Alex Wilson is the Executive Editor of Environmental Building News. For more than 25 years Alex has written about energy-efficient and environmentally responsible design and construction. Prior to starting his own company in 1985 (now BuildingGreen, Inc.), he was executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for five years; before that he taught workshops on the construction of solar greenhouses in New Mexico in the late '70s. Alex is author of Your Green Home (New Society Publishers, 2006) and coauthor of the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings (ACEEE, 8th edition, 2003) and the Rocky Mountain Institute's comprehensive textbook Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate (John Wiley & Sons, 1998). He has also written hundreds of articles for other publications, including Fine Homebuilding, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, the Journal of Light Construction, and Popular Science. Along with writing about design and construction, Alex has written four guidebooks on quiet-water paddling published by the Appalachian Mountain Club—covering all of New England and New York State. (You can order Alex's books online.) Alex served on the board of directors of the U.S. Green Building Council for five years and he is currently a trustee of The Nature Conservancy - Vermont Chapter.
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Recent Entries by this Author
Our next feature article for Environmental Building News is on the Passive House standard for ultra-low-energy buildings--a standard that originated about 20 years ago in Germany. Excitement about Passive House in North America is resulting in some really cool products being introduced from Europe. One of those is the Zehnder line of heat-recovery ventilators (HRVs) and associated components.
I had a chance to spend some time with Barry Stephens, the national sales and marketing manager for Zehnder America at last week's Building Energy Conference, sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). Zehnder is a Swiss company that specializes in hydronic heat distribution, heated towel racks, ground-source heat recovery, and advanced heat-recovery ventilation systems. Runtal, a more familiar brand in North America, is a Zehnder company.
The last couple weeks I've written about two of the common myths of green building: that it has to cost more to build green and that green building is mostly about materials. This week I'll cover another myth: that green building products don't perform as well as conventional products.
A lot of people still point to products like early water-saving toilets, compact-fluorescent lamps, and recycled-plastic-lumber decking as evidence that new-fangled green products don't work very well. Clearly, there were some poorly performing products out there as manufacturers scrambled to respond to consumer demand and new regulations. But, for the most part, we've climbed up that learning curve, and current-generation products work very well.
Let's take a look at the history of a few of these product categories.
Last week I wrote about one of the common myths of green building: that it has to cost more to build green. This week, I'll tackle another myth: that green building is mostly about materials.
This isn't quite as significant a misconception as it was a few years ago, but there are still a lot of people who think green building is largely about using products that are made from recycled waste materials, or agricultural products, or rapidly renewable products like bamboo. It is still common to hear about how "green" a building is because of the recycled-glass tiles in the entrance foyer or the carpet that's made from recycled soda bottles.
Using recycled-content and bio-based materials is a great idea, but materials are only one--relatively small--aspect of green design. Usually more important are the following:
We've been writing about the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in Environmental Building News since the organization was created in 1993. We've watched as FSC pushed the mainstream forest products industry toward more responsible forestry practices even as that industry fought to prevent or slow the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Rating system because it awarded points for use of FSC-certified wood exclusively. And we've continued to recognize FSC-certified wood products through EBN product reviews and listings in our GreenSpec Directory.
One of my frustrations with FSC-certified products has long been that they almost always involve an upcharge over standard non-FSC-certified products. It's great that Marvin Windows or Armstrong Flooring offers FSC-certified products, but because the FSC wood is an option--a fairly expensive option--relatively little ends up getting specified.
 Even if a small house has lower levels of insulation than a larger house, it's likely to cost less to heat. 1. R-19 walls, R-30 ceilings, double-low-e (U=0.36) vinyl windows, R-4.4 doors, infiltration of .50 ACH, and R-6 ducts in attic; 2. R-13 walls, R-19 attic, insulated glass vinyl windows, R-2.1 doors, infiltration of .50 ACH, and uninsulated ducts; 3. Natural gas at $0.50 per therm; 4. Electricity at $0.10 per kWh. |
Having written about green building for more than twenty years now, I've encountered lots of misperceptions. One of those is that green building always has to cost a lot more than conventional building. There are plenty of examples where it does cost more (sometimes significantly more), but it doesn't have to, and green choices can even reduce costs in some cases. Let me explain.
Simple is good, but high-tech can be really cool. In the case of the Parans fiber-optic daylighting system (distributed in the U.S. by HUVCO), high-tech lets you distribute daylight up to sixty feet via optical cables--bringing full-spectrum natural light to various spaces within a home or commercial building.
Here's how it works: Sunlight is collected by one or more Swedish-made Parans solar panels mounted on the roof or a wall. A 39" by 39" (1 m2) SP2 solar panel has 62 Fresnel lenses, each of which focuses sunlight into a tiny optical fiber that's just 3/100ths of an inch (0.75 mm) in diameter. These 62 fibers are joined together into four bundles, each about a quarter-inch (6 mm) in diameter. These fiber bundles can transmit the light more than 66 feet (20 meters), delivering daylight to rooms on lower floors or interior. Five different luminaires are available for delivering light to occupied spaces.
Back in 1990, when I built a new garage and office space at my home in Dummerston, Vermont (where BuildingGreen started out), I installed two sections of Lightolier lighting track with dual switching for use of whatever screw-in lamps I wanted to use in can-type fixtures as well as exposed sockets. During the twenty years since, this has been my little testing laboratory for state-of-the-art energy-saving lamps. I've installed the latest compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), cold-cathode CFLs, and, more recently, LED lamps.
I was at Efficiency Vermont's Better Buildings Conference in Burlington, Vermont last week. It's a great conference each February to learn about energy-efficient construction and find out about innovations in energy-conserving products, from lighting to heating systems.
Wandering around the trade show at Better Buildings, my attention was caught by several cut-away window corners at the Marvin Windows & Doors booth. For years at conferences, I've made it a point to ask the mainstream window manufacturers when they will give more attention to triple-glazed windows. Usually I just get blank stares from the salespeople.
I gotta say, I was pretty surprised to come across this product recently. I make it a habit of keeping up with new products as they come out--especially insulation materials. I had somehow missed this.
Dow Chemical launched SafeTouch in a few select markets in 2007, but expanded availability late last year to 53 market areas, mostly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states and exclusively through Lowes stores. You can find stores carrying the product using this locator.
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