Eco Brooklyn was visited today by Klearwall Industries. Klearwall is a certified Passive House windows company. Originally based in Ireland, Klearwall is looking to make its mark in the US market. They offer triple-paned windows and doors for domestic and commercial needs, ranging from single-window installation to entire buildings. Their windows are billed as eco-clad, …
MotherPlants is a nursery in Ithaca, NY that specializes in growing plants for green roofs. MotherPlants is a women-owned company, committed to environmental sustainability. They use renewable energy, healthy growing practices, and dedicate a large portion of their land for wildlife. These woman do green roofs right. They focus on plants that are drought resistant, …
Anthony Archer-Wills is a world class water garden designer who has built over 2,000 ponds, water gardens, waterfalls, and streams across the globe. He has several books out, among them The Water Gardener and Designing Water gardens: A Unique Approach. Gennaro Brooks-Church, Eco Brooklyn’s Director, had the opportunity to take a course with him on designing natural …
Review: Anthony Archer-Wills, Water Garden Designer Read More »
Fans are inherently energy efficient since they reduce your need for an energy hog air conditioner. But for those of us constantly pushing the envelope we want to know what the most energy efficient fan is. Right now my favorite is the Sycamore Fan. The main reason I love it is that it is a classic example …
A client of mine just came back from England raving about her friend’s natural paint company Annie Sloan. Paint, a substance you put onto another surface, usually acts as protection and an aesthetic. Natural paint can be many things but needs to have the same basic elements: a binder, a base and optional color. The …
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 …
I realize concrete has huge embodied energy and creates tonnes of CO2 during it’s manufacture but I still can’t resist reading up on the uses of concrete for residential interior applications. Eco Brooklyn is guilty of making some concrete counters too. I just read Concrete at Home by the concrete fanatic Fu-Tung Chen. He has …
There are a number of ‘green’ product listings and databases on the web; Greenspec at BuildingGreen.com and Pharos, for example, but most (if not all) of them require a paid annual membership. One good source of free information on green products is Oikos.com. More than 2,500 companies are listed in a searchable database. Others are …
HAVC manufacturing companies throw a lot of info around without consumers really knowing what is true. As an energy efficient HVAC installer we are very interested in the real energy efficiency of a unit. Is it really a SEER 25? How did they do the test? Does it retain that rating when the temperature drops …
There are several glues on the market now for attaching wood flooring to the sub floor, considered green glues because they have very low VOC’s compared to typical flooring glues. They tend to be water based instead of chemical based. We have experimented with them but haven’t had good results. Firstly, using anything water based …
