|
Wednesday, October 11, 2000 Is your new home an energy hog?
For a homebuyer, nothing matches the feeling of glee in touring a builder's model and visualizing your new home for the first time. While you're pondering the builder's laundry list of luxury options, why not consider the practical option of making your home more energy efficient, and increase its resale value down the road? Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to design an energy-efficient home from scratch. "The good news is, energy efficient designs need not be expensive to construct," says Richard Roll, president of American Homeowners Association (AHA). "Every homebuyer can benefit from recent technological improvements, all of which can be seamlessly integrated into any type of house design." The added benefits are not what you might expect. It's not just hundreds of dollars in potential energy savings each year from lower heating and cooling bills. Houses with better insulation and tighter construction tend to be quieter. Less noise is transmitted from room to room, or from outside sources. The first aspect of energy efficient design is constructing the "thermal envelope," the structural components that physically separate the living spaces from the outdoors. Wall and roof assemblies go beyond the traditional "stick" (wood stud), framed wall type of construction. For example, structural insulated panels (SIPs) are plywood or oriented strand board sheets laminated to a core of foamboard. Since the SIP acts as both the framing and the insulation, construction is much faster. The quality is often superior to framed walls because the units are pre-fabricated under factory-controlled conditions. Remember also to demand more insulation than the bare minimum that local building codes require, depending on local climate. For example, in the northeast, R-11 in the exterior walls and R-19 in the ceiling simply don't cut it. Go for R-20 to R-30 in the walls, and R-50 to R-70 in the ceiling. Tightly sealed homes should be ventilated to reduce air moisture infiltration, prevent mold and vent indoor air pollutants to the outside. Although building your energy-efficient home may require a little more time and money, it just means researching the options with your builder, to arrive at the best balance of cost vs. benefits. For more information on any aspect of buying a home, go to www.realhome.com, the web site for American Homeowners Association.
|
||