style with substance
room for improvement

Seize the opportunity of your next remodel to spread green upgrades throughout your home.

By Vishu Magee
Photograph by Robert Reck

This article first appeared in Spring 2009 Su Casa

If you’re considering a remodeling project for your home, this period of bailouts and tight credit is a good time to make sure your goals are financially sensible and you take green criteria into account. Your smart choices can improve not only your home’s livability but also its impact on the planet. As you plan your next remodel, consider these 10 ways to green up your project.

Making use of passive solar gain in your home is as simple as adding or enlarging windows on the south side of the house to let in sunlight. As a rule of thumb, a square foot of south-facing glass will fully heat four or five square feet of living space on a decent solar day. A typical 15-by-15-foot room, for example, would need windows totaling 4 feet high and 12 feet wide. However, you can choose from many variations, such as clerestory windows (a high tier of windows that permit deep sun penetration) and trombe walls (glazed openings backed by dark masonry that absorbs heat and radiates it into the living space). For people who like plants and additional humidity, attaching a solar greenhouse is an excellent way to capture a surplus of solar heat, which can then be conveyed into adjacent rooms.

Natural cooling is typically a function of well-designed shading and good cross-ventilation. If your home overheats, the usual culprits are morning and afternoon sun. Block this sunlight by adding portales or awnings over east and west windows and glass doors. This technique works much better than interior blinds and provides the additional benefit of shaded outdoor living spaces. Cross-ventilation completes the job. You can draw cool air into your house by installing low windows on one side while letting hot air escape through higher windows across the room.

Insulation provides a straightforward piece of the remodeling puzzle—it keeps heat inside in the winter and out in the summer. Replacing or increasing insulation in existing walls is rare unless they simply have no insulation whatsoever. The exception is uninsulated adobe, which needs two inches of foam under a new plaster coat to deliver an acceptable thermal performance. Be sure that any addition to your house has extra insulation in the roof—R-50 and up definitely places you in green territory—and if your old flat roof is due for an upgrade, look into spray-foam roofing, which both waterproofs and increases insulation by 30 to 50 percent. Weather-stripping around doors and windows is old hat, but you don’t have to stop there: installing shades or blinds adds palpably to the comfort level indoors by reducing radiant heat loss, while honeycomb designs add an air space that will double the insulating value of the glass.

Landscaping methods can factor into the greening of your remodeling project as well. You could, for example, plant deciduous trees off the southeast and southwest corners of your house to block morning and afternoon sun in spring and fall. After the leaves drop in October, the sun can again penetrate your south windows when you really need the solar gain. Shade trees anywhere close to the house create a “swamp cooler” effect. To water them, channel roof water directly from your canales. Similarly, driveways and paved patios can be graded so runoff flows to plantings instead of storm drains. These simple techniques apply the principle of roof water and storm water harvesting without all the cost and resource consumption of cisterns, pumps, pipes, and controls. When landscaping your yard, always consider plants appropriate for your area, particularly xeric options, which don’t require a great deal of moisture.

People often overlook daylighting as contributing to both energy conservation and psychological warmth. We already remarked upon clerestories as a source of sunlight high in the room—skylights, of course, do much the same thing, but they actually lose heat in winter and gain it in summer. I don’t hesitate to install a conventional skylight where the aesthetic touch is important, but I compensate by adding a retractable shade or an extra acrylic lens inside the light well. In cases where your only goal is light, you’re better off installing newer products such as Solatubes and Sun Tunnels, which distribute an amazing amount of light with little thermal downside.

You might consider active solar systems as part of your remodel. These systems use collectors to heat fluid, which is then pumped back to a mechanical room and distributed to your domestic hot water or radiant heat systems. If you have an existing radiant floor or hot-water baseboard heat system, it may be possible to convert them to solar energy with or without replacing the current boiler. If you don’t have a radiant system to convert, then it probably makes sense to settle for heating your domestic hot water from the collectors. In any case, retrofits are tricky, and you’ll need the advice of a good technician to see if an installation is feasible. It helps if you have a convenient south-facing wall for mounting the collectors (garages are ideal) and if you can easily access your existing mechanical space for the piping. These systems are pricey, but tax credits are a big help, and after a payback of five to six years, you get free heat from the sun.

When investigating options to make your home more energy efficient, you might also think about solar electricity. While highly publicized, solar electricity is not cost-effective unless you live miles from the nearest source of grid power. A complete, self-sufficient system including batteries and a generator can cost upwards of $35,000 and would require more than 20 years to pay for itself at a rate of $125 per month. Nevertheless, some green aficionados find it satisfying to place a few photovoltaic panels on the roof with a grid-tie inverter that feeds power back into the grid when the sun makes more power than you use. This is a reasonable retrofit approach for someone already on the grid, and substantial federal and state tax credits are available to help out with the cost.

Electronic controls for energy and water conservation bring new technology to the challenge of increasing efficiency, and some are fairly easy and inexpensive to install yourself. First you will want to make wise choices in the appliances you select—look for the Energy Star rating—and choose low-flow plumbing fixtures. Then consider digital controls to limit your heating and cooling precisely to the hours when you need the system to kick on. Sophisticated lighting controls can turn lights off and on automatically when you leave or enter a room, and entire low-light “scenes” can be programmed for efficient use of light at predetermined hours. Insulating blinds can be opened or closed automatically in response to increasing or diminishing rays of sunlight. The water side of the equation also relies on timers and controls: you can schedule irrigation for nighttime to reduce evaporative loss, and the system shuts down altogether when it detects rainfall or when probes in the soil say “enough.”

Air quality has a huge bearing on health—safeguard it by using natural and nontoxic materials for your remodeling project. Depending on the scope of your remodel, a heat recovery ventilation system can keep your home free from both home-generated toxins and dust and pollen from outside. These systems suck stale or polluted air from bathrooms, laundry, and kitchen and reintroduce fresh air to living areas and bedrooms. A heat exchanger prevents heat loss in winter, and filters and humidifiers can be added according to your needs. Heat recovery ventilation systems are especially helpful for people with environmental sensitivity or in homes with high radon levels. They are best installed in new construction, of course, at a cost of $7,000 to $10,000. But depending on the layout of your existing house and the design of your additions or remodel, a retrofit might be possible.

Water quality also factors highly in promoting good health and is something you can improve within your home. Salt or potassium softeners and reverse osmosis filters are now giving way to healthier conditioning systems. These systems use activated carbon to filter the water and may feature magnetic devices that change the charge on calcite and magnesium molecules so they don’t precipitate on glassware and plumbing fixtures.

You can find a wealth of additional information about these techniques at the library or online. For more details plus typical installation costs, visit archetype-design.com and select the Costs Handbook.

Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.