Building for Energy Savings: 9 great tips

So I have to say thank you to Stewart Perry over at Planting Acorns for this list. He attended a U.S. Green Building Council and listened to a lecture from architect Norbert Lechner. Lechner is an energy expert who discussed energy efficiency and green building with the audience. Here's the 9 tips he gave to save energy straight from the building process.

Now before I go into the list I think it's important to realize here that it is crucial to start with the building blocks when making this transition to energy conservation. It is much harder and less effective to remediate problems after the building or home is already in place. A homeowner can switch out appliances, put in different windows, and add skylights after the fact but this is far more costly and your return on energy savings is far from ideal. The key is to make the home as efficient as possible DURING construction.

And from the guru, here's Lechner's take...

1. Building orientation/positioning (can reduce energy consumption by up to 50%) Just by positioning the building in a particular way on the lot and at the appropriate angle we can drop the consumption in half!

2. Building color (reduction up to 20%)

3. Window placement

4. Window size

5. Shading

6. Passive solar heating

7. Day lighting

8. Active solar heating

9. Photovoltaics (PV)

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