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Back to home renovation articles
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 5 Green building renovation ideas |
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 Ideas for renovating your home with green building materials and tips.
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| Toronto Painting Contractors Go Green with paint options |
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Toronto painting contractors and other business’s across Canada have Green Building options even when painting your home that you possibly never knew about. You may be asking the same question I did prior to my last experience with a professional painting contractor, How can a chemical like paint be a Green building option for my next renovation? Read about painting contractors and green paint options |
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| Green renovation energy ideas for your cottage |
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Long before green building and green renovations were popular in large cities like Toronto, Ontario, homeowners enjoying the outdoors have been organizing financial programs and preservation projects of property and wetlands all to help conserve our outdoors. Have you overlooked your own cottage or hunt camp? Is the peace and quiet that nature offers overpowered by a big diesel engine or propane tanks using fuel all day? Maybe the green building solutions available for your cottage haven’t been fully explored yet. Take a look at some power saving ideas to reduce energy costs at your cottage and improve the environment while you save |
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| Geothermal Energy - Green heating and cooling solution |
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You may be seeing more companies advertising Geothermal Heating and Cooling systems and be asking yourself what is Geothermal Energy and why should I be interested in it? A Geothermal heating and cooling system is something that has been below the radar for many years due the impact it could have on the fossil fuel industry; but if you’re interested in saving money and doing something good for the environment, a Geothermal Heating and Cooling system is worth doing some research on. What is Geothermal Energy? Geothermal Energy is energy stored in the ground that we walk on every day. The ground absorbs the sun’s energy everyday and stores it only a few feet below the surface. This energy can be extracted using a series of water pipe lines and then used to heat and cool your home all year round. Geothermal energy on large scale operations is very expensive to tap into through drilling and the ideal geographic areas are limited to supply large cities but systems to heat and cool individual homes have become more practical today than ever before. Due to the limitations Geothermal Energy has for large cities, it’s extremely green energy benefits have been over shadowed by the usefulness of Wind Turbines and Solar panels but it’s not to say your individual home can’t get a lifetime of savings by choosing to install a system like this for your home. How to extract geothermal energy for your home |
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| Green Building Renovation Costs and Features |
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Does A Green Building Renovation Cost More Than Traditional New Construction? Now that you are looking into Green Building you may want to know how much more it’s going to cost you to build green compared to everyone else today that is planning on traditional building standards. The answer is it’s only going to cost you what you feel comfortable spending and every little bit of green building products you choose to incorporate into your building project will be sure to help our environment for years to come and usually not for much more than traditional building expenses. Deciding how far to take green building |
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| Choosing the right windows for green building |
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In the early stages of designing your green building project, you need to select the locations of where you plan to install the windows. This can be a complex and challenging design project. To do this properly you need to consider the surrounding climate along with typical wind directions, possible landscapes to be planted, and sunrise and sunset conditions. A good idea is to look at all of the possible orientations of your home prior to your green building project to ensure the prevailing winds will face a corner of your home instead of the broad side with many windows and doors. This is not always possible to do as in some cases your home needs to be positioned in a specific direction or manner to meet the building requirements in your desired building location. Due to circumstances beyond your control you might not be able to avoid windows at high sun peaks but you can help capture the sun’s energy and use it to heat your home in the colder climates without the use of your solar panels. The best choice of windows to allow the sun’s energy to help heat your home is a solar heat gain coefficient window or SHGC window. |
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| Solar Energy Program – Ontario, Canada soaring to the top of North America PV charts |
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Ontario is the first province in Canada to support the construction of solar energy generation projects through the Standard Offer Program which offers property owners secure contracts and financial incentive programs to sell their energy created from solar panels back to the energy market. Solar power uses the energy that the sun produces to directly generate electricity. The sun provides us with energy every day, it’s a renewable and sustainable energy but it has never successfully been tapped into in large quantities for re sale until now. Is the technology of converting the sun’s energy into electricity worth the investment from our government? More about the solar energy program for Ontario |
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| Building a Green Roof - City of Toronto By-Laws |
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The purpose of the Toronto green roof construction standard is to provide requirements to the design or a green roof construction while meeting the Ontario Building Code requirements. Any  green roof being constructed in the City of Toronto, Ontario that exceeds 2000 square meters must first fill out a Green Roof Declaration form and submit it to the Municipality of Toronto. You can find the Green Roof Declaration form at: http://www.toronto.ca/building/forms/Green_Roof_Declaration.pdfThe typical components of a green roof required to meet the City of Toronto’s guidelines are as follows; starting from your building and moving to the top where there is vegetation. Read the rest about building a green roof in Toronto |
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| What Makes a Deck Eco-Friendly |
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So, you want a nice place outside to entertain friends or just relax with your family and a deck seems like the perfect solution. It would improve the value of your house and increase the use of your yard but you want to know what you can do to reduce the environmental impact of your new deck. There are several choices for decking materials and each one affects the environment in good and bad ways. The lessons from using pressure-treated wood, which has been phased out for residential use due to the adverse affects of its arsenic content, make us sensitive to how our choices affect our lives. What becomes of the waste materials? How do I clean my deck? What happens to the deck when its life span is over? These are some of the things to be considered. What Makes a Deck Eco-Friendly |
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| ecoENERGY program ends March 31, 2010 |
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Contractors and Homeowners alike are in disbelief of the announcement from a posting on a government site that the ecoENERGY program that was  started in 2007 has come to an abrupt end. “We’re disappointed by this decision” Steve Koch, Executive Director of NAIMA Canada. “This was a wonderful program that did exactly what it was supposed to do and more. It was one of the government’s most impactful programs to deal with climate change and energy efficiency.” Many contractors have been cashing in when homeowners have taken advantage of the financial benefits that the ecoENERGY program has offered to homeowners upgrading and renovating their home to combat rising energy costs. The program that started in 2007 was promised by the Liberal government and was to last 4 years, and despite the recent injection of an additional $80 million of funding, the program has ended on March 31,2010. About the ecoENERGY program |
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| Understanding Green Home Remodeling |
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 Americans are now spending up to 160 billion each year on remodeling their homes and businesses. A fraction of this money has been focused on what is known as green construction. Green construction or remodeling is using energy savings, recycled products, and is experiencing nothing less than a renaissance or rebirth. You can help restore a significant portion of the world’s ecosystems by using green construction. Such a practice can also help create a healthier indoor environment for your family. Continue reading about Green Home Remodeling |
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