Eco Friendly Home: 4 Defining Features

What features should you include in your custom, eco-friendly home? Find out here. 

While this is by no means a complete list, we do offer the 4 most practical and impactful green home features for your consideration. These include green living in your new home as well as environmentally-friendly construction.

Before you build, be sure your blueprint includes these features.

1. Sustainable and Locally Sourced Materials

Going green with your new luxury home starts with eco-friendly construction. To that point, one of the eco-friendliest things you can do is to insist on sustainable, locally-sourced building materials.

Using locally sourced materials means less shipping is involved. Conversely, the farther away your materials are shipping from, the more gas is consumed. Flying, boating, or trucking rare materials in from exotic locations spews a huge and unnecessary excess of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Furthermore, carefully choosing sustainable materials keeps you from depleting precious resources that can’t easily be replenished.

2. LED Lighting

The larger the home, the more lightbulbs are required to illuminate it. Not only that, but you’ll also need specially designed lighting fixtures to give each room in your custom home the perfect lighting arrangement.

In short, luxury homes require many, many lightbulbs. And that calls for an enormous amount of energy, especially if each one of those is an energy-sucking incandescent bulb.

And besides being energy inefficient, each of those incandescents gives off heat. One large room lit by 20 or so incandescents will significantly increase the energy cost of cooling your home.

However, ENERGY STAR certified LED bulbs use 75% less energy than incandescents, in addition to giving off no heat. That applies to your entire home if you insist on installing only ENERGY STAR rated LED bulbs in your home right from the start.

3. Solar Panels

Next, do your part to reduce energy consumption in your state by going solar. Use the abundant energy of the sun to power your home with solar panels on your roof and acreage.

This benefits not only you but everyone in your entire state. It’s so helpful, in fact, that most states will repay you with a tax credit for going solar.

4. Vegetable Gardens

Vegetable gardens add a number of green and valuable benefits to your luxury home. First, the cycle of growth and decomposition involved in maintaining a garden keeps the earth on your estate healthy.

The plants themselves expel oxygen into the atmosphere and consume the carbon dioxide that produces the greenhouse effect. Also, eating your own produce means less grocery shopping for you, reducing your gasoline consumption.

Next, there are personal health benefits to you as well. A diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables is essential for good mental and physical health. And tending a garden is also said to be beneficial for reducing stress.

Growing and consuming organic produce reduces the amount of pesticides and other harmful chemicals released into the soil. Such chemicals often end up in groundwater, eventually poisoning ecosystems of aquatic life. This effect ripples outward, affecting the whole planet.

Include These Features in Your Eco-Friendly Home

You’ll undoubtedly find many ways to go green in your new, eco-friendly home. But first, be sure to include these excellent green features in your luxury home.

For more awesome options to consider, read 6 Beautiful Features to Include in Your New Custom House.