Selecting Plumbing and Lighting Fixtures

Not much going on with the house as we are waiting for the exterior shell being built offsite, in addition to the cold weather. What we have been doing is selecting exterior colors, windows, roofing, countertops, cabinets and plumbing and lighting fixtures.

A couple people told me that they thought about building a house, but they didn't think their marriage would survive it. Ang and I have been lucky enough to be on the same page for most decisions regarding the home, especially big items, such as, overall style, desire to go green, color and much more. However, when it comes to the smaller items, there were some real polar opposite views between the two of us. Who thought someone could be considered an idiot based on their thoughts regarding a faucet. It has been great that Ang has taken the lead on choosing plumbing and lighting fixtures, as I am not sure our marriage would have survived picking those out together.

This is an area where there are thousands of choices. One of the benefits of going green is that it has limited our choices. To some that might sound like a problem, but when you have thousands of decisions to make when building a home, you come to appreciate having choices narrowed. Plumbing and lighting are areas where I thought our choices would really get narrowed. However, there are not many practical green items. To go green in these areas, you need to be more eccentric, like using your bath water for toilet water - grey water, yummy.

The main green thing we did in the area of plumbing was choose dual flush toilets. Most of the toilet manufactures are coming out with 'eco' lines with new flushing technologies. The standard toilet has a 1.6 liter/flush, but the eco toilets have 1.1. As flushing is fairly important to us, we did not feel like we wanted to take the leap. When I want a real flush, I want a real flush, ya'-know-what-I-mean. Also, the eco lines have a robust selection, so going with the dual-flush toilet limited the choice to one style, which is more like a European toilet and I thought that would bring some uniqueness to the bathrooms. So the dual flush will allow us to have a 1.6 l/f when we need it, but also the option to get rid of the peepee with less water in a .9 l/f. Enough about that subject.

For the lighting, we are mostly using can lights throughout the house that are configured to use only compact fluorescents. The main green aspect for lighting was to use compact fluorescent lights (CFL http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=cfls.pr_cfls), which use 75% less energy and are expected to last 10 times longer. We have heard that CFLs are not as bright and take a couple seconds to warm up, but seems like this will be the standard in a couple years and more than happy to do our part if they last longer and use less electricity (i.e. save about $30 per light bulb that you use).

In addition to the can lights, there were 42 additional lights, which Ang has graciously chased down. She has chosen most to be regular lights that we will likely use CFLs in, but we will have the option to use regular lights if an area requires a brighter light, such as, the bathroom. I should not have a problem shaving under a CFL, but application of makeup may require brighter light. Living with 3 females, I have opted not to question this area any further.