
Why Build a Green Custom Home?
Below, we take an in-depth look at the benefits that come with custom home construction. Green building allows homeowners to build a custom home and focus on reducing the home’s carbon footprint. Each home offers unique opportunities to leverage green building techniques and materials to maximize its benefits. Here we outline the economic, health, and environmental benefits that come with building the home of your dreams.
The Economic Benefits of Custom Home Builds
Most people generally understand that custom home construction is more expensive than opting for an existing home or mass-produced home. And for obvious reasons. A custom home build allows homeowners to personalize the space where they spend the majority of their time, plus it offers ways to differentiate their home.
What most people don’t understand, however, is that a custom green home can also end up saving you a significant amount of money in the long run. The economic savings associated with a custom green home occurs both due to the increased energy efficiency of the home, and the improved quality of the construction.
With increasing energy prices, a custom home build can ensure that your household is heated, cooled, and powered with the most energy efficient technologies on the market. Here at Conrado Home Builders, our building teams have over three decades of expertise in constructing the most energy efficient structures in the area. Many of our team members have in-depth knowledge on the best ways to help you design and build a custom home that achieves Net Zero energy usage.
Specifically, we can help our clients design and build custom homes that save money through:
- A focus on an airtight building envelope;
- The use of high-quality insulation that eliminates the issue of thermal bridging;
- Recommending the best renewable energy technologies that might allow you to heat, cool, and power your home with the sun or geothermal energy present at your home site;
- Offering advice on the most efficient heating, cooling, and lighting technologies on the market today.
Your custom home built by Conrado Home Builders will also save you money over the long-run due to our commitment to building with legendary and enduring quality. We go the extra mile to build beautiful and functional custom homes that will continue to look and perform like new, even after decades of occupancy. When you invest in the best quality materials and craftsmanship, you will also end up saving an enormous amount of money in home repairs and maintenance.
According to the famous one percent rule, homeowners can expect to spend around one percent of their home’s value every year for home maintenance tasks. Investing in major repairs to your home’s foundation, reworking your home’s exterior envelope that was not properly sealed to the elements, or having to replace interior home elements due to inferior quality add to the overall cost of a home. With Conrado, however, you can rest assured that we will not cut any corners throughout the building process and will recommend assemblies and products throughout construction so that your home will be built to the highest standards of quality.
The Health Benefits of Custom Home Builds
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the levels of indoor air pollutants are often 2 to 5 times higher than outdoor levels, and in some cases these levels can exceed 100 times that of outdoor levels of the same pollutants. The air inside your home may be more harmful to your health than the air outside. So, what exactly is the cause of contaminated indoor air quality?
According to one recent study, the indoor air quality in many homes may be contaminated with harmful particulate matter, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), high levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, radon, heavy metals, aerosols, pesticides, biological allergens, and microorganisms. All of these pollutants can lead to diminished indoor air quality and thereby harmful effects on human health.
Here at Conrado Home Builders, we are committed to building custom homes that eliminate the vast majority of indoor air contaminants and pollutants. For example, formaldehyde is one of the most common chemicals found in building elements, from plywood to flooring to the weather stripping you place around your windows every winter. Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence that long-term exposure to formaldehyde may be a leading risk factor for various types of cancer. To protect the health of our clients (and our building teams), we use zero formaldehyde-added products in the homes we build. We also prioritize low or zero-VOC products so that your “new home smell” is not a concoction of dangerous chemicals that could damage your health.
Another way to maximize the healthfulness of your indoor air quality is by ensuring that the air inside your home is continually being refreshed with fresh air circulated from the outside. Depending on the specifics of the custom home build, we may recommend several different natural and mechanical ventilation strategies to offer a constant influx of fresh air into your home without compromising the energy efficiency and thermal performance of your home.
We believe wholeheartedly that a custom home should be one that is not only beautiful, unique, energy efficient, and durable, but also one that you can live in without having to worry about potential toxins and contaminants that could negatively affect the health of your or your family.
The Environmental Benefits of a Custom Home Build
Lastly, a custom home build also allows homeowners to drastically reduce the environmental footprint of the homes they live in. Around the world, our households are responsible for almost one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Poorly built homes may require an enormous amount of energy to properly heat, cool, and power the home, thus increasing the overall carbon footprint. Here at Conrado Home Builders, we are proud to say we have built a home that achieve net zero energy status, meaning that the home generates as much energy as it uses.
Through investing in the best renewable energy systems and implementing the leading energy efficiency building techniques and materials, we can ensure that your home’s energy use and “operational” carbon footprint are drastically reduced.
We also believe that custom homes should be built with the most sustainable materials possible. We source FSC-certified wood products, which is a certification given to lumber and other wood products that were harvested from forests that are responsibly managed, socially beneficial, environmentally conscious, and economically viable. Our build team can also recommend the best ways to incorporate both recycled materials and locally produced building materials to drastically reduce the embodied energy footprint of the construction.
Lastly, when you invest in the legendary quality of a home built by Conrado Home Builders, you are also reducing the long-term environmental impact of that home. A home that is built to last 100 years will have half the footprint of a home that only lasts fifty years.
Find Out About a Green Custom Home by Contacting Conrado Home Builders
When you choose to work with Conrado Home Builders, a custom home can save you money, protect the health of you and your family, and potentially lower your environmental footprint. Contact Conrado Home Builders today and speak with our home building team.