Energy-Efficient Home Design: Smarter Comfort, Lower Bills

Orient rooms for winter sun and summer shade, shape the building to reduce heat loss, and capture prevailing breezes. Small moves at the planning stage compound into big savings. Comment with your climate and lot constraints.

Start with the Big Idea: Whole-Home Strategy

Choose metrics that keep you honest—EUI, HERS, or even Passive House targets. Translate ambition into numbers, then design to meet them. Want our free target-setting checklist? Subscribe and we will send it to your inbox.

Start with the Big Idea: Whole-Home Strategy

Build a Better Envelope

Match R-values to climate and reduce gaps with continuous exterior insulation. Dense-pack cavities, align air and thermal layers, and protect against moisture. Have you tried mineral wool or cellulose? Share your experience and lessons learned.

Build a Better Envelope

Sealing cracks at plates, penetrations, and sheathing edges can cut heat loss dramatically. Use blower-door testing to find leaks, then verify improvements. One reader halved infiltration in a weekend and noticed quieter, cleaner indoor air.

Choose the Right Glass for Your Climate

Balance U-factor for heat retention with SHGC for solar gain. Triple glazing with warm-edge spacers boosts comfort at the couch on winter nights. What brand specs are you considering? Drop them in the comments.

Shading that Works All Year

Design fixed overhangs for summer protection and winter admission. Add exterior shades, deciduous trees, or operable louvers by elevation. Share your facade orientation and we will mock up a shading idea in a future post.

Daylight without Glare

Use higher windows, light shelves, and matte finishes to bounce light deep into rooms. Consider skylights with diffusers and proper shafts. Show us a photo of your brightest room, and we will suggest a glare fix.

Cold-climate mini-splits deliver comfort with impressive efficiency when properly sized and commissioned. Keep lines short, mount thoughtfully, and test in shoulder seasons. Considering electrification? Share your heating degree days for tailored recommendations.

Heating, Cooling, and Fresh Air

Power from the Roof: Solar and Storage

Right-Size Your PV Array

Model loads after efficiency upgrades, then size panels by orientation, tilt, and shade patterns. Plan for future EV charging or heat pump water heaters. Share your annual kWh, and we will workshop array sizes together.

Battery Storage and Resilience

Back up critical circuits—refrigeration, communications, medical devices, and one comfort zone. Pair storage with load-shifting for stormy weeks. After a three-day outage, a reader’s modest battery kept essentials humming and anxiety surprisingly low.

Measure, Learn, Improve

Install energy monitors to see where watts wander. Dashboards reveal always-on loads and forgotten settings. Post your baseline chart; we will suggest the top three actions that deliver the fastest, simplest reductions.

Materials, Health, and Embodied Carbon

Favor wood framing, cellulose insulation, mineral wool, and lower-carbon concrete mixes. Design details that minimize waste beat fancy materials. Have a supplier recommendation or cautionary tale? Share it so others avoid costly missteps.

Materials, Health, and Embodied Carbon

Select low-VOC paints, formaldehyde-free cabinetry, and balanced ventilation to flush contaminants. A serene home smells like nothing. Tell us which certifications you rely on, and we will unpack what each label truly means.