Energy

These days, with so many builders touting themselves as green, the whole idea of a green home can seem like a marketing ploy.  Instead of stepping into someone else’s business plan,  your home can be your own financial survival tool – that is what you can learn from looking at the off-grid way of life.

When a builder markets his homes as environmentally friendly because they feature water-saving toilets and high-efficiency gas furnaces, that’s a problem: You’d be hard-pressed to find a new home without these features. But here’s the thing:  the relative improvements in resource consumption compared to the wasteful old ways are still way out of whack with the way you live if you are harvesting your own power and water, off the grid.   You can live a comfortable off-grid life on 25% of the water and electricity that people regard as normal.  But LEED standards are more like 50% or more – ie half what is “normal” but double what off-gridders would consume.…