A few shopping ideas for the holiday season.

A Yuba cargo bike with precious cargo.
Photo Credit: Yuba

I’m not a big shopper. I don’t even particularly like getting presents. Our society is just too much about consumption. Nonetheless, as I’ve done on occasion in the past, I’m providing below some Christmas shopping ideas.

1. LED light bulb

Every time I turn around, it seems, I see another LED light bulb. Among the screw-in replacement lamps, there are many good products—but also some that aren’t so good. Look for products from a reputable manufacturer (a company that’s been around for a while), and select a product that carries an Energy Star label. The most common problem with LED lamps is failure due to poor heat management; I’ve had products fail after less than a year.

Open-web, parallel-chord joists with solid-wood diagonal struts for use as superinsulated roof rafters.

Open Joist Triforce rafters being installed on our house. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

Last week I wrote about an innovative foundation insulation material, Foamglas, that we used in our new house in Dummerston. This week I’ll talk about the open-web rafters we’re using to achieve a superinsulated roof.

First, a little background. To create highly insulated roofs there are several approaches:

When the insulation is installed in the attic floor (creating an unheated attic), it’s easy to obtain very high R-values inexpensively—it’s cheap, that is, as long as you don’t count the cost of the lost living space by creating an unheated attic. Basically, you just dump in a lot of loose-fill cellulose or fiberglass on the attic floor, filling the joist cavity and more.

I’ve heard of as much as two feet of cellulose insulation being installed in this manner, achieving about R-80. To make room for a lot of insulation at the roof eaves, it’s usually necessary to install “raised-heel” trusses for the roof framing (so that the insulation thickness at the edges is not significantly compromised.

Urban Green's EBies recognize professionals who work behind the scenes to make existing buildings perform sustainably.
Image: Urban Green

2/19/13 Update: Urban Green has posted a new EBie scorecard demonstrating how entries will be scored—worth checking out, with the submission deadline close on our heels!

The EBie Awards—the "Oscars of sustainable building"—will be announced by Urban Green, a chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, in New York City on June 19, 2013, so now is the time to throw your name in the hat.

In case you didn't tune in for the first EBie Awards, here's a rundown from the EBie website on what it's all about:

From high-tech BIPV to smarter plugs for the home, we found lots of great new products at Greenbuild this year.

Lutron's Serena remote-controlled shades install easily and are inexpensive compared to most automated shades.
Photo Credit: Lutron

Greenbuild is always a great time to find new products and reconnect with friends and colleagues. It’s a busy, rewarding, and exhausting few days—especially this year, since the trade show was spread across three buildings and a couple of city blocks.

I did a lot of walking, but it was worth the effort. Here are a few of the products I spotted on the expo floor.

The Forest Stewardship Council honors four stunning projects at Greenbuild for their use of sustainable timber.

This rendering shows the Bullitt Center as envisioned.
Photo Credit: Miller Hull Partnership

We’ve been hearing more and more lately about wood framing for midsize (and even some high-rise) commercial buildings, and this year the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has given Design & Build awards to two pretty large examples of timber construction.

A vernacular West Indian cottage also took home the residential award, and there was a surprise “Judges’ Choice” award that I’ll explain below. The projects are chosen each year based on use of FSC wood, market impact, broader contributions to sustainability, and aesthetics.

I had the privilege to serve on the jury for these awards, which was a lot of fun—but we also had to make some pretty tough choices. 

Using Foamglas instead of polystyrene to insulate beneath our basement slab and on the foundation walls.

Eli Gould cutting Foamglas for use under our basement slab. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

In my role with Environmental Building News and our GreenSpec Product Database, I get plenty of opportunity to research and write about innovative building products. That’s one of the really fun aspects of my job.

On occasion I also get an opportunity to try out new or little-known materials. In the construction of our new home in Dummerston, Vermont—actually the rebuilding of a 200-year Cape—I’ve had opportunity to get some real experience with lots of products. One of these is a cellular glass insulation material known as Foamglas (check out Foamglas in GreenSpec).

