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{Re}habitat
Learn how adaptive reuse and upcycling can add hip design to your home, apartment, or yard with the Go Green channel's {Re}habitat series. Follow host Rachael Ranney as she shows you how to repurpose salvaged and found materials, adding fun and function to your space without breaking your budget.
Moisture in a bathroom can lead to peeling finishes, warped doors, and even mold. The purpose of a bathroom exhaust fan is to control moisture and remove airborne odors and pollutants. While maintenance of bathroom exhaust fans is quite often overlooked, a proper maintenance schedule will ensure quiet and efficient operation, increase the fan's lifespan, improve indoor air quality, and keep the unit attractive in appearance.
Solar energy technologies were discovered by the ancient Greek society, yet we are still uncovering today how to store the sun's energy for use on those days when cloudy cover prevails and there is no sunshine to capture. Many alternative energy sources, such as solar energy, have been overshadowed, as well, by fuel sources such as coal and natural gas, once seen by early industrialists as abundant and seemingly limitless.
MIT's Chemistry Professor Dan Nocera and his research team offer society new hope for taking solar energy technologies one step closer to an in-home reality.
Mitigating Elevator Noise in Multifamily Residential Buildings
Written by David Ingold Mon Dec 28 2009Today’s modern mid rise and high rise luxury condominiums and apartment buildings offer numerous amenities to attract potential owners. They can offer spectacular vistas through floor to ceiling walls of glass, high end finishes on the floor, gourmet style kitchens with all the modern features one could ever want, and a master bedroom suite that offers a tranquil and quiet place to escape. In these building types, elevators become a necessary component for vertical circulation to access the floors. For those residences that are adjacent to the elevator equipment room or the elevator hoistway, the noise and vibration caused by the operation of the elevator can be a potential source of sound intrusion. Because today’s buildings are constructed with lightweight materials, and because there is a need to generate maximum useable square footage, sound transmission issues are compounded. All this combined can result in unsatisfactory living conditions for tens of thousands who live in condominiums or apartments.
One of our KnowledgeBase writers, Robert Klar, otherwise known as Cowboy Bob, is a holidays enthusiast who would like to share some of his ideas about how to make the holidays an enjoyably green experience. He shares with us a few tips about LED lights that tie into the At Home article Christmas Light Safety. As for me, I greatly enjoyed walking through the Columbus Zoo's new LED Wildlights Display, sponsored this year by AEP with over 3 million brightly shining bulbs.
While we hope to inspire families to change out their traditional Christmas stings of lights with LED's this year, like Prince Charles has done for Buckingham Palace, the greater goal is to invoke a stronger, more broad use of the new LED technology in all light sources. After all, 6% of all electricity use in the U.S. comes from lighting sources. LED's are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescents. So, look forward to watching how LED technology progresses in the coming years.
Happy Holidays!
Autodesk released a new online game called Retrofit Online Game for Green Buildings yesterday, intended to raise green awareness and be publicized through social media. Though China technically emits more CO2 than the U.S., we are still the leading country emitting CO2 per capita. No, of course we are not proud of our ranking?!
Check out the new game. Find out how much energy it takes to use a hair dryer and how much CO2 a typical American household outputs each day. It takes about 20 minutes to complete the video and quizzing portions. It is funny that you, the construction worker, have to work against a woman who is throwing her coffee mug at you, a man who is breaking windows as you work, and an annoying bird that throws you off the ladder.
According to Architecture 2030, the key to preventing the impending loss of our polar ice caps (as written in my recent blog post) is to reduce our use of coal, which is used to generate electricity. Mazria, the founder of Architecture 2030, recommends we reduce our use of coal first by using passive solar solutions, and then by supplementing those solutions with active eco-friendly technologies to get us to cut emissions that ultimately lead to the melting of Earth's polar ice caps.
The Knowlton School of Architecture (KSA) and The College of Engineering at The Ohio State University partnered to compete in the 2009 National Renewable Energy Lab's Solar Decathlon Competition that was held in October at the Oval in Washington D.C. The team of OSU architecture and engineering students, led by David Nedrow and Deanna Hinkle, who both were graduate students in the Masters of Architecture program at OSU, presented a compelling design that functions off-the-grid (the home generates its own electricity and does not depend on traditional public utility services) with both passive solar design and active solar technologies.
Problems can occur with any type of renovation project. Prior to installing our new three piece acrylic bathtub and surround, we determined that the existing locations of both the shower arm and tub spout were too low. While we had hoped to keep the existing plumbing intact, we realized that we would need to redo the rough plumbing to relocate the shower arm and tub spout.
Since our house already had copper plumbing pipes, we decided to replace the existing tub and shower pipes with copper, rather than PEX or CPVC. Even though I have done some plumbing in the past, I had reservations about soldering the copper piping and fittings.
It's Not Just the Polar Bears that Need the Ice Caps to Survive
Written by Stephanie Aurora Lewis Mon Dec 21 2009Coldness as we know it may begin to change, no matter if global warming is a "natural fluctuation or an effect of industrial society's releasing heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere," as reported in John Noble Wilford's New York Times article Ages Old Polar Icecap is Melting, Scientists Find, written nearly ten years ago. Scientists have proven the ice cap is melting in the summer at a greater pace and more aggressively than at any other recorded time in history.
