Passive House vs. passive solar house...

Unfortunately, the words Passive House often, incorrectly, evokes images of out-there home designs of the 70’s and 80’s… sporting Trombe Walls and double-pane windows that fill with styrofoam beads when the sun goes down. For clarity, there’s a Passive House and there’s a passive solar house (what I described above goes with the latter). A Passive House is designed and built to exacting standards, performance tested, then certified versus a passive solar house built to take advantage of the sunshine that we don’t have. Here we go, in a...

South Sound Green Tour Reminder...

South Sound Green Tour Just a last reminder to check out the South Sound Green Tour this weekend April 17 &18. The Tour sites are open from 10am to 4pm, there is a schedule and map of the workshops and demonstrations here. Tuesday’s Olympian featured a front page article about the Cooper Residence, which will be on the tour. Tessa Smith, our building designer at The Artisans Group, designed the home and it was built by Cory Eckert, owner of Laupen Homes. It’s a PNW Mediterranean-style home with many green features that come together in a very impressive...

The Sustainable Future of Lighting...

Most of us are familiar with Solatube type passive daylighting, which is functionally nice, but for my eye an aesthetic compromise. I was looking over the Green Source magazine this morning, whose audience is mostly commercial, but this product review caught my eye because it’s this kind of sustainable technology I believe we’ll see in homes in the very near future. It’s the next generation of bringing natural daylighting in to spaces that otherwise need some type of energy-intensive electrical lighting. Parans daylighting system provides natural daylight...

Fuel Cells: The Bloom Box...

This is an interesting article on the next generation of de-centralized fuel cells… like much of technology, it won’t be long before we all have our own clean power sources generated right at home!… I hope. Christian Science Monitor. Click here to link to the original article. By Husna Haq Correspondent / February 22, 2010 It’s being hailed as the Holy Grail of clean energy: a refrigerator-sized personal power plant that produces energy cheaply and cleanly and may one day replace the traditional power grid....

How is Energy Efficiency Measured?...

HOW IS ENERGY EFFICIENCY MEASURED?* If you’ve read my previous posts on the origin of Passive House, you’ll know it originated out of Europe and the Passive House standards were born of the Low Energy House standards. The chart below references European homes and is in kWh per square meters per year, but you can imagine use patterns are not extremely dissimilar in the U.S. On the other hand, since we are notoriously heavy energy consumers, the energy savings indicated would be that much more graphic! Energy efficiency ratings of cars are measured in miles per...

Natural Poplar Bar Siding Update...

Yesterday I posted about a company in N.C that harvests and sells natural poplar bark building materials. Within a few hours, I heard from Bark House, another company that specializes in poplar and tulip tree shingles and other natural architectural features made of tree parts. I looked over their website, it’s hosts a lot of good and interesting information there not to mention an excellent gallery of projects. This is an interesting snapshot from their website: Highland Craftsmen Gets Nod as Cool Product from GreenBuild 2009 Alex Wilson of BuildGreen.com had...