Great Green Idea: Green Furnishing: Will More Windows Make my Home Greener?

Will More Windows Make my Home Greener?

Adding more windows to your home is a great idea on different levels. To start with, it makes any property a lot more attractive looking and gives the occupants an enhanced view of the outside world. A crisp, winter evening is a great time to look out on the world from the comfort of your own home while a spring morning with flowers blossoming and birds chirping is another great time to look out while you are snug in bed or sipping coffee in the kitchen.

Apart from these aesthetic concerns another huge advantage to putting more windows into your house is that it can also make it - and by extension you - more ecologically friendly. This works on two levels. In the first place you will often find that you need less heating on cooler days. How often have you been cold inside your home but when you have gone outside, a bit of rather weak sunshine has made it seem a bit warmer than indoors? Cleverly placed windows can help capture winter sunshine and warm up your property when it most needs it.

The other side of the coin is that your home is easier to cool naturally in warm weather if you have a number of windows in it. This is because you can open some windows and get a pleasant breeze running from one end of your home to the other without needing to switch on the air conditioning. This can save you a lot on your home energy bills during a hot, sticky summer and will also help the environment. Another benefit is that a sweet, natural draught of air is much nicer to feel on your face than one caused by a machine.

Of course, if your home already has a good number of windows in it but you feel that they aren't helping you cut down on your energy consumption then there a couple of very likely reasons for that. The first one is that they have been badly fitted or have become damaged and are consequently not working efficiently. This is obviously most evident in winter, when your attempts at heating the place just don't work as they should. Getting the windows checked and professionally fixed can substantially reduce your energy bills and help your house become greener at the same time.

Another possibility is that your windows are simply placed in the wrong positions or aren't giving you the benefits that they should be. This would be most noticeable in two instances; a lack of winter sunlight entering the property and an inability to get a good refreshing breeze in the house during the warmer part of the year. This is a much trickier problem to fix, as you presumably don't really want to go ripping out windows and putting in new ones.

The simplest thing to do in this case is to try and solve the problem without taking any drastic measures. Sometimes it is simply a question to cutting back some overhanging trees or working out how to get the sun and the wind to pass some outbuildings or walls.