Green Building How-to

The six sections here (links on sidebar at left) cover the four typical, engineering oriented Green Building topics of energy, water and material conservation along with healthy house design. The fifth section, on architecture covers the more subjective areas of dealing with human emotional desires in building.  These aesthetic issues are often omitted from discussions on Green Building, and sometimes at odds with the engineering as well.  The Sensible House attempts to work to reconcile those conflicts, or at least expose them so they can be dealt with objectively rather than just emotionally.  Finally, the sixth section reviews standard and alternative construction methods.

These topics are covered extensively enough for anyone to be able to make informed decisions, but because the information is condensed from thousands of pages of sources, it is by nature somewhat limited.

Green Building is by nature climate specific, and while much work has gone in to giving solutions for multiple climates, the original site was northwest specific, and so our coverage for hot-dry and hot-humid climates is somewhat lacking.

In the case studies section, there is currently one example (a second coming soon) of a house built using the principles described here.