Smart Landscaping Slices Energy Bills

Smart Landscaping Slices Energy Bills

Effective landscaping can create environmental benefits in each of the green building categories defined by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED ranking system: water efficiency, indoor air quality, materials, air, sustainability and energy. For easy, beautiful landscaping plans that save energy and money, keep reading.

Huettl Landscape Architecture

Plant conifers in which they can serve as a windscreen. They will block cold winter gusts, supply beautiful green buffer zones and stop winds from wicking indoor heat away.

Lee Ann Marienthal Gardens

While evergreens with dense foliage give a stronger buffer, these highly structured conifers possess an architectural allure.

Cary Bernstein Architect

For a clean look or for an area where foliage won’t flourish, a wall might also provide a similar level of wind protection.

Straight Line Landscape

Homes in colder climates can add warmth by putting fire features and outdoor kitchens close to the house, in which the heat can permeate or serve as a buffer to colder surrounding temperatures. In this garden, the strategy provides another advantage: The construction of the house and fireplace, together with the roof, can make the outside area usable in colder months.

Weisz Selection Yard & Landscape Services, Inc..

In warmer climates, it may be wise to place fire features and outdoor kitchens at a space that prevents heat from enveloping or entering a construction during warmer times of the year.

Style your perfect outdoor kitchen

Beautiful bones and purple stones

Deciduous trees, unlike many conifers, are excellent energy savers, providing color in the summertime while letting in light and heat in winter.

Hufft Projects

Trees are the greatest air conditioners. They supply color and can reduce temperatures under by as much as 20 degrees.

McClellan Architects

This home’s striking floor-to-ceiling windows must provide lovely daylight light, which makes it feasible to cut back on artificial light. The walls of trees filters sunlight, reducing glare and heat.

Johnsen Landscapes & Pools

Obviously, trees can supply the identical shady benefit to an outdoor garden area.

Ron Herman Landscape Architect

In the winter, when leaves have fallen, deciduous trees allow sunshine through to warm outdoor and indoor spaces, reducing home heating expenses.

As you may have guessed, tactical positioning of conifers changes from tactical positioning of deciduous trees. Deciduous trees work best to the south and west of houses, the regions most likely to receive direct sunlight.

Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces

Hardscapes like concrete patios and drives are famous for increasing the “heat island” effect. When sun reflects off their tough surfaces, then it reverberatesheat a room. Choosing green foliage, even at ground elevation, keeps a space cool.

A meadow such as this, especially as a substitute for a conventional yard, is a fantastic bang-for-the-buck sustainable landscaping strategy. It produces dramatic improvements in both indoor and outdoor air quality. By reducing the need for energy and water, then it can save a household as much as $2,500 per 1,000 square feet every year.

The Garden Route Company

If hardscaping is essential, it is good to understand that light materials attract less heat.

Shades Of Green Landscape Architecture

Natural materials, like this granite counter, may also absorb light and heat. A number of these materials are appropriate for driveways as well as patios.

Woolly Pocket

Developing a green wall prevents constructions that receive excessive sunshine from transmitting the sun’s heat indoors. This wall at Los Angeles’ SmoggShoppe isn’t simply energy efficient; it’s living, vertical art.

Obviously, if this heat is what you need, this isn’t the way for you.

Blasen Landscape Architecture

Planting thick foliage in external containers is a simple approach that requires less technical experience and commitment than a green wall. When temperatures cool, then move the containers to sheltered or indoor spaces.

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More:
Outdoor Design: Save That Tree!

Landscape Tour: Two Rural Acres in Maine

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