Green Building Blog

In many areas of the country, homes are receiving Energy Star labels they don’t deserve. Major errors like the ones shown in this photo are supposed to be caught by the HERS rater who performs third-party verification services. This home slipped through the cracks.

The photo shows at least four errors serious enough to have prevented the home from receiving an Energy Star label. Can you spot them?

Next week, we will post the answers that a Building America team, BIRA, came up with.

Reprinted with permission from Construct Ireland magazine.

Last week, GBAGreenBuildingAdvisor.com published a photo of a crawl space in an old house under the headline, “What's Wrong With This Picture?”

The photo showed an unvented crawl space in a cold climate. The home was built in 1885. This crawl space is attached to an adjacent concrete-floored basement. The foundation walls are made of mortared limestone.

Scroll down this page to see a construction site video of the Karuna House in Yamhill County, Oregon, showing the installation of capillaryForces that lift water or pull it through porous materials, such as concrete. The tendency of a material to wick water due to the surface tension of the water molecules. break material on top of the footings to prevent moisture from wicking up the foundation walls.

The Karuna House was designed by Holst Architecture and is being built by Hammer & Hand of Portland, Oregon.

You might call Ty Newell the reluctant engineer. At the University of Michigan in the early 1970s, he would rather have studied natural resources or liberal arts, but those programs were full. So he went into engineering, figuring he’d switch to one of his first choices in a semester or so.

Except that it never happened. His grade point average wasn’t high enough to get him into natural resources, and the prospect of being drafted for duty in Vietnam kept him from dropping out of school. So engineering it was going to be.

Attics are a great place to reclaim living space without the expense of an addition. If you have the headroom, you can gain at least one extra room by finishing your attic.

But with energy codes requiring more and more insulation, it can be difficult to pack all of that R-value into the skinny little rafters that are common in older houses.

Juli MacDonald is an architect and accredited LEEDLeadership in Energy and Environmental Design. LEED for Homes is the residential green building program from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). While this program is primarily designed for and applicable to new home projects, major gut rehabs can qualify. professional who worked in Chicago for 20 years before relocating to the East Coast and eventually opening her own firm in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in 2007.

Later that year she started writing the GreenBridge blog. It’s named after her firm, which concentrates on residential additions and remodels.

Kevin Dickson was an early convert to solar energy. He earned a bachelor of science degree from the Colorado School of Mines in 1977, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and solar technology from Colorado State University in 1979. In the early 1980s, he was involved in hundreds of solar thermal systems and received several design patents.

Here's a list of favorite things that every contractor’s kids should experience before they turn 18! Enjoy the list — and feel free so suggest additions.

1. Visit the dump. Nothing will better impress your kids about the consequences of our actions than seeing and smelling the detritus our society generates and then buries!

2. See spray foam being sprayed. This is about as cool as it gets. Put on the body suit and respirator and get ready to see some smiles. Psshhhhhhht and watch it expand. Then have fun poking it full of holes!

Paul and Desirée have three young daughters, two dogs, a flock of chickens and a 1935 house in Minneapolis that needs a ton of work.

Although the house was extensively updated in the 1990s, the 1400-sq.-ft. structure still has a host of problems: an under-insulated attic, single-pane windows, thin exterior walls, an awkward layout, aging interior finishes, and an air handler located in the unconditioned attic.