Holistically
Green Homes
Eighteen Principles for Designing, Building, and Retrofitting Your Energy Efficient Home
Eighteen Principles for Designing, Building, and Retrofitting Your Energy Efficient Home
Holistically Green Homes is Available in Hard copy, and PDF on USB thumb drive.
This book and its eighteen principles describe what green home design, building, and energy retrofitting are all about, specifically what makes a home more energy efficient in comparison to other homes. Each chapter has information that will be useful regardless of whether you’re planning to build, retrofit, or just want to save energy in your current home.
You have probably heard opinions or questions like, “It is too expensive to build that way,” or, “Is it really cost effective?”
This book provides facts, insights, and answers that will help you make sound economic and lifestyle decisions—particularly in this changing world.
The information inside is an accumulation of knowledge gained in the author, Orlo Stitt’s, lifetime. It includes things you probably do not know about designing, building, energy retrofitting, or ideas to save energy everyday in your current home.
The featured homes are real homes that save the owners tax-free money month after month on low utility bills, make the owners happier and more satisfied, and promise higher re-sale value.
A Holistically Green Home is the result of creative brainstorming and personal choices. Its performance is affected by home size and style, the composition and installation of construction materials from foundation to roof, furnishings, appliances, landscaping, and more.
Energy Basics is dedicated to that spark of natural human curiosity. It answers many of the “whys” you might have about how energy efficiency and construction fit together. It also gives you a factual basis for deciding what is good for you, your family, and the planet in relation to the house you plan to build or remodel.
How do the Eighteen Principles combine to create an energy efficient green home? The inter-relationship among the principles is such that when one is completed properly, it significantly affects the design or specifications of the others. When all are combined correctly, the benefits outweigh the individual contributions of each principle. In other words, the total is greater than the sum of the parts.
Understanding how a house and property function together as a complete energy system is invaluable when designing or remodeling a house. The challenge is to comprehend the specifics and benefits of each principle individually and all of them as a whole—holistically—and then include the art and science of them into your plan.
When asked how much it will cost to build a new home, I usually reply that it depends on what is going into it. The question is similar to asking how much a shopping cart of groceries will cost. If you fill your cart with baloney, hamburger, bread, and potatoes, it will cost a lot less than if you fill it with lobster tail, filet mignon, exotic fruits, and gourmet coffees. It is not just $120 per cart no matter what.
After your design professional finishes the first or second revision to your preliminary plans, you are ready to physically begin preparing for construction. This is a good time to more accurately stake your house, because the staking defines the placement of the foundation and may require altering the preliminary plans before they are converted into final plans. The staking also shows whether your house fits well among the existing trees and foliage.
Each of the homes highlighted in this section includes mulitple energy efficient features. Additional energy features, unique to each home, are noted.
Orlo Stitt is an award-winning design-builder whose company, The Stitt Group, has specialized in designing and building energy efficient, passive solar homes since 1978. Orlo holds a B.Sc. degree in botany from Iowa State University and an MBA from The University of Iowa. He has been a Certified Home Energy Rating Systems (HERS) Rater and has served on the board of directors of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET). He is currently recognized by the National Association of Home Builders as a Certified Green Professional (CGP).
The Stitt Group has won more national Energy Value Housing Awards than any other company nationwide. In 1999, Orlo’s company won the EnergyValue “Builder of the Year.” In addition to this prestigious award, his company has also won 18 other EnergyValue housing awards, two “People’s Choice” awards, and two “Sustainability Awards” for the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas.
