Home extensions can present new opportunities to look at Environmentally Sustainable Design (ESD) practices in your home. Converting your existing house plan to a more environmentally sustainable house plan may only involve simple planning strategies that could result in significant reduction in running costs to your home.
Recent Projects
Sustainability Considerations:
Remedial Design
Re-organising your living spaces to better suit your lifestyle is a great chance to make better use of the aspect of your site and orientation towards the sun and prevailing wind patterns.
Re-thinking the location and size of your windows and glazed doors can help to reduce the amount of heat during the summer months and also the rate of heat loss during the winter.
Even if your project is simply to add on an external deck and pergola, this can provide shading to your house that will bring big cooling benefits in summer. Taking steps like these can result in a big savings in the heating and cooling costs to your home. It is worth considering that if you choose to then cover the pergola with clear polycarbonate or un-insulated metal roofing the affect will be an increase on the thermal load inside your house and higher running costs.
In some cases, salvaging the building materials from the parts of your house that you demolish can help reduce the carbon emissions inherent in using new materials. Re-using old timbers and bricks are two materials that can be straight forward to make ready for re-use and contribute to the aesthetic of retaining parts of the house as memory. The cost of labour involved in this process is difficult to gauge and should be carefully considered during the design process if re-use of existing materials is proposed.