Last spring, Maple Grove appeared in national headlines when Great River Energy announced the most energy-efficient, sustainable building in all of the Upper Midwest was completed here.
The power company headquarters located on Elm Creek Boulevard, touted greening initiatives that sounded space-age and extraordinary: The building would use a wind turbine to transform wind into electricity, and multiple atriums would harvest daylight. What's more, the Eco-friendly design would allow Green River to use 40 percent to 50 percent less energy than buildings of similar size.
Wind Turbine? Daylight harvesting? sure, those ideas sound great. But can the average person with a budget and little time on their hands actually go green without spending and arm and a leg? The short answer is, yes; there are a host of things you can do to your home that will not only cut your energy use and gas and electric bills, but minimize your carbon footprint, too.
Think Classic
Twin Cities architect Sarah Nettleton has been designing sustainable homes for three decades. She's know for her work on the Tofre Cabin, a 1947 North Shore structure she redesigned to coexist with its natural surroundings, and she's also the acclaimed author of The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough. Nettleton stresses that simple sustainability is about commonsense sustainability. Purchase items for the home that are timeless, she says. Become more cognizant of the life of the product--from the forest to the city. Instead of buying bamboo floors for the kitchen, which cut back the rainforest, Nettleton suggests thinking about using recycled countertops and flooring; many can be found at the ReUse It center in Minneapolis. "Buying new for the sake of new is very expensive ecologically," she says.
Invest in Energy Efficient Appliances
Refrigerators gobble most of the energy in your home. If you are going to buy one thing, Nettleton says, make it a highly efficient refrigerator. At Maple Grove's Lowe's--a partner with EnergyStar--residents can purchase resourceful freezers and refrigerators. "If your bill is $30 bucks a month, your refrigerator is probably $20 of it," Nettleton says. "It's a motor that runs all the time, and there's virtually no insulation."
Monitor your light weight
You don't have to add west-facing windows and store daylight for future use to change your home's shade of green. In fact, by just using CFL or LED lighting you can greatly reduce your energy use.
Ramy Selim runs Sunny Day Earth Solutions in Minneapolis and consults with clients going green across the Twin Cities area. His store sells LED lights with and efficiency rating of 96 percent, compared to the 10 percent rating of standard incandescent bulbs. "Good [lights] can last for over 300,000 hours," Selim says. "You might pay a little more, $35 to $120 a bulb, but you gain three to five years at three hours of use per day. That's a return on investment. Plus, it save on electric bills." What's more they don't use mercury, which is also environmentally harmful.
Selim cut back on his energy waste even further by investing in a few power strips and plugging all of his electronic gadgets into them. He did this, he says, to minimize his phantom loads--the energy sucked up by things like DVD players and TVs that use power even when they're not running. "When I leave the room to go to bed," he says, "I just flip off the power strip. When I started doing this a few year ago, I saved about $14 a month." Plus, shutting off these energy gobblers every day will cut back your wattage use by about 140,000 per month.
Cover Up
Insulation is an important step in saving money and energy. If you can make the investment, put it in to adding home insulation. "Think attics and ceilings," Nettleton says. "This is the most beneficial, since heat rises."
In older construction, only 8 inches of insulation was required in each home. Now, homes are required to have as much as 16 inches, saving drastically on energy use and cost. Performance Foam Insulation serves Maple Grove and uses spray foam that non-toxic and Eco-friendly.
And as homes in Maple Grove age, their windows become obsolete. In the '70s and '80s, windows were created below today's standards. Nettleton says that when shopping for new, energy-efficient ones, the most important factors are the U-values for the window and its pane. The U-value corresponds to how much heat is lost through the window, and the lower the better of course.
Lowe's in Maple Grove sells windows with a U-value rating as low as 0.32, which means less heat escapes. The store also can order windows with an even lower U-value rating.
Stay away from fiberglass insulation, Selim cautions, and be sure to use formaldehyde-free products. "try to use cellulose insulation whenever possible," he says. "It's environmentally safe, and it doesn't cost as much as you would think. We just insulated the crawl spaces in a 1,400-square-foot home for less than $1,200."
Selim also suggests buying simple weather stripping to insulate the cracks in homes. "If you have your average three-foot doorway space with an 1/8 inch gap, that's the equivalent of a 5-inch by 4-inch hole in your house. Why would you leave that uncovered?"
Be sure to hire someone who's certified to do green work. But if you wanted to do it yourself, Sunny Day Earth Solutions holds workshops on green living and design, including how to insulate your home for maximum efficiency.
