Author Archive
Cancers from Environment ‘Grossly Underestimated’
Cancers from Environment ‘Grossly Underestimated’. ”Daily Exposures Cause Far More Cancers Than Once Thought”, a Presidential Panel Says. According to studies almost half of the US population will be diagnosed with Cancer over their lifetime….
It makes me think of the Roman empire where they regularly ate off lead plates and all their plumbing was lead. The [...]
Insulation Values For Selected Materials
The table below gives R values of various building materials. To obtain a wall or ceiling assembly R-value you must add the r-values of the individual components together (this won’t give you an entirely accurate R value if you’ve got thermal bridging but it is good enough for rough estimates).
If we are building a passive [...]
Patrick Blanc – Living Wall Pioneer
Patrick Blank is the rock star of living walls. He started it way back in the 70’s and has since then become super successful at it all over the world. He does corporate offices, high rise buildings, public spaces, jet setting around the world building beautiful works of art in the form of plants growing [...]
HRV / ERV Efficiency
With our new Passive House building standard a key component of our green brownstone renovations are the ERV or HRV, or Energy Recovery Ventilator and Heat Recovery Ventilator.
Both units perform the same task of clearing the house of stale air and providing it with fresh air from the outside. In a “normal” brownstone this task [...]
Wood, Cancer and Boiled Frogs
When most people think of wood they don’t think cancer, but studies have shown that wood workers have a higher level of respiratory cancer.
This was brought to my attention when a local lumber supply sent me the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for wood . At first I thought, ” Why do you need MSDS [...]
Brooklyn Green Roof Maintenance
We went to check on one of the green roofs we installed last year in Park Slope. It looked good! Some of the edges were a little wind bare but for the most part the sedum were happy and growing.
We are Brooklyn green roof installers and it is really satisfying watching us spread a sea [...]
CEPHEUS – Living Comfort Without Heating
The book CEPHEUS – Living Comfort Without Heating is actually the compilation of Passive House (PH) results for buildings in Central Europe. They turned their findings into a book to give a great overview of different houses with the one common element of being Passive House.
As a Brooklyn Passive House contractor I found it very [...]
Green Building time and cost
Building along green standards does not significantly increase the construction time or cost. There is no reason why not to build green since it may save money in the short term and is guaranteed to save money on a monthly basis once the building is done.
I wouldn’t say this is the case with most [...]
Brooklyn Bee Maintenance
We checked on some of our hives today a week after putting them into new hives. They were doing great. In their productive enthusiasm they had built comb in a place where it would cause spacing problems so we had to take it out.
Both hives had excess comb we had to remove. One was larger [...]
EVE Project
The EVE Project is an earthship community where they have gotten permission from the building department to build outside of building codes for experimental purposes, much like a race track where new cars are tested.
It is really worth checking out. The earthship model is very similar to our Zero Brownstone model that Eco Brooklyn strives [...]
Register Your Brooklyn Bees
When NYC legalized bees a little while ago the one stipulation they asked was that bee keepers register their bees. There is no way I’m doing that! I have 40,000 bees. Do you have any idea how long it would take me to register them?!
But I might register my hives. Or I might [...]
Gentle Architecture Book
The book Gentle Architecture by Malcolm Wells is one of those cult books. Published in 1981 it is out of print. The author died in 2009. But the book lives on amongst those of us searching for alternatives to our current building crisis.
Most people don’t even know we have a building crisis. Most architects don’t even [...]
Brooklyn Green Roof Strawberries
You have to check this picture out. It is of a strawberry on the green roof of the Brooklyn Green Show House. Notice the pine cone, sedum, flowers in the background. It is a world as seen from a field mouse or bee. We can see things like this too.
[...]
Great Natural Exterior Paint
We’ve been experimenting with exterior wood paint with some great results.
The research is based on the traditional Scandinavian red paint, which is a base of linseed oil with various things added. One description:
Centuries ago, European farmers sealed the wood on their barns with an oil, often linseed oil, which was a sort of tawny-colored oil made from [...]
The Homeowner’s Guide To Mold Book
The Homeowner’s Guide To Mold by Michael Pugliese is a thorough examination of mold and mold remediation. I recommend it for any contractor. It won’t get you to being certified but certainly will give you the information needed to assess a mold situation and take action.
The author is an expert at mold abatement and gives [...]
