How to Build an Eco Friendly Home on a Budget

New Jersey college of architecture professor presents us with how to build an eco-friendly house cheaply. Did you know that two New York-based designers designed an eco-friendly home, an asymmetrical residence, with a fixed cost of $250,000? Jersey City citizens Richard Garber (assistant tutor at NJ Institute of the Technology, University of Architecture and Design in Newark) and Nicole Robertson of GRO Architects in NY rose to the challenge of creating and overseeing the construction of a single-family house that’s an authentic testament to both progressive design and eco-friendly technology.

Denis Carpenter recently bought one small vacant lot and, to attempt his interest in the planet’s health, desired an efficient and easy residence to maintain. What’s so unique about this home? Here is a post about eco-friendly home design on a budget, the guest post by Cynthia Booth, the writer for the Architecture Careers Information blog, discusses green design ideas and features.

Eco-friendly Green building with old empty bottles

Green building design and home automation for saving money on energy bills

High-tech home appliances, yellow-silver stove concept

Passive solar home design

– Inside, on the floor level, radiant heating beneath the exposed cement floor warms the entire bathroom and a couple of bedrooms.

– In the attic-like 2nd level, sleek aluminum and stainless steel railings accent the bamboo stairway to the mezzanine, lounge room, and an artfully designed kitchen outfitted with restored kitchen appliances and cabinetry.

– Passive air conditioning strategies like fans and clerestory windows allow residents to be cool during summer and warm during winter.

Urban sustainable architecture, floating Arcology concepts

Eco-friendly laundry washer

Sustainable architectural design for a serene urban lifestyle

– The roof has 260 square feet of photovoltaic panels that provide nearly 2,000 kilowatts of energy annually to a battery stored in the basement.

– The house design features a 2-foot-square area planted with drought-resist to collect rain.

This single-family 1,600-square-foot home was created in 6 months and won a 2009 American Institute of Architects Merit Award and the 2010 Green Building of the Year Award from the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency.

Green renovation ideas

So what now? How could you completely transform your home into an ecologically-friendly home without spending too many dollars? If you’re renovating a home, perform an energy review first to help you establish what energy efficiency developments should and can be made to your home. In this way, you’ll evaluate how much energy your home needs.

My personal favorite eco-friendly methodology is the passive solar cooling/heating design. Passive solar signifies that your home windows, walls, and floors can be created to collect, store, and distribute solar energy in the form of heat in the winter season and reject solar heat in the summer. Existing buildings can be adapted or “retrofitted” to collect passively and store solar heat.

The following five elements constitute a comprehensive passive solar home design:

1. The Collector – The area through which sunlight enters the building (usually windows).

2. The Absorber – The hard, darkened surface of the storage element. Sunlight hits the surface and is absorbed as heat.

3. The Thermal Mass – The materials that retain or store the heat produced by sunlight below or behind the absorber surface.

4. The Distributor – The technique by which solar heat circulates from the collection and storage points to different house areas.

5. The Controller – Roof overhangs can be used to shade the aperture area during summer months or Thermostats that signal a fan to turn on.

The author – Cynthia Booth, writes for the architecture careers information blogs dedicated to offering help to young designers who need resources for their searches. With this, she would like to enhance the consideration of eco-friendly home design and change the general-public conception of energy efficiency.

  by Ena Russ   
   30.11.2022