From Guest Blogger Lizzie Weakley: How to Make Your Home Green and Sustainable During the Winter Months

Choosing life inside a green home means doing everything possible to reduce your home’s ecological footprint. Choosing life inside a sustainable home means selecting material, products, and designs which facilitate long term conservation. A sustainable home finds alternatives to our hyper consumer culture’s loop of infinite production, consumption, and deterioration. For winter, home design and regular heat system maintenance are two extremely important factors in green and sustainable living when the temperature drops.

Green and Sustainable Design

Ideally, green and sustainable homes begin with thoughtful design. Before a single nail is driven or a foundation poured, design lets homeowners create structures which promote environmentally conscious living.

Designing a home from scratch lets you choose green and sustainable materials every step of the way. You can also select materials easily recycled, rather than introducing useless, toxic and temporary materials into the environment.

Having control over your home’s size helps prevent wasted energy. Many home’s today are simply too large. It’s nice to scale down. Choice of placement for your home during daylight also makes a significant contribution to saving energy. Using the sun effectively has a dramatic impact on energy usage in all seasons. Finding the right balance, the right placement, is a major accomplishment for you and the Earth.

Choice of windows is an overlooked but crucial aspect to building a green and sustainable home for winter. Most of our heat loss at home travels through inferior windows.

Heat Maintenance Is Mandatory

One of the biggest way homeowners impact the environment negatively is by operating faulty heating systems. A green and sustainable home must include regular maintenance on its heating system.

If your home’s heating is supplied by a water heater, you should absolutely call your favorite technicians to tune it up. Water heaters are operated by a network of parts. All of these parts are problematic after extended use and need yearly care at least. Gas heat has a whole other set of issues which require yearly care. A malfunctioning gas heater can create a volatile and dangerous situation, or it can lead to health problems for everyone in your home.

Central heating systems offer yet another world of concerns demanding regular maintenance. According to Comfortable Home Systems, failure to change out an air filter, for example, could lead to a costly breakdown of the entire system during winter. Last but not least, the traditional heating method – a chimney – certainly needs a good scrubbing once per year to prevent fires and keep the chimney working well.

Insure efficient heat use further by chasing down lost heat around windows, doors, and through walls lacking insulation. Seal up and insulate the areas before winter strikes.

Together, we have the potential to preserve the Earth for future generations. Our contribution begins at home with thoughtful living. We owe it each to other, ourselves, and tomorrow’s world.