Last year saw a focus on using the term “green” in marketing, and there has been a rise of businesses offering services which appeal to this idea. The idea of a “green” home is much older though. I can remember a few years ago when the concept of green home was really taking off in the main stream media. Straw bale construction was considered way out there at the time, and few home inspectors knew about the building codes for this type of construction (or cared for that matter). Now more people are aware of this building style.

Most of the focus has been on green home construction, but not on converting existing homes to a green one. Of course we are all aware of certain steps that we can take to reduce our environmental footprint and reduce energy. CFLs are quite common (I see them in home inspections all of the time), but I am not really seeing contractors who specialize in converting a home to a green one. Many were predicting that this would be a real growth industry starting at this time. Considering that Realtors are being trained to point out green features, and there are new designations for Realtors to show off their environmental credentials. Maybe this green remodeling industry is sure to follow soon.

Before this industry goes into full swing, there are means for a homeowner to start converting a home on their own. This is going beyond what is typically mentioned as do it yourself projects like the light bulb conversion. What we need is a plan to follow which will make our homes meet a higher standard, but we also need to consider ways to emulate green techniques when our homes were not designed with that idea in mind.

With this series of posts, I hope to indulge in a little fantasy in thinking about how these green conversions could take place, and I want to look at how these conversions can take place now with products which are readily available. With this post, I want to set myself the goal of writing a post a day on this topic/series.

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Tags: building, green, home, inspection, inspector, marketing, reducing, utility costs
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Green home conversion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.