Does a green built house have to be new, or can you retrofit an old home? When people start to build sustainably, they start to act sustainably. Absolutely, you can make your home more green by making it...
Absolutely, you can make your home more green by making it more energy efficient. Some cities have programs that offer rebates for a lot of energy efficiency improvements - windows, insulation, water heaters, heating and cooling systems - all those things. Here in Austin, there is a great rebate program to make those things more affordable. You can even get rebates for high efficiency washers and dryers. Many cities have patterned their green building programs after the Austin program, and many cities are getting on board with that. In some cases, the most sustainable thing you can do with an older home is not remodel at all. But if you are making the home more energy efficient, there's one really good reason to do that - energy efficiency.
Q: Can sustainable structures be built to withstand dangerous weather patterns?
Oh, sure, of course. That's just a question of engineering. I tell everyone that anyone can build a bad building out of anything. All materials have their limitations. In some ways, sustainable and natural buildings may have more limitations than others. Because I work with them, I know how important it is to respect their limitations. Engineers respect the limitations of the materials they use. That's their job. That's a really important thing to know. I think it's a very common mistake for people to take the sex appeal of natural building and run with it without respecting its physical limitations.
What's kind of cool about sustainable and natural building is that you usually wind up downsizing your structure because suddenly you realize that you're pushing the limitations of this material and getting that back in line often requires downsizing. That's very cool because we're building too big anyway. So when you begin building sustainably, you often wind up acting sustainably.
