Choosing a sustainable design for your prefabricated building is just common sense: it reduces your impact on the environment, allows you to stay cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, and enables you to save money on power costs. With today’s technology, the up-front costs aren’t even that much higher than they are for regular prefabricated buildings.

At Future Building, we offer a variety of sustainable designs, as well as sustainable add-ons that can be used to improve the energy efficiency of any of our prefabricated buildings.

Here are four ways you can make your Future Building a sustainable one:

1. Choose sustainable building materials

A huge percentage of your building’s lifetime impact on the environment is the energy and materials used to make it. You can reduce this significantly by choosing sustainable building materials.

Future Building offers prefabricated buildings made with 80% recycled steel and covered with a GalValume Plus coating. The coating reflects heat, keeping your pre-fabricated building cool on hot summer days.

Our buildings can also be dismantled to be moved or recycled at any time.

2. Place windows and skylights strategically

One of the easiest ways to make your prefabricated structure sustainable is to place your windows and skylights strategically to maximize natural light. This can dramatically reduce the amount of power you need to use during the day. Working in natural light also keeps you more alert and focused, so if you’re building a workshop, make sure you have lots of well placed windows!

3. Make sure those windows are properly insulated

Poorly insulated or installed windows are one of the most common power drains, and they can cost you a fortune in hydro bills over the years. On the other hand, properly insulated windows can save you a significant percentage on your hydro bill each month (often around 10%). They’ll also keep your space cooler during the summer and warmer during the winter.

4. Add solar panels and other extensions for renewable energy

Taking advantage of natural light to reduce energy consumption is great, but what’s even better is creating energy of your own. We don’t sell these devices ourselves, but you can work directly with our engineers to create a building that can easily accommodate solar panels and other energy-creating devices.

5. Get professional help with installation

Doing everything yourself—or with the help of a few friends—might save you some money up front, but improper building or installation can cause enormous problems down the line. And long before everything breaks down, you’ll find that it’s costing significantly more than it should.

6. Use energy efficient lightbulbs and appliances

Of course, minimizing your impact on the environment doesn’t end with choosing a sustainable building design. The tools and appliances you use also require energy, sometimes quite a lot of it. Luckily there are high-efficiency options for virtually any tool you can think of that requires power.

Some of these tools only save a small amount of energy, so be sure to research exactly how efficient a “high-efficiency” option is before making an investment. It’s also worth noting that creating a new tool takes a lot of power. Often you’re better off working with the tools you have until they break down, and then investing in more efficient options later on.