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.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
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.
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.
We first wrote about TimberSIL from TimberSIL Products in a 2004 article in EBN, touting the company's treated wood as a revolution in the treated wood industry. From an environmental standpoint, a recent enhancement makes the product even better.
_72dpi_crop.jpg)
Environmental Building News first introduced waterless urinals to the green building community--back in February 1998 in a product review of the No-Flush Urinal from the Waterless Company. In the 12 years since then, we've profiled as many as a dozen waterless urinals as they've entered the market.
Most waterless urinals, including those from industry pioneers Waterless Company and Falcon Waterfree Technologies, rely on a plastic cartridge that holds a lighter-than-urine vegetable-oil fluid that serves as the sanitary trap (preventing sewer gases from entering the restroom). Though water savings are dramatic, there are at least four problems with this approach:
We've promoted the Forest Stewardship Council's wood certification program in the pages of Environmental Building News since FSC was formed back in 1994. We've always looked for companies offering FSC-certified wood products to highlight in EBN and GreenSpec. Over the years, most of those products have been from small companies; larger more industrial timber industry companies have shied away from FSC in favor of the less-rigorous Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certification.
While we continue to feel great about small companies embracing FSC, we also find it exciting when larger players enter the FSC world--because these companies will help FSC become more accepted by the mainstream timber and building-products industries.
Thus, we were really pleased recently to learn that Armstrong World Industries, one of the world's largest flooring manufacturers, had entered the FSC world with FSC-certified engineered hardwood flooring products.
Every time I turn around, it seems, I'm finding out about some new, really cool green building product. It's time to start sharing this information. Starting this week, I'll be writing a weekly "product of the week" blog. I'll be skipping around from category to category. Not every product will be brand new, but I'm guessing that most will be unfamiliar to most readers. I welcome suggestions of products I should cover. Contact me by email (alex@buildinggreen.com) or use the comment field at the end of the blog to submit suggestions.
Clean Dry Electric Hand Dryer from TOTO
In Environmental Building News, we've been touting the new generation of high-speed electric hand dryers since January, 2002, just after Excel Dryer's XLerator hand dryer was introduced. The XLerator was the first electric hand dryer that used a very high-velocity air stream to not just dry hands by evaporating water, but to actually blow droplets of liquid water off hands. By doing this, the drying time is reduced from 30 or 40 seconds to just 10–15 seconds.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|