Eco-Friendly Cabin Design
Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction: These eco-friendly cabin design methods can save you money and benefit your health while minimizing your impact on the earth.
If you decide to build or renovate your cabin or second home, consider hiring design professionals who are committed to eco-friendly or sustainable design methods.
These methods can save you money and benefit your health while minimizing your impact on the earth.
The land you build on and the building products you use inside and outside can affect your environment. Here are some suggestions if you are interested in designing or renovating your home using sustainable methods.
Your Cabin Location for Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction
Ensures that water runoff flows away from your buildings. You won’t have to worry about flooding or mold caused by moisture.
Be aware of lakes, rivers, and wetlands; ideally, don’t build within 100 feet of wetlands or 50 feet of a body of water. This will reduce human contamination of the water and reduce the effects of erosion.
Build on vacant land or over cleared land. By reusing and improving an already disturbed site, you green one area without affecting another.
Keep landscaping, Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction brush, and other disturbances that affect the natural environment surrounding the building and streets to a minimum:
No more than 40 feet from the edge of the building and 10 feet from the edges of the streets. This helps keep native flora and fauna intact and preserve ecosystems.
Minimize your impervious surfaces like your roof and driveway.
Consider installing green roofs:
vegetation instead of traditional roofing material.
Green roofs on small buildings are beautiful and have been a feature of Scandinavian country homes for centuries. Plus, green roofs are naturally cooler in the summer.
Consider a reinforced grass/gravel mix for your driveway or a permeable sidewalk that allows rain to drain naturally.
Control your roof runoff—before it reaches a body of water Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction —with rain barrels, rain gardens, or green roofs. This also reduces destructive sediment and heated runoff entering your lake, river, or stream. Water Efficiency
Landscape with native plants that can survive drought. They thrive in your climate and don’t require as much water and maintenance as other types of plants.
Consider composting toilets. This can reduce your water use by 20 to 50 %. The compost can be used as a natural fertilizer around ornamental plants; however, check with your local health department for disposal regulations for Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction.
Choose low-flow faucets, showerheads, and toilets. Low-flow faucets use 40 percent less water than traditional faucets.
Low-flow showerheads save about 50 percent of the water used for a traditional shower. New toilets (which are required by law to be low-flow) use less than a third of the water volume of older models.
Collect rainwater to water and wash plants in Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction.
Energy Performance
Wall and roof insulation values (R-values) and window energy efficiency ratings should meet or exceed those of high-quality homes in your area. Visit ornl.gov for recommended R-value or on your location.
Also, look into walls constructed with insulated concrete forms (ICFs). They’re no longer just used for foundations.
ICFs have R-values between 17 and 26, so homeowners who build with ICF exterior walls can save about 40 percent on their heating costs and about 30 percent on their cooling costs compared to an equivalently constructed wood-frame home.
Consider insulating your cabin so that no winter heating is required to keep the base structure at 40 degrees Fahrenheit so it can survive a severe ice storm without heat or electricity.
Vacation rentals are often located in places where the power grid is a little less reliable. Why not do everything you can to protect yourself from costly freezes?
Consider installing a solar system in Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction that will make your home less dependent on the grid.
Materials and Sources for Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction
Explore the possibility of reusing an existing, structurally sound building for the structure and shell – saving the environmental impact of construction and transportation components for a new building.
This existing building can be an existing one, or a building that has been moved from another location, such as a well-preserved log cabin, and then rebuilt on your site.
Choose local materials to reduce transportation costs and maintain commerce in your area.
Also consider using materials with a high recycled content, such as: B. steel roof panels, benches made of recycled paper or glass, and flooring made of recycled tires, for example.
Such products give their components new life and can be recycled again.
Choose products made from rapidly renewable elements such as cork or bamboo. Cork trees are stripped of their bark every nine to fourteen years; the tree is never felled and the habitat remains undisturbed.
Bamboo is the fastest growing plants on the Earth.
Natural Daylight
The old design rule for windows was to use 10 percent of the floor area for window sizes. Forget about this and choose 15 percent or more as your planning guideline.
Use the best energy-efficient windows and place them as high up in the walls as possible to optimally illuminate your living space.
Natural Ventilation
Plan your rooms with windows on two opposite walls for cross-ventilation by Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction. Useful skylights are great for venting out hot air, creating a chimney effect, and effectively lighting a room.
Typically, Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction vacation homes are used primarily in the summer. North-facing glass is best for bringing cool daylight into the interior.
These are just a few sustainable design practices you can implement. The Jeddah KARFAN BARKS PORTABLE (KBP) provides a framework for sustainable design at different levels at Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction.
See the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System by logging on to usgbc.org. They can improve your “green quotient” and benefit your environment, your wallet, and your health.
KARFAN BARKS PORTABLE in Jeddah , is a LEED-accredited architect with more than 25 years of experience designing cabins, homes, and schools according to Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction.
When he’s not designing, Steve enjoys trout fishing, canoeing on lakes, and backpacking in the mountains for Eco-Friendly Cabin Construction.