Green Homes
Today we took a tour of the Taylors’ home in Madison. When they decided to build their home they used the five principles of building a “green home.” Green homes use these ideas to help keep the environment clean and friendly. Here are the five qualities of green building and how the Taylors used them.

1. Site Development and Planning: This means that, when designing the house, the architects took into consideration the way the sun moved around the house, how the ground was sloped, what kind of trees grew in the area, and so on. Basically, it’s looking at the environment of the plot of land you want to build the house on and building around it. The Taylors’ house was especially designed to use the sun. They studied the way the sun moved in both the winter and the summer, so that in the winter, the sun helps to heat the house and in the summer, it does not add to the heat with direct sunlight on the house.

2. Energy Conservation: The Taylors are sure to include energy efficient appliances and building materials in their home. Not only do they use things like a refrigerator or a stove that saves energy, but they also designed parts of the house to be energy efficient. The windows in the living room area are specially designed to allow a better flow of heat throughout the house so heating and cooling bills are lower. They also use passive solar heating – those big, colored tubes – to help distribute natural heat in the winter, so that they have to rely less on their heater.

3. Green Materials: These kinds of materials are both recycled and eco-friendly. The Taylors used a lot of these in building their home. They were big recyclers. Almost every building material used to frame the house was recycled. They used wood from old warehouses and other buildings to make everything from the floors to the stairs. They used everything they could from the original house on the site, and even from neighbors. The house is partly sided in the copper roof tiles from the church right next door. It is also covered in old boards from barns here in Wisconsin. Using these older pieces to side the house meant that the Taylors didn’t have to treat their siding with dangerous chemicals because they were already used to being outdoors.

4. Indoor Air and Environmental Quality: High concentrations of pollutants can stay trapped in the home if it’s not taken care of in the right way. These harmful pollutants come from all kinds of sources from heating supplies like kerosene and wood to building materials, to household cleaning products. The same considerations of air flow that help keep the Taylor house heated and cooled efficiently also let enough exchange of indoor and outdoor air to keep the air clean.

5. Water Conservation: When Mr. Taylor joked that his daughters and wife didn’t always like the showers and toilets in the house, he was talking about a type of system called low-flow. This means less water is wasted in everyday jobs like showering and flushing the toilet. Water is also conserved in the way the house is situated on the lot. The Taylors took special care to make sure that their house did not affect the trees and plants on the property. This helps reduce erosion and keep the vegetation safe.