Published on August 5th, 2008
Home automation systems (such as Colorado vNet and Control4) are becoming a necessary amenity in any high-end home, but are they also a new tool in our fight to reduce energy use and global warming? After all, these systems are designed so that you can control your high-end AV components, home security system, lighting and HVAC from one device (or via the web from somewhere else), so why not add energy conservation to the mix, right?
The idea is that these high tech systems will minimize or eliminate the wasted energy from lights left on by accident, vampire loads from home equipment in the “off” state, thermostats set too high or low for usage patterns or climate conditions, etc - the automation systems themselves will set things right even if you forget. We’ve certainly written about how important it is to kill of these wasteful elements, but are they big enough to warrant buying one of these systems just to reduce them?
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Published on July 21st, 2008
Recessed can lighting is a familiar method of lighting rooms. Rather than having fixtures protruding into the space, the light source is hidden in a recess in the ceiling, reducing glare. But, when the ceiling above is insulated, the can light fixture is a potential source of air leaks and thermal bridging.
I recently got a press release from a company advertising a product to quickly and easily “convert” recessed can lights to a pendant light look. But, after a brief look, it turns out to be a particularly bad case of greenwash. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:
ceiling lights,
ceilings,
downlights,
fixtures,
halogen,
home lighting,
IC,
incandescent,
insulation,
Non-IC,
pendant lights,
recessed can lights,
retrofit
Published on June 27th, 2008
As we walked into the mammoth PCBC (Pacific Coast Builder Conference) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco we couldn’t help but notice the hanging banners with the words - Power. Forward. Sustain. Of course we could see Power and Forward, as we wouldn’t expect Weakness and Backward but then - Sustain. That omnipresent word like Green that has seeped into the mindset of builders and developers. Or has it? Is it part of the green spin or are things starting to move forward in a powerfully sustainable direction? We decided that “both” loomed as the right answer. For this installment, we decided to cover some of the unexpected and the questionable lower profile “green” products. Sorry about the ” ” around the green but you’ll see where we go with this idea.
We totally got buzzed about something so innocuous that we almost walked passed it because it didn’t have a bunch of Green banners proclaiming its greenness. This Verve living system offers what they called a living control system which in simple terms operates like a whole house lighting system. We’ve seen these before but this one operates on battery free, self sustaining technology or what they call energy harvesting radio frequency technology. Pretty scientific for us but the little gizmo works in a panel that reduces the power so that certain switches can come on at certain levels and times. The systems extends bulb life and new homes don’t need copper wiring installed if they use this system. We even like the parent control which operates like the driver’s control when it comes to locking and unlocking car doors. We’re locked for this system.
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Tags:
copper_wiring,
efficiency_level,
furnace,
furnaces,
gizmo,
heat_escapes,
hot_water_heaters,
hydronic_system,
lighting_system,
mindset,
moscone_center,
new_homes,
pacific_coast,
pcbc,
radio_frequency_technology,
sustaining_technology,
switches,
verve_living,
wanderer
Published on April 7th, 2008
As more and more homes have compact fluorescent lights, questions are arising about when (or even whether) they should be turned off. One school of thought is that it takes a huge surge of electricity to start fluorescent lights (like those institutional tubes in your 6th grade classroom), and turning the lights on and off actually uses much more electricity than just turning them off when you are out of a room for a while.
In a word: WRONG!
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Published on December 13th, 2007
Of this year’s Building Green Top 10 Green Building Products, the least sexy is, without a doubt, the LifeGuard electrical cable manufactured by Houston Wire & Cable Company. Wire isn’t a sexy new building material. But sometimes the most prosaic of materials can be interesting, and something as exciting as a top 10 placement can come from a new development that improves on an old and very familiar material.
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