As a result of several trends, new home sales have recently moved away from the sale of already completed homes to more often being sales of homes still under construction and even homes that have not yet begun construction. Eight out of ten new home buyers are already home owners whose experience with previous homes […]
Building a ‘Layered House’
Building an energy-efficient house is a complicated process. Even with the best of intentions, it is possible to leave leaks or compromise the integrity of the insulation through certain overlooked details, despite the amount of insulation installed. One such overlooked detail in terms of efficiency can be a recessed ceiling light. They’re great from a […]
Brainy Drainage: Permeable Outdoor Surfaces
According to Kevin Eckert from Build LLC, a Seattle building firm, the design of the exterior “hardscape” is just as important as the design of the actual home in residential work, both for new homes and remodels. These “hardscapes” include entry sidewalks and any sequence of “experiences” that leads up to the house itself, including […]
Solving Comfort Problems Caused by Attic Kneewalls
Kneewalls in Texas, are called “hot walls.” Allison A. Bailes III, an advisor for GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, jokes that they ought to be called liabilities in warmer climates. What they are in reality are walls that separate conditioned space in a home from the unconditioned attic. As such, they are the cause of many discomfort issues in […]
A Failure that Stalls the Certification of Many Energy Star Homes
This article is specifically about the failures of some Habitat for Humanity houses that were going for Energy Star certification recently, but the problems they had are ones not unique to Habitat for Humanity. In fact, this is a problem that occurs with surprising frequency in homes aiming for certification of the Energy Star’s version […]
Owner/Contractor Built Housing Flat, Market Share Falling
As the single-family market for new home construction rose on a year-to-year basis from last year, there was a corresponding drop in the market share of homes that were built on land owned by the homeowner where either the homeowner or a builder acted as a general contractor. This information is from Census Data from […]
OSHA Puts the Squeeze on Asthma-Causing Polyurethanes
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently decided that the risk of fatal asthma attacks for construction workers associated with the production of polyurethane compounds was too great and launched a program, the National Emphasis Program, with the aim of reducing or, ideally, eliminating the health effects of occupation exposure to polyurethanes by […]
Acoustical Ceiling Solution
Hunter Douglas Contract has recently developed a new acoustical ceiling. They call their new ceiling the Echelon Frame and Panel System. Its selling points include the ease of access to building services, a sophisticated look for the ceiling, the thinnest visible grid in the market, a large selection of customizable acoustical ceiling surfaces (currently available […]
Cleaning Solar Panels Often Not Worth the Cost
Engineers from the University of California, San Diego, published their findings that it isn’t worth the money to hire someone to clean your solar powers in the July 25th issue of Solar Energy. Testing panels that hadn’t been cleaned or even rinsed for 145 days during a California drought, the engineers discovered that only 7.4% […]
Making Solar Energy Affordable: The Positive Sides of Copper Doping
Scientists and engineers worldwide are working to make solar energy more widely affordable and available through the discovery of low-cost production technologies. One area showing promise is flexible thin film solar cells, which require a minimum amount of material to be produced and can also be produced en masse through roll-to-roll processing. Cadmium telluride (CdTe) […]