Green Show House
Extensive Green Roof
An extensive green roof is a green roof that is less than 6″ thick. As opposed to an intensive green roof that is more than 6″ thick. Because of the thickness of the growing medium an extensive green roof can only support sedum and drought tolerant small plants. The reason for this is the limited root space [...]
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.
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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 [...]
Eco Brooklyn Show Garden Seeks Participants
We are planting our front and back gardens at the Eco Brooklyn show house and welcome anyone who wants to be involved.
The gardens are edible gardens as well as aesthetically beautiful. Drawing from horticulture, permaculture, feng shui, xeriscape, gray water and Biodynamic gardening we seek to redefine the definition of a Brooklyn brownstone garden.
It is [...]
GardenFork.TV Visits Brooklyn Green Show House
My friend Eric Gunnar Rochow from the great show GardenFork.TV came by the Brooklyn Green Show House to see our green renovation progress. If you are interested in a five minute tour of the show house with me and Eric check this out.
GarenFork.TV is a cool show where Eric combines wholesome living with intelligent insight. [...]
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 [...]
Brooklyn Green Brownstone Renovation Template
The way Brooklyn brownstones are currently renovated does not work. It does not work for the environment nor for the inhabitants’ comfort and utility bills.
Eco Brooklyn is focused on redefining how a brownstone gets renovated. We use the Brooklyn Green Show House as an example of a renovation template that works for the triple [...]
Hitting Eco Brick Walls With Clients and how to Overcome Them
I just had a contractor come visit our Brooklyn Green Show House. He was up from Virginia visiting family and decided to check it out. He isn’t a green builder but wants to move in that direction.
Where he’s from he says there is very little green building interest and he is very frustrated with his [...]
100K House
A reporter was over at the Brooklyn green show house last week and I was talking about the importance of Brooklyn green contractors being affordable to middle class people in order for our goal of turning Brooklyn green to be successful.
She mentioned another green developer who had built a house in Phili for $100K and [...]
Passive House in Brooklyn’s Space Craved Brownstones
How feasible is it to green renovate a Brooklyn Brownstone along Passive House standards? After looking into it the main issue I see is the lack of space. A brownstone has a fixed building line, usually something along the dimensions of 20×40 feet. At least a foot of that is taken up by bricks, leaving [...]
Solar PV for Brooklyn
Like most people nowadays we think Solar PV is sexy. When you have a Brooklyn brownstone it isn’t like you can have a lot of it, though. Especially now with the new fire regulations requiring a large area of the roof be left open for fire fighters. And if you want a green roof or [...]
Reclaimed Home interviews Eco Brooklyn
ReclaimedHome.com came by and interviewed Gennaro Brooks-Church at the Brooklyn Green Show House. He talks about the new template for building a Brownstone.
Below is the video they took while I did a tour.
They also took some cool pictures.
Check out their site. They are doing some great stuff.
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Converting Metric to Emperial R and U values
If you are a green builder in Brooklyn you are often looking to Europe for green building techniques and technologies. And often it is Germany. They are miles ahead of the US in terms of energy efficiency and green building.
The German Green Party has been a strong political party for years. Compare that with [...]
Daily News Mentions Eco Brooklyn
Today’s issue of the NY Daily News mentioned Eco Brooklyn and quoted Gennaro Brooks-Church. They posted the below pic and had this to say about Eco Brooklyn and Gennaro:
Gennaro Brooks-Church and his 5-year-old daughter always wash their hands after they go canoeing on the murky green water. A green builder and real-estate broker, Church is [...]
Eco Brooklyn named Green Hero of the Week
We got a nice plug in The L Magazine – we were named Green Hero of the Week.
Eco Brooklyn Needs a Green Space!
Eco Brooklyn is desperately in need of a green space where we can store and share with others all the materials we salvage. The city provides and we constantly find good materials in dumpsters and demolitions.
But we have no place to put it! The Brooklyn Green Show House is bursting with material and we are [...]
Tung Oil
We love tung oil. If you want to do a green renovation in a Brooklyn brownstone you can’t do it without tung oil. All the floors, stairs and banisters need to be treated with something. Usually it is some nasty poly or paint application.
