BUILDING DEFINITIONS
Small is the new Green: 1500 sq ft homes are becoming popular. Smaller homes use less energy to build and operate allowing owners to spend more time doing what they love and minimizing impacts to the environment.
Build it Tight, Ventilate it Right: Current best building practices and building science have concluded building a super tight house and providing mechanical ventilation is an essential component of super insulation strategies and healthy indoor air quality.
Sustainability: Meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Green Versus Sustainable: Green generally refers to a product or practice that requires fewer resources and has fewer negative impacts on the environment than its conventional counterpart. Sustainable is a higher standard than green that refers to a product that is forever renewable and has no harmful impacts on the environment, the people that provide it or manufacture it.
Adaptable Buildings: A key component to sustainability, adaptable buildings can be easily renovated for new uses. A variety of engineering options and construction techniques allow building to adapt to new uses.
Advanced Framing: Design and construction techniques that dramatically reduce the amount of lumber needed to frame a structure. This allows more insulation to fill the walls and reduces thermal bridging losses.
Thermal bridging: Highly conductive building materials such as framing lumber conduct energy into and out of a building increasing the heating and cooling loads.
Passive Solar Design: A building specifically designed to collect and store the sun’s heat in the winter and cool the building through shading and use of thermal mass properties in the summer.
Thermal Mass: Dense materials like earth, concrete and stucco can absorb and retain energy, allowing them to help heat or cool a building.
Integrated building design: A design process that takes into account how building components are related and maximizes their effectiveness by designing them to work together as a system.
House as a System: (H.A.S.): A whole house system approach to designing for maximum efficiency by fully integrating each individual component of a house with the next. Effectively making the sum greater than the parts.
Building Envelope: A buildings shell, including exterior walls, windows, doors, roof and bottom floor.
Conditioned Space: An enclosed space supplied with conditioned air. Attics, basements and crawl spaces can be conditioned or unconditioned space. Controlling which spaces are conditioned and which ones are not is a very important aspect in house design.
Conditioned Crawl Space: Many crawl spaces can have poor indoor air quality such as damp moldy air. By insulating and conditioning these spaces the air quality can be improved, thereby improving the air space inside the house as well.