How Homeowner Behavior Can Improve Operational Efficiency
Last Updated: Mar 29, 2025Solar panels and high-quality insulation can undoubtedly help make a home consume less energy. But, how you live and operate a home—adopting a sustainable lifestyle—can have a much more significant impact on the environment in the long run. Today, many homeowners are unaware of the importance of homeowner behavioral strategies for reducing their household's carbon footprint. For example, replacing incandescent bulbs with LED lights could reduce the amount of energy your home requires for lighting. However, forgetting to turn those lights off when not in use negate the potential efficiency savings.
Table of Contents
- Why Does This Matter?
- Are Big Homes Bad For The Environment?
- How Can Smart Technology Use at Home Reduce Energy?
- Can Human Behavior Reduce Energy Use?
Similarly, installing a smart or programmable thermostat might save homeowners between 10 and 15 percent on their heating and cooling bills. But these energy efficiency savings require correct usage of the technology! Millions of homes in North America purchase smart thermostats every year. Learning how to use smart home technologies is essential for increasing the operational efficiency of the structures we inhabit.
For this reason, the most rigorous and exacting sustainable building certifications, such as the Living Building Challenge, don't simply offer certifications to homes with the right technologies in place. Instead, they require at least 12 months of homeowner occupancy data. This requirement ensures that the humans who inhabit these homes know how to correctly use the sustainable technologies that builders and designers put in place during construction.
In an interview with Allison Capen, the former Technical Director of the Living Building Challenge, she told us that requiring a twelve-month performance period after occupancy enables Living Building Challenge project teams to know they have met the requirements. She went on to say that they learn along the way about reducing energy demand, commissioning systems, procurement policies, and educating occupants. Doing all this enables them to continue to operate as desired, even after the auditor is gone. The US Green Building Council also recognized the importance of ongoing operations and maintenance of commercial buildings when it introduced the LEED rating system for Existing Buildings. This rating system also requires at least 12 months of energy, water, and waste data to measure ongoing performance.
Why Does This Matter?
Over 70 million single-family detached homes in the United States use a lot of energy and water. A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine stated that back in 1993, space heating and cooling accounted for approximately 58% of the total residential energy use in the US. They went on to say that, By 2011, heating and cooling made up only 48%, due to more efficient equipment, better insulation, and shifts in population to warmer climes. The study also found that overall home energy consumption increased during the same period. This increase was primarily due to a marked increase in the demand stemming from appliances, electronics, and lighting, in addition to the rise in the average size of single-family homes.
This is not meant to be a harsh commentary on the human condition. Instead, we hope that it sparks ideas and conversations about how we think about sustainability—and how we might rethink our behaviors—in the world we live in today.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
