Perhaps you've seen one of a few micro-inverter-type solar products on the market and wondered whether you could install a solar system at home. Unless you're an electrician, that may or may not be a good idea, but these products (some available now and others coming to market) make it a whole lot easier to get started generating solar energy at home. Check these five:
Critics gave me a hard time for discussing a 2,988 square-foot home in Florida. One loyal commenter, bruteforcecollaborative, responded:
"Panning a project on square footage alone is asinine. you don't know the client's programming needs – maybe the house is designed for the grandparents to move in. maybe one of their children is disabled and requires dedicated space. maybe the house is also a home office, thereby foregoing additional office space in another location … size alone isn't a function of how green or ungreen something is."
As the magazine does every year, Sustainable Industries has just published its list of the Top 10 Green Building Products of 2010. Selections are chosen by an esteemed panel of judges — Michelle Kaufmann, Barry Giles, Kris Kimble, and Liz Dunn — based on design aesthetic, environmental performance, compatibility with LEED, and value, scalability/market impact, and innovativeness. This year, the judges took interest in products that reuse resources or reduce energy. Here are the top ten:
Popular Science just published an interesting roundup of green communities in an article now titled, "Nine of the World's Most Promising Carbon-Neutral Communities." You'll recognize several of these communities as we've mentioned them previously. What's important is the notion that reducing an environmental impact can be ultra effective when done on a large scale.
Eric Corey Freed, architect and principal of Organic Architect, has a new book in stores this month — Green$ense for the Home — and Allison Arieff was able to pry a list out of Freed of simple green home projects for renters and homeowners. This is the low-hanging fruit, to use the proverbial phrase, but that doesn't mean there's no impact or benefit. To paraphrase Freed’s responses to Arieff, here are the nine green projects:
Project Profiles
