Marla Esser Cloos, (Close) Green Home Coach

NAHB Master Certified Green Professional, LEED AP and Missouri Certified Women Business Enterprise

Marla inspires and educates about how homes can be part of the solution through green and sustainable actions, whether it’s a few green practices in an existing home or remodel or a whole new green home.  Her work creating an online owners’ manual for green and greener homes, HomeNav.com, paved the way to sharing how green practices and homes help people – in all walks of life – to have safer, healthier, more comfortable homes.  Her mission is to empower people to live better lives and be part of the solution for our future by taking action in their own homes.

Living Green Effortlessly: Simple Choices for a Better Home 

Marla is the author of LivingGreen Effortlessly: Simple Choices to a Better Home from NAHB Builder Books. She founded and co-hosts the Green Gab Podcast, on iTunes, 2 Guys Talking Podcast Network and GreenHomeCoach.com.  Her blogs and articles can be found on Green Home Coach, Elemental.Green,  Proud Green Home, Green Home Builder, Building Women and The Healthy Planet.

I absolutely Love that you say I have an amazing life!

But you know you fake it and you make it! Some days are amazing and you

My main webstie is awesomeMontana.com. I struggle and have my challenges, but I definitley feel that I am blessed every day. What I love about you is your passion for the planet and how you teach people. We had talked a few days ago about Idk if I told you I had my real estate licesnse and Mike and I are definitely interested in real estate investing 

That makes a lot of sense, Realtors are a link between home buyers and the home industry there’s a very back burner conversation

Realtors understanding more of this and get into the conversation means and what green means

go green means nothing

taking action with green practices

road to get us to a better destination

go green is great but we haven’t told anyone what to do to go green!

I’m all about action!

what really works

go do it, go try it

failure’s how we learn there was a great post on Facebook

failure was first attempt in learning…

you have to go do things to  figure out what works.

How many ligthbubls did Thomas Edison make?

1700 perservere

have to keep going

finding ways we can talk about with our friends and family

Doing it in a way that gets everybody excited!

We have to do it in a way that is non-confrontational

whole bunch of stuff about the nasties

we’re never gonna fix this if you just wallow in the bad stuff

other side of the coin

There’s a lot of people a lot of ingenuity

We don’t have to invent

a lot of choices are super simple ….

We have to

• get out of our habits
• get a little brave

So that’s what the book is about

Living Green Effortlessly: Simple Choices for a Better Home 

let’s talk about some of the ways

simple choice

different

 OK, let’s give listeners one action step right now that they can implement today!

Go home. take every incandescent bulb out of your house. If you have to throw in trash they are going to get thrown away whether you have to replace them or not. 

Leds are everywhere now

I have found them for as little as $2 a bulb

They’re hassle free

• totally recyclable
• electronic component
• better light
• different shades of bright

When they first came out they were the bright light and American’s don’t like whiter light that a lot of Europeans and Asians

You want to replace your lights. They’re better then

cfls

the costs have come down.

Skip Cfls

CFLS are harder to recycle. They have a little trace of mercury in it it’s not enough to harm you one little bulb but do you want people you know working in factories working in that environment so let’s just up the level and care about everybody and not do as much mercury then we have to.

So what’s a LED light. They’re different then these spiral light bulbs we have and the ones my electric company gave me etc. What’s an LED light? IDK if I have one.

Good question

My builder had all CFL’s in my home too.

CFL’s are little squiggly ones. 

compact fluourescent lighting

They are the long tubes in office and in the old days they hummed. Those are florescent tube lighting. A couple of decades ago or IDK when a while ago somebody figured out they could take that long tube and put it in a spiral so IDK how it works but it needs so much room. It needs a certain amount of linear room. Needs to light up a gas.

Here’s another little known fact.

Did you have a little easy bake oven when you were a kid?

I did.

What did you use to bake your cake?

IDK a light bulb?

Yep exactly.

