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Part of being a green contractor means studying emerging technologies offering more eco-benefits than conventional construction. In this case we’re looking at old technologies: the rammed earth wall, one of humanity’s oldest building techniques. When it comes to walls, a couple of rammed-earth techniques are available as alternatives to your standard insulation-filled 2×4 frames: The Earthship model [...] When you flush a toilet in America you have every expectation that whatever just went in there is going away forever, no questions asked. So why would anyone want a toilet that takes your dirty business, stores it right where you put it, and hands it back to you again after a few months?? [...] Gennaro Brooks-Church, Director of EcoBrooklyn Inc, discusses the significant element of salvaging materials for use in the company’s green renovations. Currently we are wrapping up a full-renovation of a brownstone in Manhattan where we’ve been working hard to attain its stringent Passive House requirements. Check out our video below, and feel free to leave [...] In our Manhattan green brownstone renovation in we used Rieder windows because they allow us to meet the stringent Passive House standard. They came from Austria so it took about two months lead time to get them. All said it cost about $30,000 just in window expenses to supply the brownstone with your basic front and [...] Here is a good article in the NY Times about Passive Houses in NYC. As a Passive House builder we are excited to see growing interest in the technique as we feel it is a key element in building a greener New York. Here is a side shot of your typical Passive House [...] Check out this great article about our Eco Brooklyn’s Passive House in Harlem. GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, a great online source for building, designing, and remolding green homes, sent Richard Defendorf to our Harlem site to check out our work. Read his write-up of all the techniques we used to seal our passive house! http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/bringing-passivhaus-harlem [...] At Eco Brooklyn, we do energy-efficiency retrofits that involve huge amounts of air sealing, air barriers, vapor barriers and insulation. We aim for the super stringent Passive House building envelope standard and net-zero energy consumption. This is as radical it gets in energy conservation. Sealing the home in an airtight shell requires a [...] Eco Brooklyn’s Gennaro Brooks-Church discusses our clay wall application. Creating a better seal on bricks and more insulation, Eco Brooklyn applies clay to walls all over New York City. Most recently we applied clay in our Harlem Passive House and in the downstairs apartment in our Brooklyn Show House. Check out this great video! [...] Come check out our Open House and Blowerdoor test at our Harlem Passive House renovation. When: Friday, November 11, 2011, 4:30 PM Where: 156 West 130th Street, Manhattan. The New York Passive House community is kicking off the weekend of International Open Passive House days at Ecobrooklyn’s project in Harlem. The house is well [...] This Friday at 2pm we will be doing a blower door test at the harlem Passive House. If you are interested in attending please let us know. Eco Brooklyn, NY Passive House Contractor
Here is a cool article from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. As a New York green contractor we are always looking for local green building materials, especially anything that relates to the super high efficient Passive House construction tools. These windows from Maine look really promising. New Green Building Products High-performance windows, doors, and tapes for your next [...] We are doing the flashing and installation of the windows for our Passive House brownstone in Manhattan and needed a scaffold. There seems to be a lot of confusion among contractors around what is allowed for scaffold installation. Here are the official rules for scaffold installation in Manhattan I asked around to my seasoned contractors and [...] Director of Eco Brooklyn, Gennaro Brooks-Church discusses how the Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) will work once it is completely installed in the Passive House building. The NY green contractor is currently renovating this entire Harlem brownstone, and the addition of an ERV is a vital part of the standards that need to be met. [...] We just received our triple pane windows from Europe to our Passive House site in Harlem. The windows will help the brownstone achieve its necessary air tight specs and save up to 90% in energy costs compared to an ordinary building of the same size. If you enjoy the video, please give us a [...] The windows we ordered finally arrived to our Harlem Passive House. They’re not your typical windows though by any means, and unfortunately we couldn’t get them USA made. These are triple pane windows. They’re pretty heavy compared to a typical window of the same size, and a heck of a lot more expensive. As [...] We just made a last minute switch from Zehnder’s Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) to Ultimate Air’s ERV for our Manhattan Passive House project. There were two main factors in this decision: price and USA made. Zehnder is a great unit and Barry the sales rep is a great guy. You’ve got top grade quality [...] Here is a cool web site about all things Passive House, aptly called, International Passive House Magazine, or IPHM. It is run by Tamas Banki. Based in Hungary he is doing a great job pulling together all the PH info from around the world. As a Passive House builder in New York I found the site [...] Here is a discussion between myself and other Passive House people regarding what ventilation system to use in the New York Passive house Eco Brooklyn is building. I originally got a bid for an ERV from Barry Stephens at Zehnder, which I thought was expensive. That prompted me to ask around for other options. [...] Here are three excellent Passive House resources prepared by the folks at the Passive House Institute. One is for retrofits: One for new construction: And the third for non-domestic: Eco Brooklyn is a passive house builder in New York City, where there are very few Passive House projects. The vast majority of [...] Here are two useful videos on Passive House principles, insulation and air tightness. Eco Brooklyn is a New York Passive House builder and we are committed to spreading Passive House information. It is good stuff, especially when combined with green building strategies of recycling and salvage. In the video you well see Tomas O’leary, [...] Here is an excellent pdf on Passive House. It shows the construction methods and results of a group of Passive House buildings in Hannover, Germany, giving a great insight into how Passive House works. PEP-Info1_Passive_Houses_Kronsberg As Passive House builders in New York this information is invaluable to us. In NY we are definitely experimenting [...] We have been working on the first slated Passive House in Harlem, Manhattan, for a couple months now. It was a complete burnt out shell when we started. Since then we have cleaned it out, put in floors, stairs and a roof. Check out the pics below. 130th House Summer-Fall 2010May 11, 2010Photos: 195 [...] We are building a Passive House in a Manhattan brownstone. Instead of using more synthetic materials to air seal the brick walls (crucial for PH) we are using clay. Here are some notes to a successful clay application over New York brownstone brick walls: – Use reinforcment mesh (fiberglass is best, hemp is mesh also [...] Since Eco Brooklyns larger projects in New York are all Passive House standard now we have become very interested in Energy Recovery Systems (ERV). An ERV passes air between the house and the outside so that there is a constant fresh supply of air in the house. This is needed since Passive Houses, and all good [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] |
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