Vermont Natural Coatings is one of the leading green wood finishes out there. Most of the time we mix oils and bases from staple ingredients like tung oil, linseed oil, whey pigments and citrus solvent, but sometime the situation calls for a more “conventional look”. This is when we might use Vermont Natural Coatings. Here […]
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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.
Cancers from Environment ‘Grossly Underestimated’ Read More »
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
Insulation Values For Selected Materials Read More »
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
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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
Wood, Cancer and Boiled Frogs Read More »
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
Brooklyn Green Roof Maintenance Read More »
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
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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
Green Building time and cost Read More »
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
Brooklyn Bee Maintenance Read More »
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
