Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls Book
The book Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls by Nigel Dunnet and Noel Kingsbury is an authoritative book and should be on the shelf of any Brooklyn green roof installer.
I bought it in the hopes it would help improve the Eco Brooklyn living wall technique for Brooklyn brownstones where plants are actually growing on the [...]
Living Walls and Green Walls
Here is a great pdf doc on green walls. It is created by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, an excellent resource for urban green roofs and living walls.
We install living walls in Brooklyn and are constantly looking for better techniques. The art is still very new and we are still very much in the exploration [...]
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 [...]
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.
[...]
Park Slope Green Roof and Deck Design
Here is a green roof and deck we are designing for a job in Park Slope Brooklyn. The deck area ranges from 900-1100 square feet. It would be made out of salvaged fir or possibly Black Locust if budget permits.
The pergolas are intentionally without many beams. The vegetation will be the main source of shade. [...]
Queens Botanical Garden
As part of our National Sustainable Building Adviser Course we visited the Queens Botanical Garden. It is amazing. The new building is totally decked out with the best of green building:
solar, rainwater, gray water, toilet composting, natural vantialtion. You name it.
But their greatest thing for me was their green roof. Really amazing.
Shashin Error: unable to [...]
Weights of green roofs
Brooklyn NY brownstones are not built to carry heavy loads on their roofs. So when you install a green roof you need to build for it and know what the weights are.
Here are the numbers from my friend Avra:
Extensive – 10-50 lb/squ. ft
Semi-intensive 30-90lb/sq. ft.
Intensive 80-150 lb/sq. ft.
Here are thicknesses for each:
extensive – 6″ or [...]
GreenRoofs.org
GreenRoofs.org is my favorite green roof resource on the web. Run by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities the web site is full of useful info.
If you ever wanted to put a green roof on your New York home then that should be the first place to look. When we are researching the best way to [...]
Cool Green Roof
Now here is a great green roof.
Solar Panels on the Brownstone Roof
The Brooklyn green show house has a green roof, solar panels, and solar water heater panels. Needless to say that is a lot to fit on a 600 square foot space. So we’re looking at ways to fit it all in.
Considerations are:
Make it look nice from the street and back yard.
Make it wind resistent.
Make it [...]
New York Green Roof Contractor
I love the abundance of energy emerging for green roofs in Brooklyn and New York. Installing a green roof in Brooklyn is the smartest think I can think of. When I go on a Brooklyn rooftop and see all the plane flat roofs I see a possible forest of verdant green and fauna.
I see a [...]
NYC Gets More Support and Funding For Green Roofs
Things are looking good for green roofs in Brooklyn! As this article states there is a growing interest amongst local politicians in supporting green roofs. The surge is really gaining momentum. We have so many thousands of wonderful, flat, sun filled roofs in Brooklyn – prime real estate for a verdant canopy of green and [...]
55 Years of Roofing
We are building a green roof on the show house. Green roofs are heavy so we are paying a lot of attention to the weight on the roof. We were going to lay the green roof materials directly on top of the tar roof that was there. It was in good shape.
But the we did [...]
Inserting the Insulation Into the Roof Ceiling
We are inserting the salvaged poly iso insulation board into the top floor ceiling of the house between the joists. All the joists have been sistered with “new” salvaged joists. You can see the bolts holding them together. We are packing four layers of poly iso board, making it an air tight R 36. The [...]