The writers at GreenBuildingAdvisor.com have many opportunities to cover new breakthroughs and experiments in products and technologies relating to environmentally friendly construction. Some, more than others, are particularly exciting. For writer Alex Wilson, one of the more exciting technologies is the heat pump that can use carbon dioxide as a working fluid. To fully understand […]

Marita Mirzatuny notes that the news is full of futuristic innovations that seem just on the horizon, from self-driving cars to smart houses. The problem she finds with this is that smart houses are already here in some capacity, in the form of home energy management systems (HEMS). HEMS are visualized as a platform that […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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% […]

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) […]

One of the biggest complaints about solar-electric (also known as photovoltaic or PV) systems is that the energy produced by them is still inaccessible when the electric grid is down. This can be understandably frustrating for people who have invested large amounts of money into their PV systems  and still have to put up with […]