Green Building Tips
Green building
can help you to save energy, lower your operating costs, and love a more environmentally friendly life. Everyone benefits from a green building.
Use Space Efficiently
Larger spaces need more energy to heat, cool, and light. The decisions that you make when you design a building will impact the environment for years to come, so you need to pay attention to the way you use your space. Where you can, minimize the size of the building. A smaller footprint means a lower energy load, and less open space is used. Using the right materials and equipment helps too. Buy used equipment, instead of new, at FleetUpMarketplace .
Invest In Insulation
An HVAC system is one of the main energy drains in a building. If you invest in high-quality insulation, you will be better able to maintain the interior temperature.
Insulation keeps cold air in, and hot air out during the summer, and the opposite in winter, reducing the workload on your HVAC system.
Use Solar Energy
The roof deflects the sun’s rays from your building. You can harness those rays to provide some power.
Solar energy is growing fast because it’s clean and has almost no ongoing costs to collect. Solar panels can be placed strategically on your roof. Any power that you are able to produce and don’t consume can be sold back to your electric company.
You could also choose to fit a battery that can be used to store any excess power. At night, when you can’t get solar power, the batteries can be used instead. This helps you to reduce the amount of electricity you need to pay for even more.
Make Space For Gardens
Massive farms producing food can be very damaging to the environment. Runoff from pesticides pollutes the water table, while heavy farming equipment releases greenhouse gases. If you’re designing a green building, you should understand the importance of producing fresh produce.
Residential and commercial properties should try to find some space for gardening to be done. At home, a food garden reduces your grocery spend and can teach children about where food comes from. Gardening has a lot of health benefits that companies can use to help stressed employees.
The extra greenery also helps to clean the air.
Adapt To Nature. Don’t Replace It
A new building changes the space it occupies forever. A new structure casts new shadows, changes the way that rainwater reaches rivers, lakes, and streams, and forces animals that lived on the site to move on somewhere else or be exterminated. New traffic patterns come into play, increasing road noise, and requiring new parking spaces, reducing the local tree population.
Architects who want to build in a much greener, more sustainable way should make sure they take the time to carry out a detailed site survey. This survey should look at how water flows, and how nature is currently interacting with the land. Where possible, you should try to balance the needs of the development with the needs of any existing wildlife and plant life that is inhabiting the land at the moment.
Over the last couple of decades, an enormous amount of the planet’s wilderness has been destroyed. We all have a responsibility to do more to reduce the impact of the ever-growing urban landscapes on nature and the planet. Including large green spaces in our developments is a good place to start, but there is more than can be done.
For example, when constructing, it’s better to use locally sourced materials. Layouts should be adapted to the existing landscape. Build with the local landscape in mind, such as including sliding glass walls and doors that can be pushed back when the temperatures allow it to let some of nature in. Architects should try to make their buildings blend in with their surroundings, through locally sourced building materials.
Those who advocate for green building practices are all working very hard to teach architects and construction companies how to best minimize the impact their work has on the planet. They can learn to preserve natural water flow and avoid site preparation that is expensive and excessive.
In the construction of transportation networks, environmentally conscious design can be used to create bridges for animals. These bridges are important, as they allow migratory species to avoid having to crossroads and highways, and instead walk over them safely. This reduces the number of collisions between vehicles and animals, keeping humans and animals safer. These bridges also support the local ecosystem by allowing natural migratory patterns to continue.
