How to convert a regular home into a green, energy-efficient building?
Let’s first make the distinction, for the sake of convenience and clarity, between an ‘ecologically sustainable home’ and a ‘green home’. The former is something that you build with materials that make for the least use of exhaustible natural resources—a typical farmer’s house is the best example, with a combination of clay walls, cow dung surfaces, thatch roofs, limestone-coated walls. There have been homes in the urban context that have attempted to use some ‘traditional’ elements but not always with success on reducing use of natural resources.
What is labelled in current times as a ‘green home’ is what you create, architect and engineer as a regular urban home, taking in to account use of building materials for floors, walls and roofs and windows, the use of systems that reduce consumption of water and energy without compromising comfort or convenience. If you are willing to spend a little more as capital cost at the start, you can secure savings into the future that can help you recoup your additional capital cost over 5 to 10 years, depending on the feature that you are adding to your ‘green home’. These could be smarter household appliances, pumps, fans etc.
Green homes can help you save as much 30 to 50 per cent in your energy bills. With the right elements in place, you can rely less on fresh water and therefore increase water security. Beyond savings, green homes can help you generate a bit of wealth from waste, by managing its conversion into either manure or compost or even energy for your kitchen. The important thing is that a ‘green home’ in the urban context will help and enable you to reduce your dependence on government infrastructure for water, energy and waste.
First, green homes don’t cost more; they need a different approach to design and planning; they need your effort to find the right vendors for the right inputs that can offer your solutions that either cut energy and water bills; or increase life cycle of products you install at home.
It is a question of how you spend the money and not how much more or less you spend in building a green home as opposed to a regular home with conventional materials that we have known for the last 50 to 60 years.
The ‘cost’, like in any house, is to do with what you want in a house. Where a green home distinguishes itself is, in the way you have employed materials. For example, using soil blocks instead of bricks increases the duration of your building. It also helps you avoid plastering externally (and therefore cost) while adding to the aesthetic of the building.
Use of natural floors increases aesthetic appeal and even therapeutic value of your house. Ask anyone with arthritis or rheumatism, who walks barefoot at home on vitrified or ceramic tile floors, and then for some months on natural floors. Their pains dramatically ease with natural floors!
So green homes is not about price. It is a whole new order of the future. It is building technology that emerges from careful thought on design and on human needs.
In India, 10 years ago, when ‘green’ was the word for only the colour, the few green buildings that were created by pioneers like the IGBC itself, The Energy Resources Institute, ZED Group in the private sector, and a few others, witnessed a capital cost delta of about 16 to 18 per cent in going green. Today, that figure has come down to a cost differential of zero. This means that a green building costs the same as a regular building, although the mainstream building industry and Indian industry at large are not willing to concede this for their lack of understanding of the design solutions, and the dearth of professional architects and service consultants who have learnt the ropes on building such energy efficiency into their design approaches.
The sum and short of it is that clearly there is no cost difference. However, there is need for many thousands of professionals who can guide such approaches for promoters and managements of builder companies and industry at large.
