Championing the
Changemakers

Over the past few weeks I’ve written about various strategies to produce hot water efficiently. We’ve seen that tankless water heaters are more efficient than storage water heaters (though are not without their drawbacks), and we’ve learned that heat-pump water heaters produce two to three times as much heat per unit of... Read more

Apparently my kids are not the only kids on earth obsessed with Minecraft. And unlike my children... Read more

Last week I... Read more

Wake... Read more

In last week’s blog I compared tankless and storage water heaters and explained why tankless water heaters often don’t make that much... Read more

Phobia or fatigue? When it comes to toxic chemicals, we all have our own way of coping with information overload. A free webcast helps you sort it all out.

Even if we try to... Read more

A new report from the George Washington University School of Business finds compelling evidence that demand for real estate in pedestrian-friendly urban neighborhoods significantly exceeds supply. “DC: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call” introduces the term “WalkUP” as shorthand for “walkable urban places,” and concludes: “This research has found... Read more

We all see “greenest building on... Read more

In the summer of 2009, the board and administration of the Bertschi School, an independent pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade school in Seattle, weren't quite ready to begin the science building that was the last component in their long-term master plan. The year before, they had achieved LEED Gold certification for a facility for art, music... Read more

This week New York City posted 2011 energy use data (PDF) for more than 2,000 large,... Read more

There are two primary types of water heaters: storage and tankless. In this column I’ll try to explain the differences between these two approaches and offer some guidance on choosing between them. (There are also “hybrid” water heaters with features of both that I’ll cover in a future blog post.)

By Hattie Hartman

A trip to the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO) in Wageningen, just over an hour southeast of Amsterdam, transports visitors to another world. Set back from a busy road, which separates the institute from Wageningen University, the building is accessed by a 90-foot-long timber walkway that spans a pond full of... Read more

This is part of an ongoing series. Read all the Sticky Business posts here.

Performance testing of adhesives and sealants used in our weather barriers is improving due to new field-testing research, as we’ve written about before. However, the improvements in testing haven’t reached a critical... Read more

In the years that I’ve been writing about energy and energy conservation (longer... Read more

The agency will hire... Read more

EBN Oct. 2011). With about 22% of low-slope commercial roofing projects using metal systems, according to Scott Kriner, technical director of the... Read more