Ken and Deb Sagan are building their first home together in State College, Penn. Deb designed the floorplan; Ken picked out his office; but the environment decides the rest.
"We're lowering our demand for electricity," says Ken. "We're lowering our cost to live day to day."
When Ken and Deb broke ground in November 2004, their goal was to build a Near Zero Energy home that combines energy efficiency with solar technologies to produce a nearly equal amount of energy to what they will consume. "Our primary drive was to be energy-conscious, and for energy conservation," Ken explains. "When we had the oil [price] increase, we decided we had to do something so we could define our own fate."
Ken, a specialist for the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, decided to build a green home when he came across the National Association of Home Builder's Model Green Home Building Guidelines. Acting as his own general contractor, Ken is building a home already in sync with many of the model guidelines.
"When I was given the beta version and started looking through it," Ken recalls, "we already had the design done, and we were into construction. I saw that we already fell into many of the guidelines."
The goal of the voluntary Model Green Home Building Guidelines is to form local green-building programs throughout the country, while encouraging mainstream builders to adopt green home-building practices.
"We do not have a [local] green building program, nor do we have an energy-conservation program," Ken says. "But I know our legislators are looking at it--the method and styles. They're looking for the input from builders on the cost-savings to the consumer."
Ken and Deb used the Model Green Home Building Guidelines to build a home to their standards. Besides the considerations they had to make about the house itself, they also were careful to plan around the existing trees on the lot. As a result, they were able to keep all of them.
Now towards the end of the home's construction, they have surpassed the manual's guidelines. Ken is pleased with the selection of green products he found on the Internet "And of course, in the age that we are in now, nationally is just convenient as locally," Ken says. "Green-building products are readily available."
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