Building a LEED Certified Home

Allison Wear: I’m Allison Wear and I’m building this house along with Frank Navarro. We are going for a LEED certification which is a base on a national program. It's a leadership, environmental and energy efficient design.

There are four different levels you can go for; basic, silver, gold, or platinum. And we are going for the gold level which is a quite difficult level to achieve. It’s based on an eight category point system and we get earned points in each category as we go along the building process.

Megan Gilman: This home has photvoltaic panels on the roof, 6.7 kilowatts of PV which will supply about 75% of the electrical needs of the house on a yearly basis. They also have solar hot water panels which will keep their domestic hot water with sun. We have high efficiency heating and cooling equipments which is very important when you focus on building this home as tight as we can.

There are lots of things you can probably do on your own house. The easiest is conservation. If you’re not in a room, turn off the light. If you are not in the room, turn down the heat. Use for ground thermostats to control the temperature of your rooms when you’re not in them. We used compact fluorescent bulbs. They can be recycled very easily now. They use about 20% of the energy of that incandescent light bulb.

So that is the easiest savings you’ll pay back in no time. The easiest thing you can do to save energy is just not use it.