Home Improvement To Become More Eco-Friendly

Whether you are looking for ways to cut your monthly bills or upgrade your home to implement more smart home features, the best route is to make sustainable changes to your home. As the environment becomes more and more endangered, many people are also actively seeking to make their house greener and reduce their overall carbon footprint. There really are simple ways to help the world around you, without overhauling or re-thinking your entire lifestyle. At Montrose Glass, we are a key player in keeping your house green, keep reading to find out how.

Solar Panels

 Solar panels on the roof of your property, or even your outbuildings, are designed to absorb solar energy that can then be directly connected to your home. With current solar technologies, it is not possible to store solar energy. This means that any unused power harvested by solar panels is transferred onto your electricity grid and fed into other homes and businesses. This means that you will be improving the efficiency of your own home, but making other properties more sustainable and energy responsible, too! If you are planning to utilise this method of reducing your carbon footprint or fossil fuel consumption, you will be aware that it can be an extremely costly start-up price but endlessly beneficial in the long run. After all, sustainability is all about futureproofing!

Replace Your Doors

Reconsidering both the internal and external doors on your property can vastly improve the insulation and heat retention. This will mean you are reducing how much you rely on unsustainably sourced heat. When searching for internal doors to make your home or business more sustainable, you should pay attention to the material as well as the supplier. Buying wooden doors from an environmentally committed timber or wood merchant is one of the best options. If you prefer the classic, contemporary appeal of glass doors that allow light to flow throughout your home, ensure they are double glazed. Domestically sourced is also best! As an added bonus, installing proper, high-quality glazing to your domestic or commercial property will also increase your resale value!

A consideration many forget when they are thinking about their environmentally friendly home is their carbon paw-print! Your beloved animals could be causing damage and costing you money if you have a poorly installed cat flap or doggy door! Ensuring all your patio doors are also double glazed will reduce your energy consumption, too!

Replace Your Boiler

Your boiler should be performing well in two key areas in order to be considered energy efficient; heating and hot water. To put things into perspective for you, ineffective heating can make a 55% difference in what you pay annually in energy bills. As we mentioned, solar panels are an extremely beneficial option for minimising your consumption, but there are boiler upgrade options that can improve your property’s functionality, too. Of course, pay attention to the energy efficiency rating (A is best, G is worst), but you can upgrade your home to use smart technologies. Smart boilers come with an assistant app which means you can control your heating from your phone.

If you really are looking to invest in sustainability, upgrading your home to install smart home appliances will allow you to control your kitchen or electrical assets wherever you are! This means you will cut down on usage time of your appliances, minimising energy consumption.

Re-consider Your Landscaping

If you have a lot of west or south-facing windows, you might consider planting foliage-heavy trees. This may seem a low-tech way of upgrading your house, but it is extremely aesthetically pleasing and low-cost. It improves your efficiency because it provides external insulation, shading your home in the summer and allowing light through in the winter when the branches are bare. Professional tree surgeons will also be able to map out the best place to plant and advise on species!  However, investing in improving your double glazing is a more assured way of improving your domestic insulation.