If your home has a basement, then you just might be standing on a major green opportunity. Turning an unfinished basement into a finished living space is green for several reasons:

•    “The greenest house is one that’s already built.” This quote comes from an article written by architect and sustainability expert Carl Elefante, for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In order to gain the space you need, you should consider finishing your basement instead of moving or building an expensive addition. It’s greener to make better use of an existing building than to consume resources and energy by building a new structure.

•    Durable materials cut down on landfill use. Every year, 136 million tons of waste is created by tearing down outdated and dilapidated houses. Using durable, long-lasting materials is a green initiative because it reduces the amount of damaged, poor-quality building materials that go into landfills. Thanks to the innovative products developed by companies like Total Basement Finishing, it’s possible to create a finished basement that won’t need to be torn out and removed because it’s worn out. Go green by purchasing durable, maintenance-free building materials. They won’t end up in the landfill (for a long time, at least) and they don’t require additional resources for ongoing repairs and refinishing.

•    Eliminating mold helps ensure a healthy home. Mold is almost certain to grow in a basement that’s finished with conventional building materials like studs, drywall, carpet and plywood. All of these materials are organic, and that’s just what mold loves to eat. But there’s a new generation of moisture and mold-resistant inorganic materials, state-of-the-art waterproofing, and dehumidification strategies, that work together to eliminate mold as a major indoor air pollutant. A healthy home is a green home.

•    A finished basement can improve home energy performance. As a result of old products, and damages, the average unfinished basement is a major source of air leakage and wintertime heat loss. Improve your home’s energy efficiency by installing a finished basement wall system and replacing leaky, single-pane windows with energy-efficient basement windows.

Here are the facts: Using electric clothes dryers accounts for nearly 6% of all electricity consumed in the U.S. Since about 90% of all households have clothes driers, the home energy savings potential here is pretty significant. By air-drying just half of your wash loads, you’ll save about $70 per year and cut annual carbon emissions by over 1000lbs.

Clothes lines used to be a predictable part of our backyard landscape, but they disappeared as household appliances advanced. Today clothes lines are making a comeback. In communities across the country, folks are rediscovering the advantages that our grandparents knew so well. If you decide to give your electric clothes dryer a rest, here’s what you can enjoy:

• Zero emissions. The only energy required to dry your clothes will be what you expend hanging them up and taking them down.
• No maintenance, no operating costs, no breakdowns. Low-tech = high reliability and surprising efficiency. On a sunny day with a mild breeze, clothes can dry outdoors just as quickly as they’d dry in an electric clothes dryer.
• Improved acoustics. Instead of the mechanical thrum of your electric dryer, you’ll hear birds chirping and clothes flapping in the wind if your line is outside.
• Fresh smelling clothes. If you’ve got an outdoor line, your clothes are going to smell fresher; they’ll retain much less residual odor from soap and bleach.
• Longer fabric life. Air-drying doesn’t beat up your clothes like an electric dryer does.
• Sunlight as a stain remover. That’s right –direct sunlight can work like a mild bleach. For this reason you may want to keep colors out of direct sun.
• Clothes pins. Simple, functional, timeless, beautiful. What more can I say?
• A new way to meditate. Your grandparents will be smiling down on you, and you’ll have some contemplative time that didn’t exist before this new online adventure.

NOTE #1: Believe it or not, some communities don’t allow backyard clothes lines. But environmentally concerned citizens are often able to get these regulations overturned.

NOTE #2: Go online to get on line. There are plenty of websites that sell clothes lines, indoor drying racks and associated products.

About Tim Snyder: A journalist specializing in sustainability, energy efficiency and  home building topics, Snyder is a former executive editor of Fine Homebuilding magazine. He recently produced a green remodeling manual for the EPA and a chapter on “Smart Shelter” for The Whole Green Catalog, published by Rodale Press. Currently he is the lead writer and training resource manager for Dr. Energy Saver, a nationwide network of energy auditors who also perform a comprehensive range of prioritized energy-saving improvements.

By applying industry-leading techniques to test, analyze and improve home energy performance, Dr. Energy Saver promises to make home energy savings accessible for all homeowners interested in saving energy, money and the environment.

“After a week of classroom and software training, field work in the facility’s various labs, and energy audits in the facility’s two-bedroom test house, participants took the knowledge they gained in Connecticut and returned home to help grow the green workforce,” described conntact.com about Dr. Energy Saver’s™ training boot camp.

Dr. Energy Saver's 40,000 sq. ft. training facility is filled with hands-on displays and multiple classrooms.

Strong evidence of the “new energy economy,” Dr. Energy Saver trains and supports a network of industry-leading energy-conservation contractors. Unlike other companies who perform a home energy audit and a limited number of energy-saving upgrades, Dr. Energy Saver has the tools, training and materials to complete a comprehensive range of repairs and upgrades based on prioritized recommendations that are presented to the homeowner following a complete home energy checkup.

