I will spare you the entire thought and building processes and show you what we finally decided on.

Since this is southwest orientation, my main concern was getting extra light and heat, since the winter sun does not come around to that side until late morning. I put three fixed skylights along the lowest part of the ceiling, which has worked well. The sun comes through them a few hours before it gets to the front.

In the New Hampshire house, the south facing windows were floor-to-ceiling. I wanted as much sun coming in as possible for daytime heating. Here in Taos, I wanted a planting bed close to the windows for maximum light, so the windows are in the 5′ space above the 3′ deep planting bed. In both instances there is a 1′ spacer between them for support.

Ventilation is as important as heating. Plants and people don’t like temperatures that are too hot, as much as they don’t like them cold. To keep everyone and everything comfortable, I installed:

• A glass door flanked by two double-hung windows. This allows more sun in winter and serves double duty to ventilate in summer.
• Two double-hung windows in the end wall
• Two VeluxR operable skylights in the upper part of the ceiling. This is where heat will rise, which made it the most logical place for a moveable vent. Air moves in through the windows carrying the heat out of the top vents. Moving air is cool air, so opening the windows and the vents cools off the greenhouse, even if it is hot outside.

The soil in the bed is to be part of the thermal mass. It will absorb the sun’s heat to keep the temperature levels even and keep the plants warm. The concrete floor and an adobe-lined wall on the northern side are also mass that will absorb sun and ambient heat to radiate back out at night.?

The ceiling is super insulated, and exterior doors lead into the four rooms of the house. There is no supplemental heat in the greenhouse. In the event there are many cloudy days in a row or old-timey winter temperatures of 40 below, I will sacrifice the plants as the greenhouse gets cold, but the heat in the other rooms will not be lost. The girls have small gas heaters in their rooms for the coldest days and nights.

The work was done enough by Thanksgiving to start seeing the benefits. My fuel bills that following winter were half of what I’d been used to paying. I cut my wood consumption by half with the new ceiling insulation and double pane windows, and my natural gas bill was about $40 a month at it’s peak with the girls using their heaters.

Come spring, I got an energy audit and a surprisingly good HERS (Home Energy Rating System) score.?

Although the environmental movement has been around for years, many communities are just starting to understand the importance of incorporating green practices into urban planning, business practices, and governmental regulations. Large and small cities have started writing green policies into their planning and development codes, and citizens are petitioning to get green initiatives on local ballots.

By demanding the incorporation of green practices and environmental regulations in planning and development decisions, environmental advocates are affecting how sustainability is incorporated in their towns and cities. When looking at cities across America, it’s easy to see that there are plenty of cities who have been “going green” for years (such as Portland, Oregon), and other communities that are just stepping up to the green challenge. Regardless of what cities have done in the past, the fact that so many cities are taking steps to build sustainability into their communities is good for everyone. In an effort to find the greenest places in America, I’ve compiled a list of the greenest American cities using surveys from Country Home, SustainLane, Popular Science and Our Green Cities.

Methodology

Though focused on the same end result (the greenest American city), each of these 4 organizations used different criteria in determining what makes a city green. In compiling their list, Country Home looked at the official energy policies, green power, green buildings, and the availability of fresh, locally grown food in each community. I was disappointed that the Country Home data wasn’t explained in greater detail, but also found it interesting that the cities on their list were comparable to the cities selected by the other organizations.

Popular Science provides the detailed methodology used in determining their top 50 cities, which includes a ranking of sustainable practices in the Electricity, Transportation, Green Living (buildings, construction, development), and Recycling/Green Perspectives of each city. If you’re interested in learning exactly how Popular Science selected their 50 greenest cities, make sure you check out these case studies that break down the methodology used in the survey.

To figure out their list of sustainable cities, Our Green Cities applied their own “Index of Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously,” a checklist that looks at smart growth activities, land usage, transportation, energy policy, pollution, and sustainable projects taking place in each of the cities. If you’re interested in what makes a city sustainable according to Our Green Cities, you can read their definition here.

SustainLane applied an impressively comprehensive method of determining the greenest cities in America, and offers an in-depth explanation of their methodology on their website. Using primary and secondary research to compile their list, SustainLane analyzed data collected from NGOs, city and state governments, federal agencies, their own interviews and surveys, and public data sources (such as academic research and media studies) to find the top green cities in America.

And the Winners Are…

1. Portland, Oregon

2. Greater San Francisco Bay Area, California

3. Seattle, Washington

4. Chicago, Illinois

5. Boston/Cambridge

6. Boulder, Colorado

7. Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota

8. Eugene, Oregon

9. Denver, Colorado

10. Albuquerque, New Mexico

The cities on this list have worked hard to incorporate green building practices, renewable energy sources, and innovative land use policies into their communities. Portland has 35 LEED certified buildings and strict limits on development, while San Francisco has planted fruit trees on city streets and made recycling a top-priority. If you’re interested in learning more about the eco-policies that guide these cities, check out the SustainLane rankings. SustainLane provides a wealth of information on each of their top 50 green cities, and you might just find ideas on how you can get your own city on the list in coming years.

Additional Resources on Sustainable/Green/Eco-Friendly Communities

Center for Sustainable Cities

Sustainable Measures: Sustainable Community Indicator Checklist

Regional Environmental Center Sustainable Cities Project

The Institute for Sustainable Cities

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• The Top Three Sustainable Cities in the United States

As the general population really starts to embrace the green movement in their lives and communities, we have to consider that green buildings and green construction are probably going to explode in the next few years. Green building and construction is on the rise – small towns all over America are passing ordinances and legislation that mandates green initiatives in all new construction projects and encourages green building otherwise.

To assist those who may be interested in proposing local legislation aimed at promoting green construction, I’ve comprised a list of organizations that help industry professionals take their communities and commercial districts into the green era. These resources have literature that can be used to educate citizens, governments and businesses, and also information that can actually be used to guide the green building process.

The US Green Building Council is a non-profit organization dedicated to making green buildings accessible to everyone in this country within a generation.

To promote the design, construction and maintenance of green buildings, the organization has developed a rating system and voluntary certification program that allows architects, real estate professionals, facility managers, engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, construction managers, lenders and government officials to implement green design, building and operations standards in new and existing construction. According to the organization,

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System? encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices…and provides benchmarks for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.

For communities that have initiated legislation requiring all new construction projects to be green certified, the rating system and certification program developed by the US Green Building Council is a great place to learn about all of the technologies, products and services that exist to help communities go green.

Another site to check out if you’re involved in construction is BuildingGreen, is an independent company committed to providing accurate, unbiased, and timely information designed to help building-industry professionals and policy makers improve the environmental performance, and reduce the adverse impacts, of buildings. BuildingGreen has a library full of information designed to help industry professionals learn about their green and “integrated design” building options.

Using the BuildGreen site, you can find out about the impact of every stage of a building process, and discover the tools available to help minimize your project’s harm to the environment. The site has literature about what it even means to be green, and offers some interesting case studies on how companies have applied green building practices in their construction projects.

Additional Resources

The US Green Building Council has a huge list of Green Building Links to help industry professionals develop and implement green building standards in all of their projects.

The US Department of Energy High Performance Buildings Database is comprised of 99 case studies with a focus on the green building practices applied during construction.

The Cost of Green Revisited by Davis Langdon contains research results obtained by examining the true cost of new construction using the LEED Rating System verses non-LEED certified buildings and finds that there is no discernible difference in the overall construction costs.

eco-structure is a bimonthly magazine for construction industry professionals looking to learn about sustainability and green building design, construction and operations.