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.
Are Big Homes Bad For The Environment?
The most impactful thing that homeowners can do to use less energy and water in their homes is to rethink the size of the house they build and live in. Larger homes will require more energy to heat and cool, more light bulbs for illumination, more appliances, and more stuff to fill up the empty rooms. The average size of a new home in the UK is 76 square meters or about 818 square feet. However, in the United States, the average square footage for new single-family homes increased to 2,641 square feet in 2018. Simultaneously, the average household size has dropped, resulting in the average living space per person doubling.
Even with the latest technologies, the most energy-efficient building strategies and mechanical systems, and the best smart home systems, larger homes will inevitably require more energy and materials than their smaller counterparts. Returning to our comparison with the UK, the average monthly electricity use in the UK is only about 328 kWh (or 3,940 kWh per year), while in the United States, that number is more than double at 877 kWh per month (or 10,649 kWh yearly).
Can Human Behavior Reduce Energy Use?
Homeowners can learn to accept limits and boundaries to their consumption if they choose to. For instance, do you really need an electric can opener when a simple manual option can do the same thing, perhaps in less time? While it might be nice to wake up in the winter to a 75 degree home, might you be able to survive if you turned down the thermostat to 68 degrees?
Limitations are often seen as negative in the American mindset and so can be hard to change. Often, people do not want to sacrifice comfort and convenience. However, we argue that sustainable investments in our homes can actually improve our comfort most of the time. The acceptance of limits and boundaries can go a long way towards saving resources. People who live in off-grid homes, for example, understand that the energy available to them through their solar panels or wind turbines is restricted. They then make behavioral changes that allow them to live within the scope of the available energy.
Most homeowners will not live completely off-grid. But, this mentality of controlling and constraining our consumption is the most critical behavioral strategy for creating a more sustainable lifestyle.
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.
