Design
Energy Efficient Front Doors
It is striking that despite the many green building going on in the US that there still remains some blaring gaps in our knowledge and available products.
I encountered another of these gaps recently in my search for a good front door for a Brooklyn Passive House style brownstone. I was looking for something super energy [...]
Energy Efficient Fan – Biomimicry
Fans are inherently energy efficient since they reduce your need for an energy hog air conditioner. But for those of us constantly pushing the envelope we want to know what the most energy efficient fan is.
Right now my favorite is the Sycamore Fan.
The main reason I love it is that it is a classic example of Biomimicry, [...]
Natural Paint Options
A client of mine just came back from England raving about her friend’s natural paint company Annie Sloan.
Paint, a substance you put onto another surface, usually acts as protection and an aesthetic. Natural paint can be many things but needs to have the same basic elements: a binder, a base and optional color.
The binder holds [...]
Hybrid House Book
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of green building books: one looks to the latest scientific innovations for solutions and the other looks to revive ancient techniques. Lets call them the futurists and the traditionalists.
In the futurists camp you have high tech, in the traditionalists you have low tech.
Futurists design houses with complex energy calculations. [...]
New York Earthen Floor Design
I just uncovered a New York Times article on earthen floors. It is cool because it mentions the person who is consulting with Eco Brooklyn on some earthen floors in Brooklyn and Harlem. Her name is Sukita and she is very knowledgeable in earthen floors.
Here are more cool pics.
We have done some experimenting to adjust [...]
Brooklyn Wood Floor Revival
We did two jobs over the past week on wood floors. They started out really ugly. And they ended up amazing. We finished them with 100% pure tung oil so they are really natural.
The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted over the [...]
Green Kitchen Design
When people say green kitchen design they usually mean recycled glass counters or something. But the actual design of the kitchen doesn’t change much. For me a green kitchen design alters the behavior of the inhabitants so that they better the environment without extra thought or effort.
For example we all know recycling and composting are [...]
Waste, Toxic Homes
The other day I passed by a Manhattan condo renovation and saw they were throwing out good stuff: metal studds and flooring. The contractor told me it was a 3,000 sq.ft. condo that right before the current gut reno it had just been gut renovated!
It had high end everything: Poggen Pohl German kitchen, slate counters, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Brooklyn Brownstone Design
Here is a design our architect intern Matthew Pethley sketched up for a row house we are designing in Bed Stuy. it is not what we eventually designed for them on but I wanted to share it because the ideas are really cool. It would make for a beautiful space. It addresses the issue that [...]
Earthship Videos
Here are some of the latest earthship videos sent to me from the folks at earthship.com
Comments on earthships and the Copenhagen summit.
Here is another cool one:
The one peeve I have with this last video is “What the world needs now is one Billion earthsips, immediately.” That sounds too much like old school consumer thinking. We’ve [...]
Earthship
Michael Reynolds is one of my favorite visionaries. He is doing what Eco Brooklyn aims to do with eco brownstone renovations in Brooklyn – Build net zero homes out of trash – only he does it with earth ships in the Midwest and beyond.
Check it out. Really cool. These are the only justifiable new construction [...]
New Construction Should be Outlawed
I think new construction is to building like heroin is to health. It should be outlawed as a threat to our well-being. There are enough old buildings for us to renovate. New construction is a needless act of arrogance and self destruction.
There’s really not much more to say. I could explain why I guess but [...]
Brownstone: No Heat Needed!
We just went away and left our brownstone for two weeks. We turned off all the heat. The only appliance making heat was the fridge. And while we were gone NY got hit with one of the worst snow storms in history.
How cold was our home when we came back? A balmy 60 degrees. Not [...]
Green Spiral Staircase
Here is a spiral staircase we are designing for a client. We salvaged an antique round oak beam. It measures 14 feet long and is a solid 8 inches in diameter. The wood is so dense it takes four guys to lift it. We tried cutting it with a chainsaw and broke the chainsaw. It [...]
What Do Brooklyn Green Contractors Do On Their Day Off?
