FXSTD – Alternative Energy Center

By: Kimberley Ward
The LEED® for Homes program is the premier evaluators of green construction practices nationwide. A LEED certification is an important distinction for a green home to earn, but what are the real differences between a LEED certified green home and a home built with regular construction techniques? Here are the top 4:

1) Over-Kill - LEED is attempting to reduce and eliminate the amount of over-kill in home construction. Over kill is the utilization and installation of over-sized equipment in home construction such as heating and cooling equipment, over-sized lumber for rafters and floor joists. In the past, it was assumed that using bigger heating and cooling units than the minimum standards was a good rule of thumb. Those assumptions have been re-worked in LEED homes to provide the right size equipment for the home.

2) Lower Energy Consumption – LEED homes require far less energy to run and have dramatically lower energy costs. Sometimes getting those savings can present a challenge. State and local code have minimum BTU requirements based on square footage and cubic foot. These minimum requirements have not been updated in a while. There are now new technologies that can heat and cool the same space with less energy consumption. The problem lies in getting the code enforcement to allow the new equipment to be placed into use before the code is updated.

3) Right-Sized Rooms – LEED homes are designed from the start to be less wasteful of building material. However, some things are not so easy to change. An example is the commercial manufacturing of lumber. Lumber is manufactured in standard lengths starting at 8 foot and increasing in 2 foot increments.

But LEED homes can be designed to overcome these limitations and reduce the amount of lumber that is wasted. Therefore, more thought is given to the design of the home. For example, it would be wasteful to design a room with odd dimensions such as 13 foot by 17 foot. It would be better and far less wasteful to make that room 14 foot by 18 foot and use standard lumber lengths.

4) Orientation - In the past very little consideration was given to the placement of the home within the subdivision other than profit. With LEED, other aspects of the home are taken into consideration. Some of these characteristics are:

The direction that the home’s roof and walls face Angle of the roof how many homes per acre (or density) how close the home or subdivision is to public transportation amount of access to parks, industry, shopping, and interstate highways

This makes the design process much more lengthy and intense, while enhancing the outcome. The homes are much more desirable, as a result, while having a positive impact on the environment.

In short, LEED efforts to reduce over-kill, energy consumption, and wasteful practices, while encouraging minimal impact on the environment leads to better quality of living for everyone.