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
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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
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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
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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
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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
The book Gentle Architecture by Malcolm Wells is one of those cult books. Published in 1981 it is out of print. The author died in 2009. But the book lives on amongst those of us searching for alternatives to our current building crisis. Most people don’t even know we have a building crisis. Most architects don’t
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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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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
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