We use tung oil. It is a key element in our green [...]
Bats in Brooklyn
I’ve been speaking with Wendy in Suffolk County about bats. She makes and sells bat houses and we’re talking about the best way to have a bat house in the Brooklyn Green Show House.
Bat are a very important part of the ecosystem. One of the reasons Brooklyn has such a problem with mosquitoes is that [...]
Reclaimed Lumber Pergola
We have built a pergola on the green show house for solar pv and thermal. This raises it above the green roof.
Green Architect Roxanne Ryce-Paul sketched up the drawings for it:
It looks really great. Eco Brooklyn green builder and project manager Jack Watson built it with his crew.
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Art Of Dumpster Diving
As a green contractor in Brooklyn we feel very fortunate. The New York area is the land of plenty if you are not averse to jumping into a dumpster. We find all the flooring we need for our customers in dumpsters. Salvaged doors, bricks, sheet rock, studs, metal beams, and wood joists are all available [...]
Milk Paint Ingredients
The Milk Paint we are using at the Brooklyn Green Show House has three ingredients:
milk protein
lime
clay
That’s it! Three ingredients!
Try to find out the ingredients of a chemical paint. First you will be hard pressed to get the list and if you do you will see it has many ingredients, most of them with long [...]
Designing a Green Kitchen
We’ve sent off our design to our kitchen cabinet builder, David Lucassen from Nexis 3, for the two kitchens in the Brooklyn Green Show House.
In the design we took into consideration how to maximize natural sunlight. This meant positioning cabinets and the fridge on the North side of the kitchen so the sun could shine [...]
EPDM membranes for green roofs
Yesterday, right after finishing my last post about waterproofing membranes for green roofs, I got an interesting e-mail from a friend that I went to graduate school with. She is professionally involved in the green building industry and I contacted her for information on waterproofing membranes for green roofs when I first [...]
Waterproofing a green roof
In my last post, I identified factors that should be considered when installing a green roof (i.e. desired function, type of roof, whether structural modifications must be made to accommodate extra weight, composition of the roof system, proper substrate formula, appropriate mix of vegetative species, and desired time to maturity/planting method). In this post, I will begin to investigate [...]
American Clay
American Clay is a great company that is reviving a millenia old building technique of applying clay to building walls.
They have a strong local culture and associate themselves strongly with their Santa Fe roots. But to grow as a company they also ship anywhere.
They are very helpful with advice too. Shaylor at American [...]
Green Brooklyn – A 10 Year View
Here is my take on green building in Brooklyn over the next 5-10 years. It is actually a lot wider than Brooklyn, but that is my focus.
Rising fuel costs will drive people back into the city, this means there will be an influx of people into Brooklyn. This will keep housing prices more elevated than [...]
What to consider when building a green roof
One strategy for addressing impacts associated with urban development is to reduce the functional area of developed surface. The European community, and especially Germany, has opted to do so by re-vegetating roofs. Green roofs have been associated with a variety of environmental and economic benefits, including the ability to retain precipitation, filter pollutants, reduce maximum rooftop [...]
Lighting with LED 1
Lighting can account for 15-20% of your monthly electric bill. With recent advances in LED technology we are able to reproduce the same level of brightness for 1/5- 1/10th the power. This is a huge savings. If we all work together we can reduce this country’s electrical draw by 10%! That equates to a lot [...]
How Much Fresh Air Does Your Home Need?
Brooklyn brownstones are being built with tighter and tighter envelopes, which means there are no leaky cracks to help ventilate the building.
This is a problem, sort of. Gone is the wasted heat. But you need to make up for that air and the best way is good design and mechanical ventilation.
ASHRAE is the group that [...]
upcoming Green House Tour in Brooklyn
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Green Buildings Open House on May 9th
Greetings!
Hello NESEA members! Bring a friend and join us for our Spring Open House Tour.
GreenHomeNYC has moved our Open House from October to May. For the next 8 hours buy one registration at full price ($25) and get up to four registrations for the same tour [...]