If you have some very clear idea in mind of what you want your sustainable house to be like, then you will most likely have been dreaming up visions of it for years. A dream home is certainly something that is hard to come by, and you are going to have to have a strong plan in order to make it a reality. If you decide you want to create a sustainable house build there are many factors to consider. With that in mind, here are six tips to inspire your sustainable house build…
Inspire Your Sustainable House Build
It All Starts In The Planning
The more attention you pay to the planning process, the more likely it is that you can create a dream home which is going to be as ethical as possible. You could enrol on a course at the Centre of Alternative Technology to learn more about creating a sustainable build. That’s because you can build an ethical lifestyle into the very home itself. You can design it in such a way that it is going to make the most of natural light, and so will need to use less energy. You can ensure that it is going to be somewhere where it is not a blight on the natural environment. You can use materials that are locally sourced and natural. All of this can be a lot easier if you focus on planning it all out as well as possible, so make sure that you are focused on that at the very start.
Holistic Help
No matter what you are trying to do, you will always need some kind of help if you are to get it right. In most cases, that will mean that you hire an architect. You might want to make things even easier, and go for a team that are able to do much more of the process for you. Hiring a contractor like Nav Homes could mean that a lot of your own attention is freed up, which you can then put towards trying to be as ethical in your design as possible. You want to have a holistic view of the help you bring on board, try to employ a team that are local, and where possible employ individual craftspeople to create things like window frames and doors.
Natural Materials
The materials you use are a great way to ensure that you are being ethical in your design. At one extreme end, you have materials which are merely churned out by some manufacturing process which takes up lots of energy and uses new source materials to create. That is far from ideal. At the other end, you could look into something like cob, which is simply where you use mud and clay and other natural materials to build a home, and you might be surprised at how effective that can actually be. Or you might go somewhere in the middle – using sustainably sourced wood, or straw bales for instance.
Renewable Energy
Of course, to be as ethical as possible in building a new home, one of the major concerns will always be energy – how you create it, how you store it, how you use it. In order for your home to have as little effect on the planet as possible, you should look into trying to use energy sources which are renewable only, and that is easy to do if you are in the position of designing your home from scratch. Where possible investigate and consider using alternative, renewable forms of energy such as solar, biofuels and power from wind and water. It can be as simple case of installing those solar panels, or using ground source heat pumps, or whatever it is that you have decided on, and then you can make sure that you are using energy ethically from the very start of your home’s existence. You could also read, Expert Solar Comparative Guide: Advantages & Disadvantages Of Solar Panels for further information on the pros and cons of solar panels.
Water + Waste
Avoiding pollution of water supplies and conserving water should be a factor you consider in your sustainable house build. Reed bed sewage systems are an innovative way of disposing of waste in a way that is ecologically sound. Toilets are available that use less water, the ultimate green loo is the composting toilet, which uses no water, evaporates the urine and turns sewage into a valuable source of nutrients for the garden- but might be a step too far for some. You can harvest rainwater as a way of using less, save and store rainwater from roofs for flushing your toilets, laundry and other household uses.
Think Local
As far as possible, you should try to keep everything as local as you can. That is the case when it comes to sourcing materials, or trying to ensure that you have the necessary help on board to actually build the building, or whatever else you might need to think about. Keeping it local means reducing the amount of travel by vehicles, which means less burning of fossil fuels. It all adds up and makes a difference, so really make sure you focus on it as well as you can.
A sustainable house build might be the dream, start planning and right down your goals- having a plan on paper is the first step to turning your dreams into a reality. What would your sustainable house build look like? where would it be? and which of these tips would you adopt? After all a dream is just a dream without a solid plan!
The Fabulous Times
