Published on June 22nd, 2008
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Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the final one in an eight-part series. If you are thinking about installing a wood-burning mass heater, this article should help you.
Operating a Mass Heater
Mass heaters are a different approach to burning wood. If you don’t don’t understand this, you won’t just be disappointed — you’ll fill your house with smoke or, worse, poison your family in their sleep! Getting proper performance from a mass heater requires a little planning, and some involvement, on your part. The tradeoff for this extra effort is safety and tremendous energy efficiency.
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Published on June 19th, 2008
Editor’s note: You might expect a post about an event called NEOCON to appear on Red, Green & Blue, but, as our friends at GreenBuildingTalk point out, NEOCON is a trade show for interior furnishings (with no particular ideological leanings, we’re guessing). The show took place in GBT’s hometown of Chicago, so they got a first-hand look at NEOCON’s green offerings. This post was originally published on Tuesday, June 17, 2008.
The National Exposition of Contract Interior Furnishings (NEOCON) was held this past week in Chicago, and GreenBuildingTalk was there to check out the unique combination of over 1,200 residential and commercial showrooms and exhibits. With our goal of discovering new green products, Josh and I made our way through the maze of office furniture, flooring, wallcoverings, and hundreds of chairs.
Amidst the legions of chairs, our first discovery was RealForm Technology’s plant-based polyurethane foams, products used for seating applications. The polyurethane foams contain 20% bio-based content, and the company’s laboratory trials have achieved even higher Bio-Polyol substitution, foams capable of being molded for any type of furniture, including sofas. RealForm’s Realbio foam product is leading the way in eco-friendly furniture foam, and is one to keep an eye on.
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Published on June 15th, 2008
Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the seventh in an eight-part series. If adding thermal mass to your house isn’t realistic, another approach is to install a massive heater. That is to say, the heater contains the thermal mass your house may lack.
Clean and Super-Efficient Wood Heating
Super-efficient wood burning heaters with lots of mass are called by many names: masonry stoves, russian stoves, finnish stoves or finnish fireplaces, mass heaters. Though mass heaters may look like traditional fireplaces, they’re actually very sophisticated heating devices.
Burning wood in a mass heater doesn’t involve feeding in wood a few pieces at a time. The wood is added all at once, lit, and burned as quickly and as hotly as possible. Because of the high combustion temperature, there’s virtually no smoke. Combustion is so complete that, with the exception of a bit of smoke released when the fire is first started, most of what comes out of the chimney is carbon dioxide and water vapor. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on June 14th, 2008
It started innocently enough. I went to a green home show in Portland, Oregon to learn more about sustainable products for my business. I saw a booth for Penguin Windows, which I had seen advertised on TV, and signed up for a free assessment of my windows.
I own a manufactured home that was manufactured in 2000. I figured I didn’t have too much to worry about. The windows seemed to be working fine, and we had no comfort problems. I was looking forward to learning about their product, and curious as to how much it would cost to replace my windows with more efficient models, purely for research purposes. Little did I know ….
When the salesmen arrived, they started by explaining that they would be looking at the condition of my windows, inside and outside, taking some measurements, then give me a demonstration of their windows, and finish with the estimate for replacing the windows. So, off we went.
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Published on June 12th, 2008
Editor’s note: Drywall isn’t the sexiest of subjects, but, as our friends at GreenBuildingTalk note, it’s the most used interior building material out there… and also has a substantial environmental footprint. Serious Materials new EcoRock product is attracting attention among a number of audiences… including investors. This post was originally published on Wednesday, June 4, 2008.
Serious Materials, an indoor building material manufacturer, successfully raised an impressive $50 million in late 2007 to support its efforts in bringing it’s new green dry wall product to the marketplace. The venture capital funding is in response to Serious Material’s 2006 research and development success that discovered a way to replace the energy-intensive calcine process used to make drywall. What the company came up with was a gypsum-free drywall they named EcoRock.
You may not think much about drywall, but it is the most common indoor building material in the United States. It does have a dirty secret, though. Typical drywall consist of gypsum, a calcined product which, like cement, needs to be cooked. Basically, it’s calcined (a thermal treatment process) and then dried. That energy-intensive process generates some 20 to 25 billion pounds of CO2 a year. The energy used to make a standard sheet of drywall is 100,000 BTUs or more per sheet, 4×8. When factoring in how much the drywall industry produces a year as a whole: upwards of 30 to 40 billion square feet in the U.S. alone, the CO2 emissions become staggering. In fact, the drywall manufacturing process produces 51 million tons of greenhouse gases and consumes almost 1 percent of all U.S. Energy annually.
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Published on June 8th, 2008
Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the sixth in an eight-part series.
