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 >
Do it for the Investment
If I were to design a house I would want to make sure that I would be living in it for a solid amount of time. I would want to ensure this so I could use solar panels to produce about half of my home's energy. According to New and Clean Energy, it takes about 9 years to recover the investment of solar panels compared to over 20 years when solar power was in its initial stages. The lights in my house are currently on a timer system and this helps save energy from us leaving the lights on. I would like to use that system in my new house as well. I would try to get my food from as many local sources as possible and not support CAFO's. These operations emit a ton of methane, a gas 20x more potent at trapping greenhouse gases than CO2. I would have a car, but I would bike to work. Lastly I would locate my house in an area where it would receive enough light for my solar panels to be viable, but I wouldn't want to out it in too much sunlight as this would cause air conditioning emissions.
I would also recommend a more efficient and eco friendly way of heating instead of using gas, Such as electric, also, for water heating, you can use a solar water heater, which are very eco friendly.