Landscaping’s main purpose is to make your yard and property look attractive, but you can have plants, trees and bushes do double duty by helping to enhance the overall efficiency of your home. With creative designs and strategic placement, you can conserve water, reduce pesticide use and pollution, and reduce your summer air conditioning costs. It takes a bit of planning but is actually relatively easy to do.
One of the best ways to help your home through landscaping is to use native plants, which need less water and fewer pesticide applications than other plants. Native plants have been tolerating local water levels and pests for many years, even centuries, and you won’t have to do much to help these flowers, shrubs and trees along. Your household water use will be reduced because you won’t have to water the plants as often, and since they can already resist local bugs for the most part, you won’t be adding any pesticide residues to the soil in your garden.
Energy use in a home is also a big issue for many people, especially in hot weather. When everyone in a city uses air conditioning at the same time, it strains power supplies. Once again, plants come to the rescue. Tall trees on the west and south sides of your home shade it from the sun during hot afternoons. If you plant, leaf-bearing trees, they’ll lose their leaves during the winter and allow the warming rays of the sun in your windows. When you first plant the trees, they’ll be too short, obviously, but if you can find native trees that grow very quickly, you can have enjoy these benefits within a few years.
Another way to help your home is to have vines that become leafy in summer draped over an arbor just outside your patio door. Instead of having hot sunlight streaming in through the glass, you can have a shady patio blocking sunlight.
These aren’t the only things you can do. Landscaping is versatile, and if you want to find out more ways to make your home more efficient, please contact us at Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning for more information. We’ve been helping Fresno area residents avoid the heat for almost 40 years.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in the greater Fresno, California area about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about landscaping and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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