Metal woodstoves are a significant improvement over open fireplaces from the standpoint of producing more usable heat. They limit incoming air, thus avoiding heating air not needed for combustion. Another improvement: they use a lengthened heat exchange pathway to improve heat transfer from the heated combustion gases before they exit the chimney.
Unfortunately, metal woodstoves must operate at low, inefficient, and polluting combustion temperatures. Why? Because wood combustion requires high temperatures to be clean and efficient. Wood burns starts to burn cleanly at around 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, with continuous improvement up to about 2000 degrees. Cast iron begins to glow red and fail at about 1200 degrees. See the problem?
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Published on June 8th, 2008
I don’t know how you spent your weekend, but we spent ours with hands outstretched, feeling for hot, attic air shooting out of electrical outlets, ventilation fans and air vents. After months of crazy-high electric bills, we decided to get to the bottom of why it was costing so darn much to cool our rather small home.
Enter the HERS Rater (Home Energy Rating System).
It turns out there are wonderful people who will come to your home, put up a strange looking contraption called a “blower door” on either your front door or entry to the attached garage. A fan is turned on, the pressure is measured (our house was brought to -50 Pascals) and the cubic feet per minute of air that is rushing out of the house is measured.
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Published on June 5th, 2008
As part of their year-long “Change the World, Start with ENERGY STAR” campaign, EPA has launched a website to help you save money and and energy with your programmable thermostat. A programmable thermostat properly programmed and used can reduce 1,847 lbs of green house gas emissions a year. According to the EPA, maximizing household energy use through serviced heating and cooling systems, leak-less ducts, and thermostats that are programmed to save energy at night or when residents are away, would prevent 169 billion lbs of greenhouse gas emissions per year. To those who are more swayed by the impact on their wallets, programmable thermostats can save about $180 a year. Find valuable tips and resources, including tutorials and a video podcast, on their new website www.energystar.gov/programmablethermostats.
Some of the helpful tips include lowering the temperature setting by 8 degrees when you’re away or asleep in the winter, or raising the temperature setting by 7 degrees when you’re away and 4 degrees when you’re asleep in the winter. Take advantage of the “Vacation” and “Hold” features to manage temperatures while you’re away from home for an extended period. More helpful tips from the EPA: Read the rest of this entry »
Published on June 4th, 2008
Editor’s note: Green building and resource conservation doesn’t have to involve the latest technology or high prices. Our friends at GreenBuildingTalk take a look at one of the humblest of water-saving devices — the faucet aerator — and show how this low-tech option is a good bet for homeowners looking to conserve water… and lower their bills. This post was originally published on Sunday, June 1, 2008.
About a decade ago, water conserving faucets and low-flow showerheads were the bane of contractors and homeowners alike. But over time, trial and error has led to better product design, education and installation. If your kitchen or bathroom faucet is fairly new, it will probably have an aerator in it. New faucets today typically have 2.2 gallons per minute (gpm) aerators, whereas conventional faucets typically use 4 gpm. If your faucets are more than ten years old, odds are they’re water hogs. Aerators provide a low-tech solution that not only make the flow more forceful, but provide more effective wetting and rinsing. Consider installing an aerator with a lower flow, such as 1.5, 1.0, or the lowest option available to date: .5 gpm.
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Published on June 2nd, 2008
Editor’s note: Just like our friends at Low Impact Living, we’ve got passion for saving water… so we were very happy to see this post about a new technology for homeowners interested in doing just that! LIL writer Jason Pelletier originally published this post on Wednesday, May 28, 2008.
I’m often pleasantly surprised at how much interest and passion you (our visitors) display for water-saving technologies. 
Renewable energy is sexy, and eco-friendly cars are top-of-mind for most people these days, but graywater systems? Rain barrels? Rain gardens? Even water-conserving toilets and showerheads? They’re pretty hot too … I for one am thrilled, for not only have I spent a good part of my career designing stormwater treatment systems but I believe that water shortages are a pretty pressing and difficult environmental challenge that doesn’t get enough attention in these days of $4 gasoline and global warming.
The beauty of any of these water-saving technologies is that a) they achieve multiple benefits, saving water while reducing wastewater or stormwater runoff and b) you can see the results right at home. It’s pretty satisfying to open the valve on a rain barrel, see the water flow out and know that you reduced pollution downstream and also prevented water from being siphoned from lakes or rivers tens or hundreds of miles away.
There are some challenges, though. In order to really make a dent in your runoff, you might have to use ten or more rain barrels - not so great if you don’t have space or your downspouts are on the visible side of your house (or if you’re not Ed Begley Jr and just don’t care!). Cisterns give you more capacity, but you’re talking about a real construction project with some possible permitting hurdles.
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