Cost of a green home

October 26th, 2009 by Matthew Leonard

We’ve often been asked how much more a home built using green materials and ideas costs over a typical home.  There’s a lot more to that question than what might appear because we need to define what green is in order to answer completely.Waste not, Want not

When considering the cost of a green home, consider the benefits of building this way.  A big part of building a home with green methods and materials, is to minimize or eliminate waste.  What people don’t always think about when they buy anything is that waste is always calculated into the cost of a product or service.  You’re paying for waste.  Often times a lower priced product is cheapened to still provide a profit to the company but by cutting waste, profit can be maintained while lowering the price to the consumer.

So by definition if green helps reduce waste and reuse waste through recycling, everybody wins.  There are some “green” products that because of extra labor or extra energy needed to produce them, they are more expensive.  I don’t see these as “green” products, at least in the deepest shade of green.  They may reuse waste from another process but the offset in energy to produce the new product is not enough to make it a positive result.  Demand will create the development of better and more cost effective ways to produce these products and increase the supply to help drive down the cost.

Some products, like Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), fall into the slightly higher cost category because the prevalent method of building homes is to use virgin lumber with inefficient stick framing.  There’s a growing population of educated consumers that understands that they don’t need to wait for the supply to increase to drive down the cost of the product to make it worthwhile to use right now.  The final product, the home, will use far less energy than even an over modified stick framed house that the return on investment is only about 3 to 4 years.

To Your Health

Another benefit of a truly green home to consider is the affects it will have on your health.  Reducing toxins and regulated/filtered whole house air exchanges ease the strain on your body’s immune system.  What price do you put on being healthier will determine if the potential added cost of building green is worth it?

So, what’s the cost of  a green home? Saving extremely noticeable amounts of energy and ultimately money, conserving resources, and better health are only a few of the benefits of, currently, an added 1% to 5% to the cost of a new home.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Energy Efficiency, Green, Save Money, Structure, Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.