Rebecca Brayton: It's widely believed that if it's environmentally friendly, it costs more. However, renovating your home to be green, will eventually save you a bundle. Hi! I am Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com. And today, we will be learning more about ecological friendly renos from the men, behind one of the North Americas most green homes. Is there a significant difference in costs between building a green house and building a regular house?
Troy McGarrigle: See you have a design for a house and you build it in the conventional methods or Eco methods, I think I would estimate 10% to 15% more expensive to build Eco, depending on the role of the people who are doing the work, at the same time that will payback the house owner over 25 year, if you take it as a mortgage investment.
Emmanuel Cosgrave: In this case, there was absolutely no difference. We actually built for under conventional building costs and it is actually LEED-certified and Platinum, which is the highest rating, you can get under the LEED Certification System. It has a lot more to do with, how you do things rather then what type of fancy gadgets you spend money on.
Rebbecca Britton: Now that you actually live in the home and is it saving you money and if so, how much?
Emmanuel Cosgrave: It consumed about $5000 worth of energy per year. Now, we are down to well under $1000 in energy cost and we've doubled the living area. If you go through the entire building, I have estimated what was bought as new materials, and we're over three-quarters old stuff. When your reclaiming materials not only are you not to say for example, cutting a tree down to make your wood, you're also displacing wood from a land fill and putting it to another useful life.
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