Chapter 10: Outside the Home: Landscaping For Energy Benefits
Have you thought about the outside of your home for energy efficiency?
Landscaping a home can be done in such a way as to allow for benefits in the energy department. In fact, you can save about 25% of your household energy consumption with a landscaping design that incorporates just the right placement of trees.
There are many things that can be done to improve your outdoor living area to keep you feeling just as happy and content as it will in keeping your energy usage to a minimum.
In fact, landscaping can do several things:
All of this from energy efficient landscaping; yes, and it usually results with a great looking yard too.
What You Need To Do
So, how can you get this done correctly? The Department of Energy in the US says that if you place just three trees surrounding your home, you can save yourself any place from $100 to $250 on your energy bills. This is because of what a tree can do.
Winter
In the winter time, the right placement of a tree can keep out some of the cold, but will still allow the warm sunshine of the winter day to stream in.
If you have any idea of what wind chill is, you can see another benefit of trees. The wind chill is the way that the wind cools things down. In the winter months, the wind chill is a secondary temperature. While the actual temperature can be 20 degrees F, the wind chill can knock it down considerably, making it feel as if it is much colder than it really is.
When you add a tree, shrubs or other structures outside of your home, the wind is stopped and can not hit the home, therefore reducing the wind chill factor for your home.
If you install what are called windbreaks (or any item that can stop the wind before it hits the home) you can reap benefits of up to 40% less fuel consumption in heating your home. If you live in a very windy area, you can lose even more, up to one third, of your winter fuel costs in this manner. (This is as compared to a home without these benefits.)
Summer
In the summer time, you will reap the rewards of cooler air. This happens due to evapotranspiration (the process of the tree moving and letting off water vapor) and shading from the tree. It can lower the temperature up to nine degrees in this way.
Another key point to make is that in a shaded area underneath a large tree, the temperature can be as much as 25 degrees F cooler than it is just above a layer of blacktop on your street.
All of this equals about 15% to up to 50% of lower need for air conditioning in the summer months. This can keep your costs down considerably. All of this just from a beautiful looking tree.
In other ways, the landscaping that you do outdoors can find benefits to your energy usage. It is easy to see that placing trees in the right locations can help. Here are some other things to take into consideration.