We actually have the opposite problem, we need one for our pump house and maybe the chicken house? And we can’t find one anywhere.

make it a bulb…

so far better then the incandescent

used a fraction of

kind

easy bake oven

60 watt 100 watt

a light bulb gets hot enough to bake…

if you live in an environment to

paying extra in energy and money to overcome the heating effects of light bulbs

phasing out the upper wattages

specialty

applications where we want them…

CFLs

next step was the CFLs

best option we had

So am I wrong? Are LED’s christmas lights?

There’s where they started. They actually started as the little indicator lights in your computer and car what somebody. 

If you combine enough

LEDs

engineer background talking. If you combine enough of these diodes. and combine them in the right colors

home and office

interior setting to read by

technical terms to have enough lumens

whatever you want to do

• read
• sew
• read a recipe
• or whatever you want to do

LED lightbulbs first came out they weren’t great quality of lights they were kind of hard to use and they were expensive

That changed really fast

if you have to go buy a bulb tomorrow buy an LED instead of a CFL

if your replacing lightbulbs

if you have incandescents replace them now with LEDs

if you have cfls, leave them till they burn out which should be several years. They should have a multi year lifespan. When they burn out recycle them

most big box stores, hardware stores have CFL recycling. 

They are not to put them in the garbage.

Try your big box stores or hardwares stores have CFL recycling up front.

This is so interesting I just talked to someone from Terra Cycling yesterday… they reached out to me.

You should be able to find them in any store now! I even find them in the drug stores…

When I go to buy light bulbs I’m like lost anymore its so confusing. We bought CFL’s when they first came out for eveyrone.

You just gave me a great idea I’ve been looking for a freebie to give out, and I’m gonna do

How to pick out a lightbulb.

SPI = Smart Passive Income

Tell us about your background because you’re a LEED specialist. Do you listen to Pat Flynn of the Smart Passive Income show because before he started the SPI he started out as an architect and his first website was really just a journal of his notes he was studying for the LEED exam.

People benefited from his notes so much that when he finally published his book they bought it just because they had learned so much from him and they wanted to pay him back even if they’d already passed the test long ago.

LEED

LEED is Leading Environmental and Energy Design

sponsored by the US Green Building Council

accredidation for people and professionals. It means I’ve gone through the training to understand green and sustainable practices as they are relevant to a building and a home. 

if you’re working with a professional whether they’ve been trhough some training.

different levels

• ga – green association
• ap- accredited professional
• fellow if you’ve been doing it for a super long time –

You can also specialize:

• interior design
• operations and
• interiors and homes

LEED is so recognized nationwide a certiication for other programs for the residential

• building
• neighborhood
• home

Another certification for the actual building and how it’s run

according to building and

• mastered
• certified

An accredited designation

I’ve been through education to know what green means

similar to LEED AP

National Association of Home Building Side

here’s what you want to take away

My home has been through and been checked out by a third party and when I go to sell my home that certification stays with the home and I can 

typically sell faster and for more money because that 3rd party stamp of approval stays with the home. That my home does what it says it does.

A lot of people that are building

a lot of people investing in commercial and multi family are requesting they have some sort of green or certification because they usually are better and sell better.

but what I’m trying to do is take what I’ve learned and translate that into something meaningful for those of us just living an ordinary life. 

translating

what’s kind of crazy

all this great information

tons of it.

• company level
• organizational
• news

Very few people are translating to what that means to you to your home sitting there today drinking your coffee or whatever. So that is what I am working to do making it part of our conversation. 

I love what I do with the podcast we ave these converstations. What I have coffee talk conversations that people may not have heard of before. Take it and turn it into something actionable. 

How I got started through

grew up with a grandmother who grew up in the depression so I grew up with this waste not -want not mentality

Then my daughter had a reaction to commercial grade detergents when we were on vacation

Then I started to get chemicals out of my home

not as easy as it is today

Then I worked with a start-up company where he was building a small energy consulting practice

learn the green and sustainability climate

and the people in st louis where I lived at the time from the inside out. There’s this amazing amount of resource and  thought practices in the St. Louis area

So I got to grow up in the industry and that

When my friend and I decided to part my own company and separate because we had some different life goals

I worked primarily with builders on these green home certification programs. I did a piece of the education and homeowner documentation. I built a software tool we offered a white glove service.

We would customize this software that would help builders meet the homeowner documentation and process on how to run your...