How to Make Your Current Home a Hybrid House

‘Hybrid’ is a word that we associate with automobiles not with a house, but hybrid pertains to anything that includes mixed elements. A house can be a hybrid, and it’s a trend that homeowners are turning too, making their current home into a hybrid house. It costs far less money to modify your current home and make it a hybrid house, than the initial cost of building a total eco friendly green home that produces all it’s own utilities.

For most people, building or buying a home that is totally self sufficient by producing it’s own electricity and water is too daunting and expensive. A few simple modifications to your current home with a minimal investment of time and money can still yield big savings in your home utility bill. You won’t completely be living off the grid in a hybrid house, but a hybrid house will benefit your wallet and the planet.

By adding a rain collection tank to your current home it’s possible to collect enough rain water to supply your families water needs. For every one inch of rainfall, the roof of a 2,000 square foot home will collect around 1,250 gallons of water. A rain collection tank is fairly simple to install and the price starts at around $200. The amount of rain water collected would vary, just as family water usage varies, but a rain collection tank is an inexpensive way to make your home a hybrid house by supplementing the water you pay the city for with free water from nature.

Use the climate in which you live to help turn your current home into a hybrid house. If your climate is sunny, consider adding solar panels. A home located in a windy climate could utilize a wind turbine to supplement the electricity supply. Either the addition of solar panels or wind turbine would make your current home a hybrid house and you would re-coup the investment money in the savings on your electricity bill.

As the trend to go green at home increases, our vocabulary increases as well. Another way to make your current home a hybrid house is to be ‘passive solar’ by letting the sun warm your home during the winter. Passive solar heating is using the windows on the south side of your house to heat the home with and/or the use of certain materials that absorb and retain heat inside your home. Installing a new stone floor, concrete floor or counter tops or an interior wall made of brick can turn your current home into a hybrid house by making it passive solar.

A few modification, a little remodeling, a little money can make your current home a hybrid house.