Designing an Energy Efficient Home
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010A research team at UCLA has developed a website to assist folks whose project goal is to design an energy efficient home. The website is called Home Energy Efficient Design (HEED) and was developed by a UCLA research team headed by Murray Milne who is a research professor in the school’s department of architecture and urban design. Users of the free website will find it useful to design their sustainable home and at the same time calculate how much money and energy they will save with each design change.
The site generally is easy to use and a user only needs to enter the square footage of a home, number of stories, type (apartment or townhouse, etc.) and location to prompt the HEED site to create two homes with one serving as your base design and one to use as a comparison home and to test any changes to a design. The base design will meet California’s energy code which is one of the toughest codes in the US but users can also change the code to their state when using the site.
The HEED tool is quite powerful and using the floor planner allows one to explore door, window, heating, cooling, appliance, shading, and ventilation options. All of this in one relatively easy to use free tool. There is no technical support or customer service helpline but if you send an email to the HEED team they are committed to providing users with a response in a timely manner.


The public and private sectors are cooperating in Phoenix, Arizona on a program called 


