From the category archives:

materials

Permeable Pavement Options for LEED Projects

December 8, 2010

We have started to explore larger projects with our development company in Philadelphia that include shared off-street parking lots with a common driveway. This provides a new opportunity to explore more sustainable pavement options than the traditional blacktop used in most projects. Part of our research, as always, is devoted to finding the best mix [...]

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Wireless Light Switches + Floor Outlets = Tighter & More Insulated Home

October 15, 2010

Earlier this week we posted on cutting labor costs associated with Cellulose insulation installs. It occured to me in some of the comments that we have never posted on our “magical” electrical strategy to help improve the insulation and air tightness of our homes. The truth of the matter is that we actually don’t use [...]

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Cutting Cellulose Insulation Install Costs?

October 12, 2010

As you may well know, we are big fans of cellulose insulation. The Skinny project was the first time we used cellulose and we learned some valuable lessons that we plan to apply to future projects like Avant Garage that Nic has been telling you about lately. As always, we are attempting to continually improve [...]

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Blown In Cellulose – The Ultimate “Green” Insulation?

August 16, 2010

In my last post about super-insulated wall assemblies, I referenced a future post about the superiority of Dense-pack Blown-in Cellulose insulation over other insulating products. Well, this is that post. We’ve talked about insulation in the past, but after extensive research and pitches from other insulation fanatics we’d like to put Cellulose in the spotlight [...]

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The Vented Rain Screen via Furring Master

May 14, 2010

It occurred to me that we haven’t really written a good post dedicated to vented rain screen assemblies. A rain screen is basically a gap created in between the sheathing of a house and the exterior cladding. It is considered by most building experts to be the most durable method of building an exterior wall [...]

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ZIP & SIS – Multi-Functional Sheathing

May 3, 2010

If you’ve been following us for a while, you probably know we’re big fans of building products that serve multiple purposes. Today we look at versatile sheathing products that go beyond simple structural support and contribute to the “Hybrid Prefab” method of building that we continually strive for. We’ll take a look at two products: [...]

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Building Gaskets and Air Sealing Tape

October 30, 2009

Yesterday we looked at some lessons learned from our aggressive air sealing goals on the Passive Project. In doing so we mentioned that we will be utilizing building gaskets and air sealing tape to help obtain the very difficult building air tightness goal of 0.6 ACH @ 50Pa that is required by the Passive House [...]

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Marker Time – Indoor Air Quality (Health)

September 22, 2008

Our third and final installment of the Indoor Air Quality Marker Time videos. In retrospect, this should have been the first of the IAQ series. Oh well. As Nic will tell you, we covered this topic about the homes first rather than things like recycled materials and solar panels because we believe it is overlooked [...]

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Marker Time – Indoor Air Quality (Materials)

September 18, 2008

Welcome to the first of hopefully a long running series of educational videos we like to call “Marker Time.” I guess you could say this is our take on the UPS Whiteboard style of presenting. In this segment we talk about Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in the 120K House compared to the average new construction [...]

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