Featured Blog Posts – August 2011 Archive (7)

Attic fans can suck air down flues causing spillage.  Spillage can cause CO poisoning.  Attic fans can't always be easily accessed or controlled.  Read on:

While doing a comprehensive quality control visit last week, our Pure Energy Final Inspector noted that both the atmospheric draft water heater and atmospheric draft boiler failed these safety tests:

• Both spilled fumes for longer than one minute (the spillage tests failed)
• Both had inadequate draft…

Picture a so-called “green” building in a floodplain.  Now picture a storm-hardened home guzzling gas like there is no tomorrow.

For me, neither of these conjures up an image of true sustainability.

By virtue of being built unconsciously (or defiantly) in harm’s way, a building is not durable and thus not (in my book) sustainable.  Similarly, a disaster-resilient building belching out greenhouse gases that any scientist worth their salt will tell you is contributing to present…

Thank you for your continued interest in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Home Energy Score pilots. The pilots wrapped up their scoring efforts last month, with more than 1,000 homes assessed and scored in total.  We are now in the process of analyzing the pilot data as well as the wealth of information our pilot partners provided to us last week at a pilot wrap-up meeting in Washington,…

We got tired of sharing a bathroom, we were afraid as we grow older that we would trip and break our hips on the stairs leading from the kitchen into the garage and to our backyard; and since the only route from inside the house to our back yard was through the garage, we decided to remodel our 1,200 square foot cottage in Walnut Creek. It seems so long ago.

We did it right. We interviewed several architects and design/build companies, had an architect work with us to draw up…

Why do so many energy insiders insist that home energy automation will fail?  Many whom I respect say the typical householder will never take the time to fiddle with smart gadgets that reduce energy costs.

Their skepticism, however, just elicits a verbal shrug from Peter Porteous, CEO of…

Talk about a light bulb moment.

A professor of engineering at Edinburgh University recently demonstrated for the first time to a wide audience his technology that uses common every day lights to transmit data.

Harald Haas streamed a video through a desk lamp at Ted Global 2011at Scotland’s Edinburgh International Conference Center in July.

If commercialized, the technology not only creates a vast new application for light, but also dramatically expands our now limited…