corn has about the same BTU as wood pellet fuels (8,000 Btu/lb), but has more ash, so the maintenance on the pellet stove, in terms of ash removal is greater. One acre will yield 3.8 tons of shelled corn, enough to heat 1.5 homes which is equal to 11.5 barrels of oil. Heating with a closed loop energy crop such as corn can reduce green house gases (CO2) by as much as 5.1 tons of CO2 per home per year.
Pellet stoves are well worth looking into as an environmentally safer way of heating your home on those cold and chilly winter months.
Buy Eco Friendly Clothes
What is eco friendly clothing? What makes your t-shirt greener than the average shirt? No it isn’t just the green dye on it, it’s where it comes from, what it’s made of, who made it and how, what impact the use of the material has and how much carbon it took to get it from where it was made to you. In fact, there are quite a lot of things to consider here and not all eco friendly clothing shops will cover everything. Usually clothing defined as being eco friendly just means it has one or more eco attributes.
Organic Clothing
Unfortunately there is no standard organic guideline for us to ensure organic clothing is accurately labelled as such. Look out for the Soil Association mark on your clothing as this sets a good standard for organic goods in general. Many people are under the assumption that organic is synonymous with natural materials like cotton. Cotton actually accounts for one third of the world’s use of pesticides and organic cotton mostly means no bleaching agents were used rather than pesticides. Hemp clothing on the other hand is resistant naturally to pests and is becoming a more viable alternative for clothing.
Eco-Fleece
This type of eco friendly clothing is actually made from reclaimed plastic. It takes around 25 plastic 2 litre bottles to make one fleece so in purchasing one of these nifty winter warmers you are saving the landfill of yet more plastic.
Fair Trade Clothing
This clothing protects developing countries, fighting poverty by creating a fair trade for the goods produced. This type of clothing is made from materials bought at a price that covers the costs and creates profit for the workers to live on. Look out for the official fair trade mark on your eco friendly clothing.