Uncovering Toxic Sites in Brooklyn
Have you ever wondered what toxic sites are in your neighborhood? Do you unknowingly live next door to an abandoned toxic dump? Here is a site that can give you some clues. It is called ToxicTargeting.com and lists all the recorded environmental activity in New York State.
You can type in your address and see all the registered [...]
A Bee (or two) Lands in Brooklyn
We just got our bees for the Brooklyn Green Show House! They arrived late at night and we put them in their hives (hived them) at the crack of dawn. We put the hives on the green roof so the bees can help pollinate our strawberries!
First we put the stands made of salvaged wood:
Then we put the [...]
Good Clay Mix for Brooklyn Brownstone Wall
Here is a great starting point for making clay wall material.
2 parts sand (mason or graded sands but have a few different sizes 70-20-50 meshes)
1 part clay soil (screened through 1/8 to 1/4 screen to get the bigger bits of stuff out)
3/4 to 1 part chopped and screened straw or recycled saw dust from the [...]
GreenHomeGuide.com Featured Gennaro Brooks-Church
GreenHomeGuide.com featured Gennaro Brooks-Church in their “Ask A Pro” Section.
To read the dialog click here.
Phytoextraction in Brooklyn
Phytoextraction is the act of using plants to remove toxins from soil. Instead of using chemicals or removing the dirt you plant certain kinds of plants or mushrooms that either absorb the toxins or neutralize them. The process can take longer since you may have to wait out several growing seasons. But if you have [...]
Tips on Removing Lead from Brooklyn Gardens
Because of the high lead levels found in the garden of the Brooklyn Show House, we have become by default a Soil Remediation Contractor.
The research and remediation of soil with such extreme levels of lead is quite an experience. Here is one article that puts soil remediation in perspective and gives great insight into how [...]
Soil Remediation in Brooklyn
We just tested the garden soil of the Brooklyn Green Show house and the results were a staggering 2000ppm of lead. Considering anything above 400ppm is rated as unhealthy we have a bad situation.
High levels of lead in Brooklyn is a pretty common problem. The back walls and fire escapes were commonly painted in lead [...]
Brooklyn Brownstone Living Wall
In our pursuit to turn Brooklyn green we are very excited about growing living walls on the facades of brownstones. A living wall differs from a climbing/hanging wall. The first has the plants ON the wall. The wall becomes the medium from which they grow. A climbing or hanging wall simply has plants that climb [...]
Passive House Defined
The term Passive House comes from Germany. It is not to be confused with passive solar heating or cooling, although that plays a part.
From the German Passiv Haus site:
A passive house is a building in which a comfortable interior climate can be maintained without active heating and cooling systems (Adamson 1987 and Feist 1988). The [...]
Spray Foam Insulation is Bad
Bad is maybe a loaded word. But don’t use TigerFoam, HandiFoam, and
all other 2-part builder-applied foams. Also, don’t use contractors who
use Dow FrothPak, which is the same type of foam but in addition to
small builder packages is sometimes blown from trucks in large volumes.
All these use refrigerants as blowing agents. They release 7-15 lbs of
refrigerants [...]
Sea of Plastic
Here is a great animation of the “trash islands” floating in the Pacific Ocean. Billions of pieces of plastic are collected by the currents and corralled into unfathomably large floating garbage heaps. People like to compare them to the size of Texas. I saw one person saying it was as much as three times [...]
Green Roof Plants
Mother Plants is an upstate NY garden company that specializes in green roof plants. As a green roof installer in Brooklyn we find it quite convenient to buy from them. Whatever you order basically gets to Brooklyn in a day or two.
They have just put out their 2010 catalog and is full of lovely pictures [...]
Strawberries on Green Roof
It is that time of year to plant your native flowers and edibles. Here we are planting strawberries onto a Brooklyn brownstone green roof! Yum!
Solar PV vs. Solar Thermal Costs
There is an increasing opinion amoungst New York solar installers that solar thermal pays for itself quicker than solar PV.
Looking at the numbers I thought so too and would recommend solar thermal as a better investment if the client had to choose between solar PV and thermal. Of course it is great when the client [...]
Green Counter Top Options
I realize concrete has huge embodied energy and creates tonnes of CO2 during it’s manufacture but I still can’t resist reading up on the uses of concrete for residential interior applications.
Eco Brooklyn is guilty of making some concrete counters too.
I just read Concrete at Home by the concrete fanatic Fu-Tung Chen. He has definitely cornered [...]