It Ain’t Easy—Or Cheap—Being Green

When making environmentally-friendly renovations to your home, get expert advice

Chris Godsey

Your neighbors just bought a gasoline-electric hybrid car. Television shows and magazine stories are aflutter about compact-fluorescent light bulbs, low-flow showerheads, and other methods of living with less cost and impact.

And after a winter of painful heating bills followed by a spring and summer of escalating fuel prices, you’re intrigued by “going green”—making your own energy-efficient changes to your home for both environmental and financial reasons.

You’ve probably got a lot to learn, and you’re not alone, say three local experts, who agree that the popular phrase “going green,” is often used as a marketing ploy that oversimplifies the concepts behind it.

“I like to use the term ‘environmentally preferable,’ “ says Brian Timm, an associate and designer at the Floor to Ceiling store in Duluth. “It’s about making choices that have the least possible immediate and long-term impact on the environment—paying attention to how products affect the earth’s resources, and considering the longevity of products.

“No product is ultimately green,” Timm continues, “but there are ways to make educated decisions about impact, like buying local, which eliminates the need for transportation that requires using fossil fuels.”

Timm’s ideas are complemented by Derek Zunker, a carpenter who renovates homes under the banner Enviromodelers, and Rachel Wagner of Wagner Zaun Architecture, a Duluth firm that, according to its web site, designs for uniqueness, energy efficiency and conservation-mindedness.

Zunker said his ideal environmentally preferable remodeling project would be a home on Duluth’s Central Hillside. “I don’t know if people here realize what they have in some of those homes,” he says. “Homes like that aren’t built anymore, and they’re deteriorating, and neighborhoods are going along with them. It makes no sense, and it’s not environmentally sound, to bulldoze them, or to forget about them and build a new house 20 miles out of town.”

The first thing Zunker would do in such a project is to stop air from getting in to and out of the home. “New insulation, new windows and doors, updated HVAC [heating, ventilation, and cooling systems]. If the siding was worth keeping, I’d keep it, but if not, I’d replace it. Radiant-heating floors—I don’t like heating the air, because objects retain their heat much better. I’d use as much reclaimed wood and other material as possible.”

According to Wagner, buildings consume 40 percent of U.S. energy, and produce 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change and other environmental problems.

“In most existing homes,” she says, echoing Zunker, “‘going green’ can best be accomplished with improvements to the air tightness and thermal efficiency of the building envelope (the insulation and air barrier surrounding the entire structure both above and below ground) so that the house requires less energy for heating and cooling.”

She says that in addition to better windows, energy conservation and living comfort can be gained with “shading on the west windows to prevent unwanted heat gain. Shading on the south windows allows heat gain in the winter months but blocks it in the summer months.”

All three experts agree that such changes can be expensive, and should be approached with the help of a qualified guide.

“A comprehensive approach to an existing building,” says Wagner, “with the goal of greatly improving the long-term energy and resource efficiency of the structure, will cost in the tens of thousands.”

What many sticker-shocked homeowners have understandable trouble remembering, they say, is that expensive renovations for efficiency will pay for themselves.

Reminders like that are what can set experts apart from do-it-your-selfers, says Timm.

“Because I’ve been doing this for eight years,” he says, “I have information and experience that an average homeowner definitely can get, but usually only by spending a lot of time getting it. It’s a professional’s job to anticipate and cut out mistakes.”

Wagner says, “It isn’t likely to get the work done well without using sound guiding principles and practices developed by those who are devoted to a scientific and broad-based approach to the issues.  Houses are not simple anymore, and good work needs to address the connectedness of many pieces.”