How would you like to save some money on your household utility bills – while helping the planet at the same time?
Sound intriguing? Then stop by the Green Model Home at the Nashville Earth Day Festival and let the experts at E3 Innovate show you how easy it is to reduce your home’s energy needs.
E3 Innovate is a Nashville-based home performance company. Simply put, E3 helps homeowners make their homes more energy-efficient, comfortable and healthy. The firm focuses on cost-effective upgrades such as insulation, air-sealing and duct-sealing.
The Green Model Home will demonstrate how investing in energy efficiency can greatly reduce your utility bills while making your home more comfortable and healthy.
Green aspects of the Model Home could include eco-friendly interior finishes, like sustainable flooring (bamboo or renewable hardwoods) and paints with no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The Model Home will contain environmentally preferable products like high-recycled sheetrock on the inside, while highly-recycled outside cladding and reflecting shingles will be featured prominently on the home’s exterior. “The reflecting shingles reflect radiant heat to keep the house cooler in the summer,” explains E3 Innovate co-owner Jeff Middlebrooks. “Reflecting shingles can keep the heat in your attic down in the 90-degree range in mid-summer instead of letting it become a 150-degree box.”
The Green Model Home will also feature renewable energy systems such as a geothermal heat pump and solar panels.
Homeowners will be relieved to know that some of the eco-friendly materials on display in the model home (such as the recycled drywall, no-VOC paint and recycled interior cladding) cost no more than conventional materials. Other products, such as spray foam insulation, may cost more up front, but can save homeowners a lot of money in the long-term. The calculation works the same as with CFL bulbs – they cost more than incandescent bulbs up front, but they last longer and provide impressive energy cost savings too.
The Model Home gives E3 Innovate a chance to teach people how they can combine energy-efficiency improvements with renewable energy systems to create a zero-energy home that actually produces as much energy as it uses. “We want to demonstrate how easy it is to make a zero-energy home,” says Middlebrooks. “Zero-energy homes are not some sort of futuristic spaceship. They are things that can be built right now.”
So come on out to see the Green Model Home at the Earth Day Festival. There will be workshops at the home throughout the day and plenty of opportunities to get a hands-on look at the latest and greatest energy-efficient products and improvements for your home.
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