Many students using our footprint calculator said that they could not pledge to reduce their home footprints because they were not making the decisions for the household. Here is your chance to design your own sustainable virtual household!
If you had your own home, what would you do to make it more energy efficient? Where would you get your electricity from? Where would your house be? Would you live near to your school or work or local transit options? Where would you get your food from?
MY Family Footprint >
Who needs lamps when we have the sun?
If I were to design a house that was energy efficient I would design it with a lot of windows. A space with many windows allows a massive amount of natural sunlight to come in. This is light years (no pun intended) more efficient than solar panels, which requires a great amount of energy to build. Also, they have been shown to have associations with pollution and are made with exotic materials. (http://energyinformative.org/solar-ener … -and-cons/). I have many windows in my current home and during the day, we barely turn on the lights. The world could reduce its carbon footprint dramatically if we stopped ignoring our primary source of natural light, our sun.
I completely agree with you on how this is helpful to the environment, and I have began doing this as well! During the day, I open the blinds in my house and use sunlight to illuminate my room, versus using light bulbs. I find that this gives me the same quality light, but is less pollutive.
I agree with you but a lot of windows are not well insulated we spend more in heating the house than we save. If we use LED lights this will be better because a lot of people still don't have them.