A home remodel in and of itself is a daunting task, but tack on making the home green as well and it can quickly seem too overwhelming to bear. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be. The City of South San Francisco recently renovated a bungalow style three-bedroom home originally built in 1952 to show its residents just how easy it is to make green home improvements.
The City chose this home as a model project since the challenges it had were similar to many other homes in the area. The problems included single-paned windows, old appliances, inefficient light fixtures and a lack of irrigation. The remodel sought to update the bathroom and kitchen, address energy efficiency issues and attend to problems that could lead to significant repair costs if ignored.
Each room of the Green X-Ray House as well as the exterior landscaping feature demonstrations of built components chosen with energy, environment, and resource conservation in mind. With the help of the Greenv Sustainable Center and its green building vendors, over 30 types of special green products and systems were donated to the project, including:
• Solar panels to offset electrical usage
• Irrigation and landscaping that is native or drought resistant
• Energy Star-qualified double pane windows
• Tankless water heater for on-demand hot water
• Water filtration system to remove the need for bottle water
• Radiant heating that is more efficient than baseboard heating
• Low-VOC and No-VOC paint
• Kitchen cabinets from responsibly harvested FSC lumber
• Energy Star appliances
• Recycled glass and concrete countertops
• Dual flush toilet that regulates water usage
• Salvaged and repurposed furniture
The fact that the home continues to blend into its neighborhood serves to show that green choices can easily be incorporated into conventional homes without the need for a total design overhaul.
Tours of the Green X-Ray House are available through the Greenv Sustainable Center of South San Francisco.
(Image credits: Re:modern.com)
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
The problem with so many green technologies is they cost more upfront than they will save the purchaser - even over the long haul - so it is hard for most people to be able to afford them. This year we purchased a 1962, original condition house, and our inspector told us replacing the single-pane storm windows or redoing the perfectly fine insulation in the walls would never pay off cost-wise. Yes, we would reduce our yearly energy use a little, but adding in new materials has a fairly high energy use built in (making windows, insulation and especially solar panels uses energy - usually fossil fuels - and creates trash out of the materials they are replacing.) It's better to maintain what you have in as good a condition as possible.
I wish there were honest studies, not funded by green manufacturers or fuel companies, that truly mapped out the impact of using what you have vs. using a better, new technology. I feel like we are carrying around so much guilt over what we can do (i.e. all the new technologies out there) vs. what we perhaps should do. Sometimes, keeping existing items is actually best - for the very fact that they already exist.
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Maybe you wouldn't see pay off of new windows in California, but anyplace colder you'd definitely see the difference in the "long haul". Especially if you consider how long windows generally last.
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Some of our friends freaked out when we chose to replace some super-old windows in our house last year, saying we were ruining the integrity of the house. Though it's pretty dang old, our house will never be a stop on the National Register of Historic Places... so that "historical integrity" argument felt a little ridiculous when we could actually FEEL cold drafts blowing through the closed windows.
We saved the leaky old windows in case a future buyer would ever want them, but holy crap have the new windows kept the house much warmer already -- and it's only November. I don't know how much we'll actually save in energy costs, but it really is much more pleasant.
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