Passive Solar Home Design Passive solar design takes advantage of a building’s site, climate, and materials to minimize energy use. A well-designed passive solar home first reduces heating and cooling loads through energy-efficiency strategies and then meets those reduced loads in whole or part with solar energy. Because of the small heating loads of modern homes it is very important to avoid oversizing south-facing glass and ensure that south-facing glass is properly shaded to prevent overheating and increased cooling loads in the spring and fall. Energy Efficiency First Before you add solar features to your new home design or existing house, remember that energy efficiency is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing heating and cooling bills. Site Selection If you’re planning a new passive solar home, a portion of the south side of your house must have an unobstructed “view” of the sun. How a Passive Solar Home Design Works Properly oriented windows. Refining the Design Direct Gain Indirect Gain (Trombe Wall)
Toolbox: Passive Makes Perfect | Green Building and Design Zehnder ComfoAir 550 HRV Don’t be fooled by its compact size; the ComfoAir 550 is Passive House certified and rated at 84 percent efficiency. It handles up to 324 cubic feet of air per minute and comes equipped with extras like automatic frost protection and a wireless remote control. Find it in Fabrica718’s retrofitted Tighthouse, and its ERV cousin in the Empowerhouse. Phase Change BioPCmat Tuck this stuff into insulated roofs, ceilings, and walls, then sit back and watch your energy costs drop. GreenWizard WORKflow PRO You’re starting a new project. The Greenest Home Julie Torres Moskovitz, founder of the Brooklyn-based design firm Fabrica718 (p. 52), brings you nearly 200 pages of illustrated inspiration in her book The Greenest Home. Seeley International Climate Wizard Last year this Aussie product was among the winners of the 2013 World Ag Expo Top 10 New Products Competition. Marvin Ultimate Casement Window
Don't Forget to Clean Here When it’s time for spring cleaning, you think of opening all the windows, letting the fresh breezes replace the stale air in the rooms while you sweep and mop and dust the surfaces ignored all through the winter. But there are more shadowy areas in your home that need attention. Spending just a few minutes on these five often overlooked spots will transform your space into a cleaner, more liveable environment, perfect for spring and summer fun and relaxation. The Refrigerator Who knows what’s living in those jelly jars at the very back of your refrigerator shelves? Food keeps longer in the freezer, but it can still pass a useable date. The exterior of the refrigerator needs your attention, too. Your Beds and Pillows Sure, you’ve cleaned all your linens, packed away all the heavy blankets, and changed your sheets but there’s a little more cleaning to be done around your bed. Sometimes laundering your sheets and blankets isn’t enough. The Computer The Trash Can Your Vacuum
40 learning websites The indexed web contains an incredible 14 billion pages. But only a tiny fraction help you improve your brain power. Here are 40 of the best. whizzpast.com – Learn about our awe inspiring past all in one wonderful place. khanacademy.org – Watch thousands of micro-lectures on topics ranging from history and medicine to chemistry and computer science. freerice.com – Help end world hunger by correctly answering multiple-choice quizzes on a wide variety of subjects. artofmanliness.com – Blog/site dedicated to all things manly, great for learning life skills and good insights. unplugthetv.com – Randomly selects an educational video for you to watch. coursera.org – An educational site that works with universities to get their courses on the Internet, free for you to use. mentalfloss.com – Interesting articles guaranteed to make you smile and get you thinking. feelgoodwardrobe.com – Find out how the world of fashion really works and what you can do to combat it. lifehacker.com – Learn to hack life!
Welcome to the Home of the Future Building materials: Wooden skyscrapers WHEN life hands you lemons, goes the old saw, make lemonade. But what if life should hand you 18m hectares (44m acres) of dead trees? That is the problem faced by the province of British Columbia in Canada, which could lose over half its pine trees to the depredations of the fearsome mountain pine beetle. The beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, is native to the forests of Western North America, where it kills trees by releasing a blue stain fungus that prevents the flow of water and nutrients. As a result, the province is peppered with billions of dead, grey trees. So, to deal with the problem, in 2009 British Columbia's parliament passed a Wood First Act that requires wood to be considered as the primary construction material in all new buildings erected with public money. Other big customers, such as the Japanese, dislike the blue-tinged lumber. Canadian researchers have discovered other uses for BKP. Even more esoteric uses for BKP are on the table.
HomeTips | Expert Home Improvement Advice Teaching kids how to write computer programs, by Marshall Brain by Marshall Brain Quick Intro - If you are looking for a quick and easy way to teach your kid a real programming language, without downloading anything or buying anything, try these Python tutorials. Your kid will be writing and modifying code in just a few minutes. Marshall Brain's quick and easy Python tutorials Let's say that you have children, and you would like to help them learn computer programming at a youngish age. As the father of four kids, I have tried to approach it from several different angles. Let's start with a something important: Every kid is different. The second thing to realize is that real analytical skills often don't start appearing until age 11 or 12 or 13 in many kids, so expecting huge breakthroughs prior to that may be unrealistic. That being said, there are lots of fun things you can try as early as five or six... Games Let's start with a few games. Then there is this game, which actually does a very good job of teaching simple programming skills: Python for Kids
About the Home Energy Score | Better Buildings Initiative Imagine you are in the market to buy a car and comparing your options. You are weighing a number of factors in your purchasing decision, including performance, cost, size, and appearance. When you ask the salesperson what the miles-per-gallon rating for each car is, they shrug and say, “I don’t know.” Even if fuel efficiency is not the only factor you are considering, this would probably concern you as a prospective buyer. And yet, this is how most people make decisions when buying or renting a home: without any information about how much energy the home is expected to use, how much this will cost them, or how to cost-effectively lower energy expenses. Developed by DOE and its national laboratories, the Home Energy Score provides home owners, buyers, and renters directly comparable and credible information about a home's energy use. The Home Energy Score Report estimates home energy use, associated costs, and provides energy solutions to cost-effectively improve the home's efficiency.
The World’s Most Advanced Building Material Is... Wood On a cloudy day in early October, the architect Andrew Waugh circles the base of a nondescript apartment tower in Shoreditch, a neighborhood in East London. Shoreditch suffered heavily during the blitz of World War II—“urban renewal, compliments of the Luftwaffe,” Waugh says—and then spent decades in neglected decay. Recently, though, the neighborhood has come roaring back. Nightclubs and tech start-ups arrived first on the promise of cheap rent, and residents followed. Along with them came architects, urban planners, and engineers, many of whom make a pilgrimage to the same tower that Waugh now circumambulates. From the outside, there is nothing particularly flashy about the nine-story building, called Stadthaus, that Waugh designed with his partner, Anthony Thistleton. But not just any wood. When it opened in 2009, Stadthaus was by far the world’s tallest modern timber building. Wood is both renewable and a carbon sink. There are plans to go even higher. The New Wood: Making CLT 3) Sand
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