The complete source for building, designing, and remodeling green homes
Product Guide
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How to Choose Insulation
Insulating a new house used to be a no-brainer. It was that step between installing windows and hanging drywall, when the crew spent a few days stapling fiberglass batts between…
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A Composite Alternative To Concrete Foundations
A Wisconsin-based company has developed a way to replace cast-in-place concrete foundation walls with insulated composite panels that can be set in place in just a few hours. Epitome foundation…
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Multipoint Locking Hardware
We have three entry doors in our home: the front door, the back door, and the side door that opens to the basement. Oh, and since the back door leads…
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Is Using Closed-Cell Spray Foam Worth the Trade-Offs?
Closed-cell polyurethane spray foam is amazing stuff. It’s a great insulator, with a higher R-value per inch than almost any other commonly available material. (Polyisocyanurate foam can be equivalent, but…
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Choices for Roof Underlayment Continue to Expand
Builders once had one choice when it came to roofing underlayment: asphalt-saturated felt. OK, two choices—#15 asphalt felt and #30 asphalt felt. These days, there are dozens of brands of…
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A Case for Composite Wood Siding
Wood is one of the most environmentally benign building products. Not only does it extract carbon during tree growth and then sequester it as lumber, it provides us with a…
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Choosing Among the Most Efficient Water Heaters
A long-running ad campaign for Maytag featured an affable but underworked repairman who spent his days snoozing in an office chair because the appliances he sold rarely needed any attention.…
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Going After the Global Warming Potential of Ready-Mixed Concrete
The absolute bad boy of CO2 emissions in the building industry is the approximately 17% dry weight of Portland cement in a standard ready-mix concrete. Somewhere between 5% and 8%…
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Epoxy Repair Kits
Last winter I helped my buddy, Connecticut remodeler and Fine Homebuilding author Chris Green, build and install a kitchen. We used biscuits to align the face frames on the cabinet…
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The Hidden World of Solar Hardware
Roughly 2400 megawatts of new residential solar was deployed last year, the equivalent of 7.5 million 320-watt modules. That's a big investment. Ever wonder what prevents all those panels from…
