New York State Goes Green to Save Energy

William Scranton and his family live in an old house in Norwich...complete with cracked windows, poor insulation and holes in the floor...a house he admits is falling apart and costing way too much to heat in the wintertime. “Our utility bills here are astronomical. They’re hovering around six hundred dollars a month," says Scranton.

That's why the Scranton’s are among a growing number of Americans willing to invest in a new and greener house this year.



“We feel moving into a new home with more efficient heating, lighting and everything, we could save fifty percent or more,” says Scranton.

Green homes are sprouting up across New York State under an energy program with an ambitious goal of making the state thirty-percent more energy efficient.

Kevin Stack owns Northeast Natural Homes and is a LEED inspector, an organization that provides green building standards. Stack says, “If you take a holistic approach to building, how you design and build a structure, it doesn’t cost more, it actually costs less. For every day it’s alive, every year, every month. It’s going to use less energy and be less of an environmental impact.”




Angelina Maynard is a carpenter for Von Wettberg Builders. So far she has assisted the company in building two green homes. She says, “There’s no one set way to do green. It’s all a fairly new process. It’s still developing.”

A green home takes into account how a house it built, where it is built, the materials used inside the home and many other elements. “You just try to create the least amount of waste that you can in the process of building. And that encompasses a lot of the green building,” says Maynard.

The Scranton family is in the beginning stages of designing their new energy efficient home. The plan is to build a single level home with an open floor plan. The kitchen, living room and main bedroom are on one side of the house. The guest rooms are on the opposite side. So the Scranton family can partially heat their home, saving energy and money.

If you’re looking to go green take baby steps: exchange your current light bulbs for Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs, buy energy efficient products by Energy Star, and hire someone to inspect the energy efficiency of your home.

And here’s a tip for everyone in the cold country: if you have icicles streaming down from your roof, that means you have poor insulation and heat is escaping from your home.