I recently read about an impressive, three-unit residential building in Portland, Maine through an article by Seth Koenig in the Bangor Daily News.  After a little digging, I learned the project is spearheaded by Paul Ledman and Colleen Myers, as owners and developers, Mike White of Island Carpentry, the general contractor, and Kaplan Thompson Architects, the architectural firm.  Ledman wanted a future-forward building and ended up with something that doesn’t use fossil fuels.

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What can you do if you’d like to use an energy efficient light bulb, but you think that they look funky? How about a LED bulb that looks and functions almost exactly like an incandescent filament bulb?

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Start-up Aeroseal has been getting decent media exposure lately with a writeup on Energy.gov and a listing on This Old House‘s Top 100 Best New Home Products of 2011.  The company has an exclusive license to technology originally developed within the Indoor Environment Program at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  In short, Aeroseal sends a sealing mist through air ducts to eliminate holes and cracks of up to 5/8th of an inch — resulting in improved comfort and energy savings.

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Earlier this week, the Shelton Group released its seventh annual Energy Pulse report, which has 450 pages of analysis, charts, graphs, and crosstabs based on the survey of 1,502 Americans.  I haven’t seen the $5,000 report but would like to share some takeaways from a release and executive summary.  Particularly, of the respondents, 42% had installed high-efficiency windows, 39% had installed extra insulation, 37% had installed higher efficiency HVAC systems, and 24% had installed a higher efficiency water heater.

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David Hanacek of EcoCycle Solutions loves to think up practical, cost-effective building products that make a big impact on efficiency. Take his Flow-Thru Finisher for example, a handy little caulk gun attachment that helps get adhesive exactly where and how you want it.  Before that, it was a clog-free drain device and lightweight steel shipping pallets.  But it’s his new invention, the CanCoverIt, that gets him most excited.   After all, what looks like a ho-hum, odd-looking box is actually a breakthrough invention that can save countless kilowatts and millions of dollars for homeowners. Read more »