What if you could take a concrete deck and replace a lot of its material with air—getting not only a stronger, lighter, thinner deck, but also one that can be delivered to the jobsite for quick assembly? You’d have BubbleDeck—a matrix of plastic spheres, steel reinforcement, and concrete. It’s not only capable of replacing a significant quantity of concrete and its high carbon emissions but also provides a number of other performance advantages.

BubbleDeck consists of hollow, high-density polyethylene spheres—typically made by local water bottle manufacturers—sandwiched between two structural steel mesh grids formed by welding rebar together. A thicker rebar is used on the bottom mesh and is welded to a specially designed lattice girder imported from BubbleDeck’s parent company in Denmark; when the spheres are added, they settle between the grids, and a thinner grid is welded on top to form a “cage.” The cage is then put in a concrete casting bed, where about three inches of concrete are added to the base to form a panel. All of this work is done at a pre-caster for quality control. The panels are then moved into place using the girder and tied off with rebar, and concrete is added to fill in the spaces between the spheres and cover them. After pouring, a BubbleDeck slab is indistinguishable from a conventional slab, but it is significantly lighter and thinner.

Key-card entry systems—used all over in hotels, dormitories, restricted-access office buildings, healthcare facilities, and other commercial buildings—don’t look like energy hogs at a glance. Even though the only visible electric consumption is a single LED light, the electronic access control uses 12 to 20 watts of electricity—and not only when the door is being accessed, but 24/7. Some doors, such as those in hospitals with automated openers, also use a lot of electricity when they’re being opened, but it is the standby electricity consumption with these doors that is the far more ubiquitous issue.

Most controlled-access door systems include a power supply, a request-to-exit unit that temporarily deactivates the door alarm during exit, a card reader, and an electrified mortise lock. The power supply could serve one or a few doors, with each power supply being connected to the building’s AC wiring system. The power supply steps the power to DC, and current is transmitted to the actual lock through the metal hinge. With traditional doors, lockset power is separate from monitoring functions, meaning that a typical opening could have as many as 12 wires going to it, according to Garrett Lovejoy, Assa Abloy’s product manager for IP-based access-control locks.

Why is Soraa different?

Almost all mass-produced LED lamps are made by depositing gallium nitride (GaN) onto a sapphire or silicon carbide substrate, but “there is a fundamental mismatch between the deposited layer and the substrate,” according to Clifton Lemon, marketing manager at Soraa. In other words, the inherent dissimilarity in those materials is a weak link that limits their performance, particularly when the LED chip becomes stressed under the high heat conditions in luminaires.

Soraa, on the other hand, uses GaN applied to a GaN substrate, a technology developed by Shuji Nakamura, the same physicist who invented the industry standard blue LED (more on this later). “GaN on GaN allows ten times more light through, so Soraa can get greater power density and create super-bright, super-small LEDs compared to earlier technology,” Lemon contends. And because the two layers are the same material, there are fewer defects, allowing the LEDs to operate at high temperatures. “If you put too much current through most LEDs, they just fail,” claimed Lemon, “but our LEDs can work up to 120°F, so we can work in closed fixtures. No other LEDs can do that.”

By Candace Pearson and Tristan Roberts

Even the best cladding will allow some moisture to collect; that’s why ventilated rainscreens have caught on to prevent moisture problems. However, rainscreens are still new to a lot of builders, and due to labor costs and their own susceptibility to moisture, not everyone has fallen in love with the wood furring strips that are common for rainscreens in light construction.

What is laminate flooring?

Laminate flooring typically contains four main layers: a clear melamine protective wear layer; a printed decorative layer (wood, stone, and tile are the most popular patterns); a high-density fiberboard (HDF) core; and a melamine layer that acts as a stabilizer and moisture barrier.

The layers are compressed at around 600 pounds per square inch (psi) at 400°F using a direct-pressure laminate process that bonds them together into a dimensionally stable flooring. One manufacturer, Alloc AC, offers a high-pressure laminate that is compressed at 1,200 psi to create a tough, commercial-grade flooring.

Over the past 25 years, refrigerants used in air conditioners and heat pumps have come under fire—first for their impact on the Earth’s protective ozone layer and then for their global warming potential. Now, some manufacturers are looking to carbon dioxide as the refrigerant.

The Japanese company Mayekawa, one of the first out of the gate with CO2 technology, offers three such heat pumps in North America for commercial applications. With the potential to produce high-temperature water in both water-to-water and air-to-water heat pumps, such systems have become a viable replacement for fossil-fuel-fired boilers in some applications—an area until now untouched by heat pumps.

It was a tough year for underfloor air distribution (UFAD) specialists. Touted for nearly a decade—including in EBN—as a radical breakthrough that would use far less energy and make occupants happier than conventional HVAC systems ever could, UFAD (which is closely associated with access or raised flooring systems) was suddenly banned by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in 2007 because of outrageous air-leakage rates.

“That was a pretty big false alarm, in our view,” argues Tom Webster, P.E., a project scientist at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) who works closely with industry practitioners to research comfort and building-science issues with UFAD. “The primary cause for that assessment at that particular time was that construction practices were really pretty poor. A lot of contractors were just starting out in the business and didn’t understand underfloor air well enough.”

The product of more than 15 years of development, “Kinetex is the first new category of flooring that’s been introduced in 10 years if not longer,” trumpets Keith Gray, director of product innovation at J&J Flooring Group. The 24" x 24" semi-rigid tiles are thinner, weigh less, and are less expensive than most standard carpet tiles—at approximately 0.20" thick compared to 0.25"–0.60"—and have a tough, woven-fiber-surface wear layer. Though Kinetex shares some similar materials to carpet, “We go out of our way to make sure people don’t think of this as a carpet,” he said.

A couple of years ago, a shower pipe connection came apart on the third floor of our neighbor’s house just after he’d stepped out for a walk. By the time he returned, water had coursed its way down to the first floor, ruining the ceilings, the hardwood floors, and many of his personal belongings.

Problems like this can be avoided using leak-detection equipment, and there are many types of systems on the market, including those that use wireless moisture sensors and others that use sensors attached to toilets and other equipment. Both types are linked either to an alarm or to a shut-off valve, but each has limitations. You need a lot of well-placed moisture sensors, and they cannot detect a leak from a toilet flapper—or, alternately, can only detect a leak from a toilet flapper.

A shocking 40% of food produced in the U.S. never gets eaten, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (PDF). That means we’re casually throwing out a quarter of the fresh water we consume and 4% of the oil we burn, according to the organization. To add insult to injury, because of the methane released during anaerobic digestion, 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from organic waste in landfills, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes. (Methane is 20 times more potent in the atmosphere over a 100-year period than carbon dioxide.)

Greater awareness of these issues—and new laws regarding food waste—have led to “an uptick in interest” in onsite composting for commercial buildings, says Vance Calvez, sales and marketing director at Green Mountain Technologies. The company, based in Bainbridge Island, Washington, manufactures several types of commercial-scale in-vessel composters—enclosed environments that encourage high-heat aerobic digestion of organics—and provides consulting services for onsite composting in both rural and urban settings throughout North America.