Sustainability

The best builders engineer their homes for health and comfort

Efficiency, health and comfort—a great new home delivers all of those. But creating that home using today’s construction methods takes more knowledge than most people realize. That knowledge is one of the benefits of working with a professional builder.

Lots of homeowners ask questions about energy efficiency—questions about insulation, the heating and cooling system, the lighting and the home’s likely utility bills.

We have installed LVT a handful of times using it in specialty spaces such as art studios, pet rooms, and even in the Great Room of a custom home built for a client in the East Mountain area.

Homeowners are becoming more interested in this popular flooring—here’s what you need to know.

More and more home systems are adding voice control technology. Let’s look at the pros and cons.

The star of this year’s International Builder’s Show was a smart lady by the name of Alexa. As you know, she’s the personal digital assistant that lives inside Amazon’s Echo smart speaker, and we seemed to bump into her around every corner.

It wasn’t that long ago that a window was a window … was a window. Basically, a hole in the wall fitted with a wood-framed pane of glass that allowed a view to the outside and provided a little bit of daylight into a house.

Over the past 25 years, windows have changed dramatically. Not only are they far more energy-efficient than their predecessors, they are available in a wide range of styles, frames and glass options. Today, professional builders and homebuyers are able to precisely align a window’s energy performance, cost, and style to achieve an optimum solution for any home.

Many of our buyers are less interested in “green” construction than they are in homes that offer health, comfort, and low ownership costs.

“Green” construction hasn’t been as big a hit among homebuyers as some builders hoped it would be. It’s easy to see why. Green has been over-used as a marketing term, often supported by vague definitions and poorly defined customer benefits. But while many buyers are no longer moved by pleas to “go green,” they remain very interested in homes that use less energy and require less repair and maintenance.

New homes are built to save energy, and a primary component of that goal is insulation. The definition of insulation, however, is rapidly expanding as homebuyers and energy codes demand even better energy-use performance from new homes.

Today, there are far more options than those rolls of fiberglass you see on the shelves of big-box home improvement stores. While “batt” insulation remains an inexpensive yet effective option, other materials have emerged that help optimize thermal value in new structures or when replacing conventional insulation.

Improving home energy efficiency and building more sustainable housing is no longer a trend — it’s mainstream. As a professional builder, we feel it’s important to keep up on emerging technologies that may soon help our clients save money, improve comfort and reduce our impact on the environment.

In the spirit of learning about these new technologies, we profile a rising star in the world of heating and air conditioning: Geothermal (or “ground-source”) heating and cooling systems. Simply, a geothermal system uses the temperature of the ground to condition the air that is distributed through the house using conventional ductwork.

Sustainable construction is nothing mysterious. Its most important aspects are some of the same things that define a quality builder.

Green homes, also called sustainable homes, are more affordable than ever.   Last year, for instance, a nationwide McGraw Hill study of builders and remodelers found that going green adds an average of just 7% in cost to a project, compared to 11% six years previously.  We can often offset all or part of this added cost with State and Federal tax credits and energy use savings.