Sustainability and residential development : a guide to cost-efficient green building technologies

Abstract

Given the upward trend of global energy consumption in recent decades, it has become imperative that countries reduce the amount of energy used on an annual basis. In America, the residential sector is one of the primary energy consumers, but many homeowners lack reliable information about how to build sustainable homes. This lack comes from the difficulty found in trying to quantify energy savings and costs of different sustainable technologies. Focusing on the commonwealth of Massachusetts, this thesis has compiled costs and energy savings for four different sustainable technologies- geothermal heating, heat recovery ventilation, triple-pane windows and a range of insulation materials. Considering all of these options, an interactive computer code was designed to take in inputs from the user about their home, calculate the energy needs of the home, and optimize the technologies and materials chosen based on a budget given by the user. The final result is a list of insulation choices for the walls, roof and floor of a home, the heating and ventilation systems, and window types for the highest energy savings within the users budget.