The idea originated with two industry leaders, Tom Casey and Larry Janesky. Tom has been in the heating and cooling industry for 32 years, and won the “HVAC Contractor of the Year Award” in 2001. His partner, Larry Janesky started Basement Systems, Inc. in 1987 and developed it into the leading waterproofing specialist in 5 countries with over 300 dealers, more than 25 patents, and countless awards. In 2009, Larry was Business New Haven’s Businessperson of the Year.

Home Energy Franchise Opportunities Available

Dr. Energy Saver is seeking specialty home improvement contractors who are looking to expand their opportunities. Dr. Energy Saver has all the tools and training needed for a contractor to start helping homeowners with home energy audits and home performance retrofits!

Energy, such as heat or cold, moves from more to less

The rule that “stuff” moves from more to less explains a great deal about how a house responds to different temperature, moisture and pressure conditions. A good basic illustration of more to less occurs when you put a drop of red food coloring into a glass of water. As soon as the concentrated color hits the water, it moves from more to less, diffusing through the entire volume of water until the red color is nearly gone.

Heat moves from more to less, so if you’re indoors when it’s cold outside, you’ll feel chilly when you stand next to a window. The greater the difference between the “more” and the “less,” the more noticeable the chilly feeling will be. Since window glass is colder than the wall surface, you’ll feel more heat loss when you’re next to the glass.

The air in a damp basement or a bathroom (after someone has taken a shower) contains more moisture than air elsewhere in the house. Just like heat, the moist air “wants” to move from more to less, diffusing into other areas where it can cause mold or moisture damage. In the basement, a dehumidifier can take moisture out of the air before it gets upstairs into the main living space. In the bathroom, an exhaust fan can move moist air outside before it leaks up through the ceiling and condenses in the attic.

Ready for one more energy saving example?

Sealing the heating or air-conditioning ducts in a house is an important energy upgrade because the air inside the ducts is under more pressure than the air outside the ducts. If there are leaks in the system (which is usually the case), the higher pressure will push conditioned air through the duct leaks (more pressure moving toward less pressure). This compromises energy efficiency as well as comfort, especially when “conditioned” air leaks away in an attic, basement or crawlspace, before it can reach its intended destination –the living area.

The experts at Dr. Energy Saver can fill you in on other examples of the more-to-less rule during an energy audit. For now, you can simply rest assured that the more knowledge you have about how your house uses energy, the less you need to spend on energy.

John Replogle is the CEO of Burt’s Bees, headquartered here in Raleigh. You’ve probably seen Burt’s Bees products at your local pharmacy. I wasn’t the only one in the audience stretching to understand why a cosmetics exec was chosen as the opening act for a green building conference, but my skepticism was soon swept away. Turns out Mr. Replogle has some interesting lessons to teach about being green.

After successfully publicizing the green appeal of products made with all-natural ingredients, Replogle got a little egg on his face when he found out how much waste material his company was delivering to local landfills. His bold and ingenious solution to this problem was to organize a “dumptster-diving” day for all employees and some locally recruited volunteers. In return for free lunch, about  500 participants waded into the company’s waste stream to discover precisely what was being delivered to the dump.

In addition to finding numerous items (plastic bottles, aluminum cans, printer paper) that should have be deposited in recycling containers, Replogle’s recruits uncovered a new cost-saving opportunity: plastic and metal cans from suppliers of raw materials that could be returned to manufacturers for credit on future orders.  The new, improved green program at Burt’s Bees includes a greywater recycling system, and an arrangement with a cement plant to burn organic waste, producing ash that can be incorporated in concrete and other cement-based products.  Also, as Replogle explained, “We’ve got our recycling program down so well that we no longer use conventional waste baskets.”

My initial walk through the trade show exhibition after the keynote presentation identified an important marketing concept: Putting words like “eco,” “sustainable,” “low energy,” “eco-friendly,” and (of course) “green” on your booth or (better yet) into your product name is probably smart.

The clear message I got from the technical sessions, the products represented at the trade show, and the buzz from attendees during coffee breaks was this:  More than anything else, green building is about energy efficiency.

To be sure, there are many aspects to green building, like using products with high recycled content or limiting jobsite waste during construction or remodeling projects. But these days the main focus is on how houses use, lose and waste energy and what can be done to diagnose and correct energy performance problems. Guess what: That’s exactly what we’re focusing on at Dr. Energy Saver.

Every year, the National Association of Homebuilders holds their big Green Building Conference in a different city. This year, Dr. Energy Saver™ reports on the NAHB’s GBC from Raleigh, NC. This is the first in a series of reports from the conference.

