Green Home Building ─ Money-Saving Strategies for an Affordable, Healthy, High-Performance Home

According to conventional wisdom, building a green home is an expensive endeavor. The standard approach treats green as an add-on, tacking "premium" products, finishes, and equipment onto a traditional home design. As a result, many green home projects end up over budget or fail to achieve their environmental and performance goals.

Green Home Building explodes the myth that green homes have to cost more. Using proven methods based on applied building science, the authors show how to:

• Lower base construction costs to provide funding for high performance upgrades
• Achieve a net-zero energy home, including "zero-ing" water, waste, carbon, and associated costs within fifteen years
• Live affordably into the future, despite anticipated rising costs for fuel, water, materials, taxes, and health care

This comprehensive guide to building green on any budget defines the strategies that maximize the return on green investments. Written for anyone who has ever been swayed by the argument that the price tag limits how green a home can be, Green Home Building is a must-read for builders, contractors, architects, designers, and homeowners.

Miki Cook is a green building and sustainability consultant who has dedicated her career to educating contractors and the public on the strategies, methods, and benefits of green homes.

Doug Garrett has trained thousands of homebuilders, architects, and sub-contractors to build energy-efficient homes using applied building science to improve comfort, durability, and healthfulness while meeting or exceeding the energy code.

Miki Cook is a green building and sustainability consultant for the oldest green building program in the nation, Austin Energy Green Building (AEGB). She has spent her career in the residential construction industry, where for the last two decades she has focused on green building certification including acting as Green Rater for the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Homes and Energy Star programs and ICC-700, The National Green Building Standard. More recently, Miki has dedicated her career to educating contractors and the public on the strategies, methods and benefits of green homes, and helping them to achieve those goals.

Doug Garrett, CEM, founded Austin Energy's Residential and Multi-Family Energy Conservation programs. He has studied building science, indoor air quality, moisture management, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning throughout his career. In 1996, Doug established the first building science consulting business in Texas, and continues to provide building science-based forensic investigations, diagnostics and design consultations for clients and home builders across the nation. Doug has presented hundreds of seminars on applied building science, energy efficiency, moisture management, energy codes, air conditioning, indoor air quality and green building, and has served on numerous advisory councils and task forces for high performance industry standards, energy codes, alternative fuels, health concerns and housing affordability.