What do brooklyn green contractors do on their day off?
Build igloos of course!
The trick to building a good igloo is to use deep cake pans or small storage boxes to make snow bricks. The other trick is as you slant the walls inwards be careful NOT to slant the bricks. The walls slant inwards but [...]
Anatomy of a Brownstone Event This Spring
The NY City College of Technology does this cool seminar series called Anatomy of a Brownstone. This spring I’ll be one of their speakers. For more info see below.
Spring 2010 Offering: Layouts and Lifestyles
Course Code: BRNS 032
Date: Saturday 3/13 1 – 5 pm
Fee: $40
Directions: click here
When it’s time to renovate [...]
Green Building gets better with age
I call myself a green builder and as such am constantly thinking what that title means. Possibly one of the best definitions of green building I can think of is this: does it age well?
Green building is meant to be sustainable, meaning it can be repeated on an ongoing basis. Clear cutting trees is not [...]
Concrete Countertop Formula
Here is a good formula for a beautiful strong concrete countertop:
4 parts white cement
1/4 fly ash
4 white sand
4 marble dust
1/3 fiber
It creates a nice white counter top that is also very strong. We do custom concrete counters and find that this formula really works. We sometimes add decorative aggregate. One that really works is broken [...]
New Green Homes Book
The book “New Green Homes” by Sergi Costa Duran, Liliana Bollini and Ethel Pohl is a focused book. It is an architects visual study of modern homes around the world. They claim the homes are green but I didn’t really see that.
What I did see was a study of a very specific architectural style, and [...]
Hobbit Houses and Glass Box houses
I’m seeing two styles in green building. One I call the Hobbit house and the other is the Glass Box house.
One looks like the past, the other the future.
Here are some examples of the Hobbit house.
Hobbit Houses are:
low tech, low embodied energy, dark, local materials, high thermal mass, part of the earth, small, have a [...]
Brooklyn Brownstone Extentions and the Stack Effect
This is the season of phone calls from clients needing Eco Brooklyn’s help with their brownstone extensions. The problem is always the same: they are cold.
They call us up because we are Brooklyn brownstone insulation specialists.
Here are my observations having seen and fixed extensions for a while now.
There are two types of extensions. The first [...]
Building Green Book
This book has a long title: Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods Earth Plaster * Straw Bale * Cordwood * Cob * Living Roofs. But then again it is a big book.
Written by Tim Callahan and Clarke Snell this book overflows with 600 pages and 1500 images. The book aims to [...]
Concrete and CO2
I was just blogging how much we like earthen floors because for one it doesn’t use CO2 producing concrete.
Then I decided to calculate how much CO2 your typical Brownstone basement would produce if you poured a concrete slab.
Answer: Almost ONE MILLION cubic feet of CO2 is let off to pour a simple brownstone basement concrete [...]
Earthen Floor Brownstone
The correct way to finish off a brownstone is to put lots of insulation and then a concrete slab, right? Correct maybe but not the greenest way. Concrete creates way too much CO2. The greenest way and a great alternative to concrete is to put lots of insulation and then an EARTHEN floor. Yes earth, [...]
Comfortable Green Brownstone
Here is a great image. It shows the true value of a Brooklyn brownstone green renovation.
This is something you can’t put a price to. It is like the credit card advertisement:
Insulation $10
Radiant floor $15
Fiberglass Windows $12
Watching your baby play naked while it snows outside: Priceless
This photo really shows the immediate value of doing a good [...]
HVAC Watch Dog
HAVC manufacturing companies throw a lot of info around without consumers really knowing what is true. As an energy efficient HVAC installer we are very interested in the real energy efficiency of a unit. Is it really a SEER 25? How did they do the test? Does it retain that rating when the temperature drops [...]
PS 58 Window Grille Stupidity
This is probably my farewell post to what I think is one of the stupidest building I’ve seen in a long time. I say it is a farewell post because I don’t have much hope for rectifying the problem and am moving on.
I’m referring to the 2009 installation of window grilles onto the PS 58 [...]