Building Green: Passive House Adventures

The temperature was mild when I arrived in Raleigh Thursday afternoon.  But today then it was back to the hot, humid weather this region is famous for. In New England, where I live, our biggest energy expenditures come in wintertime. Down here, air conditioning is what consumes the most electricity.  So how can buildings stay cool without spinning the electric meter so fast? Stay tuned and I’ll fill you in. I’m looking forward to this year’s green building conference because I want to catch the buzz among building industry professionals who are attending the conference and see what’s new in the way of insulation, air-sealing, radiant barriers, HVAC equipment, solar energy and all the other factors that can contribute to better home energy performance. Remember folks, buildings here in the U.S. are responsible for almost half of our greenhouse gas emissions and over 75% of all the electricity we generate. At Dr. Energy Saver, our mission is to utilize the most up-to-date technology to make energy savings accessible and affordable for anyone who’s interested in improving energy efficiency at home.

In advance of the conference, I got an exclusive early look at a new Passive House that’s being built in Chapel Hill by Casey Shaw and Anchorage Building Corp.  What’s a Passive House? Despite the mild-mannered name, a Passive House is pretty exciting in terms of energy performance. A Passive House is a comprehensive system of superinsulation, airtight construction and other features that can cut heating and cooling costs by up to 90% compared to a conventional house.

The initial research on the Passive House was done in Europe, but today there’s growing interest in applying this technology here in the U.S. Although a Passive House can be built in just about any style, you can count on a superinsulated building shell. The photos I took at the jobsite this morning show thick walls that combine concrete slabs with 7 in. of rigid foam insulation. The slabs are precast at a factory with openings for windows and doors already made. A big crane hoists the slabs into position, and then they’re bolted together. This construction technique eliminates the thermal bridging that exists in wood-framed walls, and gets the house enclosed much faster. The builder says I can come back on Tuesday morning to see the second level slabs being hoisted into place, so stay tuned for photos that show this dramatic construction technique. In between now and then, I’ll be reporting on new products and other stuff at the green building conference.

Tim Snyder

Earth Day - April 22

The path of environmental awareness and activism certainly has been a rocky one. Just three years after the first Earth Day celebration, we were hit with the first oil embargo, triggering an energy crisis that lasted until the early 1980s. But the oil glut that followed made us forget our energy-saving priorities and some of the energy-saving technology we developed. We went back to big cars, poorly insulated McMansions and other wasteful ways.

Today –hopefully—we know better. Our planet is certainly providing more signs that human activity can do environmental damage. It’s more evident today than it’s ever been that Mother Nature needs our cooperation. And while it’s tempting to focus on the large-scale innovations that can help preserve the planet –like vast wind farms and high-tech photovoltaic systems for generating solar electricity—the truth is that we all need to pitch in right where we live. Buildings consume 40% of the energy and are responsible for 40% of total carbon emissions here in the U.S. Improving home energy efficiency can be a huge factor in reducing our carbon footprint, and it’s a far easier and more immediate goal than building wind farms. This is what makes Dr. Energy Saver ™ such a valuable partner in planetary health. If you haven’t delved into how your house uses, loses and wastes energy, check out the info. at DrEnergySaver.com; you’ll be amazed at how many ways there are to improve home energy performance. And don’t forget: you’ll be cutting your own energy bill while you honor Mother Earth.

-by Tim Snyder
Training & Resource Manager
Dr. Energy Saver ™

Release date: 02/02/2010

WASHINGTON - In 2009, EPA’s Energy Star Leaders prevented the equivalent of more than 220,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and saved more than $48 million across their commercial building portfolios. These savings have quadrupled since 2008 and represent the single greatest year of savings since EPA recognized the first Energy Star Leaders in 2004. Over the past five years, Energy Star Leaders are saving money and helping our environment by preventing greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions from the electricity use of nearly 39,000 homes annually.

Energy Star Leaders must meet one of two energy efficiency improvement milestones. The first milestone requires a 10 percent energy reduction across the entire building portfolio. The second, known as ”top performer,” requires the buildings in an organization’s portfolio, on average, to perform in the top 25 percent of similar buildings nationwide.

Fifty-eight organizations are recognized for at least one of these milestones in 2009 – more than double the number that qualified in 2008. More than 75 percent of Energy Star Leaders in 2009 met the top performer milestone, more than in any other year. The list of 2009 Energy Star Leaders is dominated by 54 school districts, many of which are located in the nation’s Midwest region.

The complete list of Energy Star Leaders has grown to more than 100 organizations since 2004, including school districts, commercial real estate companies, healthcare systems, supermarket operators and hotel managers. Energy Star Leaders represent more than 5,600 buildings covering nearly 390 million square feet across 32 states and the District of Columbia.

List of Energy Star Leaders as of December 31, 2009:
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/business/leaders/2009_Leaders_list.pdf

Many of Dr. Energy Saver products are energy star rated and proud to be part of a eco friendly environment.

So, here is a page dedicated to renewable energy related stamps:

Renewable Energy Related Stamps

Source: http://www.stampsbook.org/subject/Energy.html