Championing the
Changemakers

Each year, Builder Magazine teams up with a homebuilder to roll out a cutting-edge "concept home" at the International Builders' Show. While last year's strictly virtual concept home was advertised as "the most innovative home never built," some critics think the 2011 "GreenHouse" might as well not have been built either.

The GreenHouse... Read more

Owens Corning, whose pink fiberglass insulation has been around for more than 70 years, whose shade of pink is trademarked, and whose Pink Panther has become almost synonymous with insulation... Read more

I think it's safe to say that nobody likes to burn oil. Maybe it's the people I hang around with, but we go straight from talking about the cold weather we've been having to how much oil we've been... Read more

Our new report, Green Building Product Certifications: Getting What You Need, covers every relevant certification in the field. But of course, as we all know, things keep changing. To ensure you have correct and current information, this errata covers all updates, corrections, and clarifications that we know of to date. If report readers learn... Read more

I've always gotten a lot of questions from friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances about energy issues,... Read more

When my husband and I attended the first Solar Decathlon in 2002 with our one-year-old and his newborn brother, we (and our massive double stroller) traveled downtown on the subway.

The North Carolina company EonCoat, LLC, has just introduced a corrosion-resistant coating that appears to be a breakthrough product that could revolutionize the painting industry--and... Read more

With all the snow we received in southern Vermont last week, it's a great time to be an energy nerd! Lots of snow on roofs means... Read more

For the past few weeks, I've been writing about petroleum... Read more

I had been reading about the innovative mushroom-based insulation material, Greensulate, which was developed by two industrious college students, for several years. The YouTube videos I watched about it were a lot of... Read more

It's fitting that this first blog of 2011 takes a look into the crystal ball--at the energy source that... Read more

New, improved guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about how to deal with a broken compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) are intended to take some of the mystery out of the purchase and use of CFLs. But by suggesting a response that borders on Hazmat lockdown, the guidelines may potentially add to consumers' uncertainties.

Happy New Year! I am going to keep the following blog fairly simple, mainly because Knight Wall Systems is interesting enough to deserve a closer... Read more

While most of us think of... Read more

This week I'll take a detour from practical energy-conserving solutions to take a look at oil (petroleum)--the fluid that has powered our automobile-based society. Be prepared for some new... Read more

Ok, it's been a few weeks since Greenbuild, yet we are still finding interesting products from the show. If you've ever been on the expo hall floor, you know how chaotic it can be. It's easy to miss products tucked among the various booths, lose coworkers among the throngs of people, or in my case, entirely forget that you visited a... Read more

Insulation is really important when it comes to saving energy in our homes. With more insulation in our walls, roofs, and foundation, less heat escapes via conduction to the outdoors. Insulate well!

All right. That's... Read more

Among the key changes coming down the road for LEED, as I recently wrote about (Your Guide to the New Draft of LEED), is a change to the LEED AP credit, formerly IDc2, now dubbed IPc2 (that's "Integrated Process" credit 2).

Up until now, projects have been able to earn a point for having one LEED Accredited Professional (LEED AP... Read more

UPDATE: This blog post and the GreenSpec product entry have been updated to reflect that BrightShelf is now manufactured by Hunter Douglas Contract.

Another of the... Read more