Championing the
Changemakers

BuildingGreen’s president, Nadav Malin, recently received the Honorary AIA designation. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) “recognizes the notable contributions and service of people outside of the architecture profession with honorary membership in the Institute,” according to its website.

I sat down with Nadav to discuss this... Read more

 At the end of my recent blog post on Kooltherm rigid phenolic foam insulation, I mentioned that the roof and wall assemblies at an energy retrofit project in Brattleboro, Vermont, were insulated with cellulose by a company called American Installations. The company claimed that the German blowing equipment it uses delivers cellulose at a more... Read more

Why and how do buildings fail? In this quick video, Paula Melton and Peter Yost discuss what they learned in the process of writing their feature article “How Buildings Fail Their Users.” The article includes seven stories of building failure and lessons learned. Read the feature article.

Improving the thermal performance of an existing attic is often challenging: workers are faced with narrow cavities, low clearances, and cladding systems that make it hard to achieve desired R-values while still maintaining the necessary drying potential of the assembly. The house at 81 Chapin Street in Brattleboro, Vermont, is no exception.... Read more

BuildingGreen interviewed designers from several leading sustainable design firms to learn what sustainable design literacy means, what it looks like, and how the best firms are supporting increased knowledge—and action. The research resulted in our feature article Sustainable Design Literacy: A Foundation for Transformed Practice.... Read more

Julie Paquette has been Director of Energy Management at Yale University for about 6 years. That means the buck stops at Paquette’s desk for the energy consumption of over 400 buildings on campus. Yale has a pretty sophisticated approach to energy, including the Yale Facilities Energy Explorer, an energy dashboard system that shows... Read more

Typical pins on moisture meters are ½ inch long, meaning you can only determine moisture content by weight near the surface of building assemblies and materials (including wood, gypsum wallboard, and concrete). But I often find myself needing to assess moisture content of first condensing surfaces in walls and ceilings or well below... Read more

Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown looks at a number of strategies that would “reverse the buildup of atmospheric carbon within thirty years.” Based on careful analysis, his team concluded that the number-one action we can take to reverse anthropogenic global warming is to manage high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants. Wait…what?! What about... Read more

When we bought our home (built in 1907), I called in a favor from an electrician friend of mine to upgrade the 60-amp to a 100-amp service. Having worked together in New Hampshire where many of our projects were on sites full of ledge, he smirked when he told me: “Here, you go try and drive this 12-foot copper grounding rod!” No more than 10... Read more

If the number of events on this topic is any indication, 2017 will go down as the year that Greenbuild became all about products. Why? Here’s my take on it:

I first “learned” about VersaDry when a colleague of mine here at BuildingGreen — our materials and product expert, Brent Ehrlich — sent me the photo reproduced at right. I was in the same boat you are right now: “OK, thanks for the photo, Brent, but what the hell is this VersaDry bent-metal thingamajig?” He replied, “Oh, yeah, here is another... Read more

Back in the early days of airport noise mitigation programs, there was a pretty strong link between air leakage and sound. A document titled “Tips for Insulating Your Home Against Aircraft Noise” noted, “Sound travels from the exterior to the interior of the home in two ways: through solid structural elements and through the air…. Wherever air... Read more

Whenever my wife starts a conversation with, “OK, Mr. Building Scientist,” I know I am in some kind of trouble. That proved to be the case one day when we were out hanging laundry on the south side of our house.

“OK, Mr. Building Scientist, you supposedly worked your moisture magic when you re-sided the house with clapboards... Read more

I regularly speak with architects who would really love to do a Living Building Challenge project, or net-zero, or another progressive project. All they are waiting for is a client to ask for it. So here we remain, stuck in a self-fulfilling pattern that looks a bit like this.

During interview: “Let’s not scare them away… we’ll make... Read more

There are a lot of different ways to get continuous air and water control layers on the exterior of a building enclosure. You can use housewrap, taped-and-sealed rigid foam insulation, liquid-applied membrane, or either the Huber Zip or Georgia-Pacific ForceField system. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses.

All things... Read more

Negative-side waterproofing (NSW) is a tough topic that I have frankly been dancing around for quite some time. Manufacturer claims and homeowner anecdotes of successful interior waterproof solutions for basement walls and slabs did not completely add up. But I did not think that I understood the topic or the physics well enough to challenge... Read more

How do you measure someone’s sustainable design literacy? As we discuss in Sustainable Design Literacy: A Foundation for Transformed Practice, no single exam or other measure tells the whole story.

We thought about writing our own, holistic, non-LEED-centric version of the LEED AP exam. We quickly recognized, however, that it’s the... Read more

A new client called me, saying that his insulation contractor urged him to contact me about some moisture problems in the home before they actually embarked on a major energy upgrade. (That was gratifying.) Many years ago the home had been moved off of a failing rubble foundation to a new concrete masonry unit (CMU) foundation on a different... Read more

I don’t do blower door work every day, but I do enough of it to appreciate the attention to detail that The Energy Conservatory (TEC) built into its new blower door kit. I have used both TEC and Retrotec blower door kits and found them trustworthy and rugged.

I once asked TEC principal Gary Nelson if there were any reasons we should... Read more

I have been advising architects and builders on high-performance design, materials, and construction — particularly for residential buildings — for many years. But to do this work on commercial buildings, a building science training and credentialing program seemed really important (yet elusive).

This past November I bit the bullet and... Read more