Dave Robinson, a principal of GreenEarthEquities, is a man in this industry that needs little introduction. If you didn’t see him at last year’s ACI event accepting the Tony Woods Award, you may have seen him teaching a class, serving as the former president of the California Building Performance Association, or performing deep energy retrofits on…

From My company blog, Foskey Road News: The focus of my blog is the consumer.

SPRING CLEANING AND ENERGY SAVINGS…

Many would think that the cost of having windows installed across house walls would be the intimidating factor during house renovation or construction. This is not the case for many in California. Safety concerns are the major challenge that homeowners attempt to address when they initially consider having all their interior or exterior walls covered completely with windows....…

Have you ever thought of heating your home with pellets? If you are one of the many individuals that pay large sums of money to fuel your masonry constructed wood-burning fireplace, you may want to consider converting your fireplace to your main home heating device. To do this, you would simply have to purchase a pellet insert, and your home will be heated by environmentally-friendly and renewable pellets.…

The steady building of man-made lights era has invited homeowners to search for out an increasing number of novel strategies of illuminating their homes. It must firstly be practical. past anything else lights should provide enough illumination to peer by means of and must cater to the utility of a room or particular house. Secondly, it should be aesthetically appealing. Lighting has a profound affect on the means we really feel and the way we understand things. A smartly lit home should be…

On two separate Quality Assurance site visits in the past two weeks I've detected elevated levels of Carbon Monoxide (CO) coming from attached garages. I was a bit surprised at this since neither garage contained a car - let alone any active source of combustion. So I did some digging and came up with this great resource from Iowa State on the topic. From my reading of…

By Trish Holder

My home is heated and cooled with a geothermal heat pump – also known as a ground source heat pump.  I was sold on the idea of geothermal heating and cooling for the same reasons that I suspect most homeowners are:

• The promise of lower energy costs
• The attractive renewable energy tax credits, which make it easier to come to terms with the rather exorbitant cost
• The belief that this is truly a more…

CEE understands that efficient technologies alone will not save energy. Consumer behavior plays a role in energy consumption, so our program design incorporates use strategies from behavioral psychology. We also like to use social media and other communication channels to educate about energy! In this post, Minnesota Energy Challenge Coordinator …

Before drywall was installed, I tested the infiltration (air leakage) at the Proud Green Home (PGH) at Serenbe,…

In the meantime, Germany is about to go under due to gov't spending on alt. fuel:

Nordseewerke, which produces Statue of Liberty-sized foundations for ocean wind turbines, ramped up its manufacturing capacity and head count in 2011 after Merkel declared that Germany would begin a massive project to install 25,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by…

Much has been written in recent times on consumer attitudes towards investing in energy efficiency retrofits, a recent GTM article http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Can-Home-Energy-Efficiency-Gain-Traction?utm_source=SmartGrid&utm_medium=Headline&utm_campaign=GTMDaily does hit the nail on the…

Solar Energy + Energy Efficiency Services – to DO or NOT to DO – is no more a Shakespearean dilemma!

The SMB solar installer finds himself in a challenging spot today

• Profitability hurts, some operators are working on a…

BPI Building Analyst Training & Certification

This course provides the training you need to become certified as a BPI Building Analyst Professional.

You will be able to perform a thorough building analysis and provide work scope recommendations to save energy, improve comfort and increase a home's safety and durability.

Your BPI Building Analyst credentials will qualify your clients for a variety of incentive programs.

Benefits of the…

There are not as many contractors out there as you would expect that are current with the most recent, and always updating, residential building code.  Particularly when it comes to the sizing limitations for HVAC equipment, most contractors consider this minimum requirement by law nothing more than a nuisance.  There is nothing more frustrating to see in a quality control role than a system that was sold, sized, and installed prior to the start of the system design process.  Completing a…

Ok, I have had a couple programmable thermostats in the past... But, once again about 11 months ago I was doing my weekly (sometimes daily) stroll through the neighborhood 'big-box' home improvement store and back in the back past the garden section there is this little…

What house has a built in energy meter?  The YesHaus of course!  This is like having a speedometer on your home and a way to record and measure your energy use.  What better way to know where you stand and what to expect on your bill?  The image you see is from an actual YesHaus reading that we took on March 21.

Look at how low the readings are on each gauge shown. This screenshot of the actual dashboard indicates a predicted home heating cost of only $9.19 for the…

MyEnergy.com

This site is supposed to be the next big thing. You give it your electric co. and water co. names and passwords. It delivers a free & pretty usage report to you. It promises you all these local friends that you will get together with at the local speakeasy to talk about home…

Things are really moving along on the Proud Green…

Background

Ok, back in November 2012 I stumbled into my local 'big-box' home improvement store with an extra $1,000 USD to burn and without any research or pre-planning I purchased 35 LED bulbs to replace my incandescent and CFL bulbs. I was way tired of continually replacing a couple CFLs time and time again and the 25,000-50,000 hours of lifetime sparked my interest and put a $1K hole in my wallet. At a burn time average of 3-hours per day that is 22-45 years of…

A sudden Change in the routine is very common; some are predictable while others are not. Even if predictions are made they are not sure to happen and a great example for this would be weather conditions. It is unpredictable and even the most effective of meteorologists cannot predict what weather condition ahead of 2 weeks. One unanticipated major storm can bring heavy rains and some inches of water could make flooding an anxiety for homeowners a lot of thus for those dwelled in low-lying…