Creating an environmentally sustainable home

Nowadays, environmental concerns have become the basis of many new laws and legislations being brought in, ass well as some voluntary standards by which to abide by. These concerns have given rise to many environmental businesses who work to provide a way to help other companies reduce their impact on the environment, while in turn, strengthening their public image and also in cost savings with the reduction in the energy costs of their day to day running.

While the fine details of how companies go about making less of an environmental impact, the fundamentals are still true for many home owners who wish to reduce their own carbon footprint, and potentially save some money while they’re at it. The Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) was originally a voluntary guideline set out to attempt to help people make environmentally friendly homes. It sets a clear guideline and rating system to help people see where they might be able to improve the sustainability of their home and to rate their households based on improvements they choose to make.

Newly built houses now build must comply with at least code level 3 of the CSH and in some places up to level 4. This is judged on a set of minimum criteria that must be met and judged based on a number of points that are accrued for various environmentally friendly implementations.

Such reviews are carried out based on the following factors; energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, water consumption, building materials, surface water run-off, waste disposal, pollution, health, well-being, management and ecology.

for level 3 compliance, the two factors that have a minimum requirements which must be achieved are the energy consumption and the water usage and run-off. To achieve the maximum points in energy consumption, (level 6), the net carbon dioxide emissions for the house need to be zero. The way this is achieved is by offsetting the energy you use by producing your own electricity from renewable means such as solar power, wind power or hydroelectric.

Water assessments are based on the measures in the house taken to help offset the amount of water used per person in the household. The test assumes predefined limits for the estimated amount of water a person will use in a given day. These are then used in conjunction with information about the appliances in the house and used to create a model of the amount of water used by each person per day. Outdoor water is reviewed separately, so swimming pools, fountains, jacuzzis etcetera, will not count towards a homeowner’s daily allowance, but will mean points which could otherwise be achieved for having water butts, cannot be earned.

Assessments for such building projects and post production upgrades can be conducted by a number of agencies specialising in code for sustainable homes. For any new builds, it may be worth contacting an environmental agency who deal with more than just the code for sustainable homes to provide other required services, such as ecological surveys.

The Author works for a company who specialise in code for sustainable code assessments and providing code for sustainable homes assessors as well as bream assessors