It’s not exactly Color by Numbers, but Prosoco’s fluid-applied air barrier is close to being that simple. That’s saying a lot in a field where some alternatives are more like origami.

“The whole class of liquid-applied water-resistive barriers and liquid-applied flashings has been one of the major construction breakthroughs in the last five years,” says Michael Aoki-Kramer, principal at RDH Building Sciences, who singles out the R-Guard Cat 5 system from Prosoco as “almost stupid easy to install; it’s really hard to mess up.” That’s by design, adds Prosoco CEO David Boyer.

Linear fluorescents make up about 75% of commercial lighting, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), with billions of T8 tubes in use. Popular because of their low cost and energy efficiency, linear fluorescents also have some significant problems: they have poor color quality, they flicker, they emit small amounts of ultraviolet and infrared radiation, and they contain mercury, complicating maintenance and disposal.

LED T8 replacements have offered the promise of solving these problems, yet they have generally been expensive, and their overall performance in some cases has been worse than that of the fluorescent products they are meant to replace.

Like any landscape, green roofs need maintenance—but unlike other landscapes, vegetated roofs offer marginal growing conditions and may require extra attention. Green roofs are meant to mimic natural systems, providing rainwater management (see Putting a “Lid” on Harmful Stormwater Runoff), heat-island mitigation, and wildlife habitat, among other benefits—but for those maintaining these roofs, the expense and bother may not seem worth it. A new growing medium, WaterGrip, is designed to help green roofs thrive with minimal maintenance and watering, and it holds promise for low-irrigation landscaping as well.

“I can’t kill a plant using this material,” boasts Allan Huberman, co-inventor of WaterGrip and founder of EZ Care Grow­ing Technolo­gies, which manufactures the engineered soil for use in extensive green roofs, green walls, planting containers, and landscaping. He goes on to claim that plant cuttings root in a matter of days, irrigation can be slashed 50% or more, and plants of all types typically thrive in WaterGrip without the application of added fertilizers or pesticides.

EBN’s prayers for a nontoxic sofa have finally been answered. Ekla Home, a small company based in California, exclusively manufactures organic couches, chairs, and beds containing no added chemical flame retardants.  

Not only that, but Ekla’s furniture offers a long list of green features, including wood certified to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) standard, certified organic fabric, adhesives certified to Greenguard Gold, and even recycled steel staples made in the U.S.—proof that the company takes furniture’s notoriously complicated supply chain very seriously. As well as serving residential consumers, Ekla boasts some big commercial clients such as Google, HBO, and Starbucks and ships nationally from Southern California.

As the continuity and durability of air barriers get more attention from high-performance building projects (see The Hidden Science of High-Performance Building Assemblies), product manufacturers are taking note. Dow Corning recently announced its entry into a small but growing club: companies offering whole-building air- and water-barrier systems combining multiple products under one set of details and one warranty. (Also see Tremco: Getting the Devil Out of Air and Water Details.)

A family of products

The Dow Corning Silicone Air Barrier System, for commercial and multifamily residential projects, combines the following:

Ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) use the consistent temperatures within the Earth as a heat sink to help provide energy-efficient heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Though GSHPs have fallen out of favor with some in the residential green building industry who prefer less complicated air-source heat pumps, GSHPs are holding their own in commercial applications. And products such as WaterFurnace’s CLW Chiller can maximize HVAC efficiency by taking advantage of different water temperatures within a building’s zones while still incorporating energy exchange with the ground.

Moving heat around a building

Most commercial heat pumps sold today are used in water-loop heat pump systems that move heat around large buildings and balance heating and cooling demands. “In a commercial building in the shoulder months of fall and spring, the side of the building with the sun facing it needs cooling, but the other side might need heating,” said Alan Niles, WaterFurnace’s Western regional commercial sales manager.  The same effect can take place between the interior and the perimeter of the building.

Raingardens, bioswales, and constructed wetlands are all hallmarks of low-impact development (LID), which mimics natural hydrology in order to manage stormwater quality and runoff rates. Since its development in the early 1990s in suburban Maryland, LID has been slowly gaining ground in green projects—and we mean that literally, since natural stormwater treatment can take up a lot of space.

FocalPoint, distributed by Convergent Water Technologies, aims to provide the performance of natural stormwater treatment with a much more compact footprint. Like its older cousin Filterra, from Filterra Bioretention Systems, the system includes an engineered biofiltration medium (Element1) developed by LID godfather Larry Coffman; unlike Filterra, FocalPoint is installed inside a geotextile liner instead of a concrete chamber, lowering first cost and making it workable for more projects.

When first introduced in the late 1990s, LED area lighting—for parking lots, office complexes, some roadways, and other uses—was expensive and out of reach for many, but over the past few years, the costs have continued to drop while efficacy has improved. We have previously highlighted top-performing outdoor lighting from Cree, typically with a focus on performance, but the company is now putting a big emphasis on lowering costs as well with the introduction of OSQ Area LED luminaires.

Outdoor LED area lighting typically comes at a first cost of about twice that of standard HID products, but because of greater energy efficiency and reduced maintenance from the long-lived LEDs, LED luminaires have paid for themselves in three to four years. Cree has lowered the first costs of its OSQ series of area LED luminaires and claims this new model costs 40% less than competitors’ models, with cost now approaching the cost of high-end HID lighting. The OSQ offers efficacies of up to 100 lumens per watt and is designed to place the light only where directed—known as target efficacy—using the company’s “NanoOptics.” This improves overall performance and minimizes glare and light intrusion on neighboring properties.

In a December 2013 blog post, we presented a green wish list for 2014. The first of seven wishes was for rigid insulation with no flame retardants and insignificant global warming potential. Partly in response to our urging, tomorrow, insulation manufacturer Johns Manville (JM) will introduce ENRGY 3.E, a polyisocyanurate roofing insulation that has been reformulated to eliminate the TCPP, or Tris (1-chloro-2-propyl) phosphate, the halogenated flame retardant (HFR) that is used in other polyiso. HFRs are made with chlorine or bromine; these compounds often have high risk of environmental persistence and toxicity.

The new product will be available right away by special order—with about a 14-day lead time, according to Christopher Griffin, Ph.D., the technical director and business leader for bituminous, boards, and insulation at Johns Manville Roofing Systems. The product is currently made only at the company’s Bremen, Indiana factory, but the other four plants could be adapted to produce the foam.

Two products—EcoSeal from Knauf and EnergyComplete from Owens Corning—have been on the market for several years as spray-applied latex sealants for making building envelopes airtight during new construction (see Spray-Applied Latex: A New Tool for Air-Sealing). Until recently, however, we haven’t had solid data on exactly how well they work—a key consideration, especially for projects that want to use them to reduce or eliminate use of spray polyurethane foam (SPF) and its health and climate impacts.