Why we need a product like Foamglas

I’ve written often about the problems with extruded polystyrene from an environmental and health perspective. Relative to performance, extruded polystyrene (XPS) is a great product. It is water-resistant so can be used below-grade; it has high compressive strength so can be used beneath a concrete slab floor; it insulates very well (R-5 per inch); and it’s inexpensive. These properties make XPS the nearly universal choice for sub-slab and exterior foundation insulation today.

The Greenbuild conference, as usual, was the place to find out about innovations in green building products.

Agepan THD wood-fiber insulative sheathing is now being sold by the Small Planet Workshop. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Small Planet Workshop

I attended the Greenbuild Conference and related meetings in San Francisco last week. This is the largest conference and trade show in the green building field, and it is increasingly becoming the national event where large manufacturers roll out new building products.

Described below are a few product highlights from the trade show that caught my eye as I wandered around. I only got through about a quarter of the trade show.

Wood-fiber insulation from Germany

In Europe it is becoming increasingly common to use high-permeability wood fiber sheathing as an exterior insulation material, and at least one such material was on display at the conference. The Small Planet Workshop in Olympia, Washington, is now distributing the German product Agepan THD. These 2"-thick panels insulate to R-5.7 (R-2.3 per inch) and have a high perm rating of 18—meaning that water vapor can pass through it fairly easily.

An easy-to-use online Fuel Cost Calculators lets you compare different fuels in terms of today’s energy costs.

BuildingGreen's online Fuel Cost Calculator—shown here with current Vermont costs for heating oil and electricity and assumptions on how those energy sources are used. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: BuildingGreen, Inc.

If there’s one thing that we can predict with certainty about fuel costs, it’s that they fluctuate a lot. That wasn’t always the case. The price of electricity, natural gas, propane, and heating oil were remarkably stable for decades—up until the 1970s.

Since then, prices of most fuels have gyrated wildly, driven by political unrest in some parts of the world, periods of greater or lower demand driven by periods of strong economic growth or contraction, resource limitations (real or perceived), and the situation in China and other parts of this increasingly connected world.

With regulated energy sources (particularly electricity), there is often less volatility, because regulators have to approve changes in pricing.

What does this mean for you as you compare one heating option to another or try to figure out whether to buy a pellet stove this winter? How does oil compare with propane or electricity as a heating source? Those sound like simple enough questions, but it’s actually fairly complicated.

This indoor space at Google has sustainably forested wood floors, soy-based furniture, and ample daylighting.
Photo Credit: Christophe Wu / Google

In one of the biggest announcements to come out of Greenbuild 2012 in San Francisco thus far, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has announced a $3 million grant from Google to support work on healthier building materials. Google has already been a pioneer in keeping toxic chemicals out of building products used in its building projects (see A Peek Inside Google’s Healthy Materials Program), but this grant takes its public support for research and advocacy in this area to a new level.

Resilience and building science are the focus for our eleventh annual BuildingGreen Top-10 product awards.

Last year's BuildingGreen Top-10 product awards were the first to emphasize resilient design. This year, in the wake of more droughts, wildfires, and the last straw—SuperStorm Sandy—our need to focus on resilience is ever more urgent. Hand in hand with resilience is durability: sound building science helps prevent moisture problems that can compromise our buildings during normal times as well as during and after extreme weather events.

Below you'll find the basics, but you can get a lot more details about each product on our press page—including relevant LEED credits and contact info for each company.

If you're at Greenbuild this year, please stop by the manufacturers' booths to congratulate them and learn more about these forward-looking products. You might also be able to squeeze into Alex Wilson's presentation about the products, bright and early Friday morning!

Amorim expanded-cork boardstock insulation

Photo Credit: Amorim Isolamentos, S.A.

Amorim expanded-cork boardstock insulation is a 100% natural, rigid-insulation material produced from natural cork. The material insulates to R-3.6 per inch, offers excellent acoustic control, is highly durable, has high vapor permeability, and meets fire-safety requirements (Euro Class E, based on EN 13501) without flame retardants.