Presenting The Green Home Guide From Popular Science
Go Green. Our second all-digital Genius Guide shows you 99 ways to save energy— and money— at home this summer
Did you know you can cut your water use by 10 gallons a day by switching toilets? That a new washer and dryer could save you almost $150 a year? These are just two of the dozens of tips, tricks, facts and projects packed into the free Green Home Guide, the second in our series of digital special issues called Genius Guides, designed to make you an expert on one of the core PopSci topics. You can click through our animated home to see the worst spots for wasting power, air and water. Or explore our interactive map to get energy cost and CO2 stats for each of the 50 states. We’ve also got stories of three ambitious homeowners who have taken energy savings to extremes, heating their house with a room full of sand or powering it with a waterfall.
Our goal is to use this experiment in digital publishing—with Zinio in our case—to both learn something about creating content for an emerging medium and give you far more information than we could in a print issue, in an easy-to-navigate and entertaining manner. As a magazine maker, I love that this format has all the depth and interactivity of a Web page, yet with the immersive quality of a print publication. And I think our design is pushing the envelope for what can be done on a digital page. I’d love to hear your feedback on the Green Home Guide—from the experience of opening it to the navigation inside to the content itself. Help us figure out where this is headed and how we can keep producing both the content and the medium you want to use.
One Man's Mission to Build an Eco-Friendly, Affordable Home. Pre-fab panels instead of a wood frame save cash and energy By John B. Carnett Posted 07.17.2009 at 2:15 pm
John B. Carnett, PopSci's staff photographer, is using the latest green technology to build his dream home. Follow his progress in his monthly magazine column (the first of which you're reading now) and on the Green Dream blog.
In the past 20 years, I've lived in some pretty weird places —
a leaky loft, a sailboat, an old carriage house that I rehabbed myself. Makeshift bachelor pads were fine until I found myself with a wife and two small boys.
Stage #1: Build the Box
Now I'm building a real home on three acres of land with river views and plenty of room for the kids to explore. And I'm going as green as I can, as cheaply as I can, starting with the prefab panels that I'm using instead of lumber to build the basic frame. These aren't your conventional structural insulating panels. Instead of foam and strand board, Kama Energy Efficient Building Systems in Las Vegas custom-makes the rigid panels out of light-gauge metal studs and a special type of expanded polystyrene called Neopor that's non-toxic, fully recyclable and blended with graphite to lock out heat, moisture and mold. My home is the first in the U.S. to incorporate Kama's new panels. They cost me about 5 percent less than a stick frame would have, but they're 60 percent more energy-efficient and can cut heating and cooling bills in
half.
The walls arrive on site pre-cut and ready to install, no special tools or hired help required. With a few buddies, I simply tilted the panels in place and secured them to a steel track on the foundation, building the whole box in less than eight days. A lumber frame would have taken me weeks to measure, cut, fit, and nail everything in place. Other types of insulating panels can require extra labor and a crane to install — in other words, more time and money.
Now that I have the frame and my insulation taken care of in one step, I'm looking at a passive solar hot-water system. That's next month's project.The Specs
House: 3,500-square-foot, four-bedroom contemporary. Location: Greenwich, N.Y. Project: Install a prefab panel box
Cost: $7.04 per square foot. Time to install: Approx. 8 days. Materials: Metal frame filled with expanded polystyrene and graphite. Eco advantages: Fully recyclable; no off-gassing, heat loss or mold
photo 1.Green Dream: Step one: build the box Peter Bollinger
photo 2.Inside Sustainable Prefab Panels: John B. Carnett
photo 3.The Secret to Energy Savings: A special insulating material called Neopor encases the metal studs and eliminates thermal bridging, which occurs when two heat-conducting materials like wood and metal abut, forming a bridge over which heat escapes Kevin Hand
One Bryant Park: The Bank of America Tower. The most ambitious eco-friendly skyscraper. Cook+ Fox Architects
Set to rise 54 stories above Manhattan, the crystalline Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will incorporate an unrivaled number of environmentally friendly technologies, from its windows to its toilets. The building will supply 70 percent of its own energy with an on-site natural-gas-burning power plant. For climate control, One Bryant Park will rely on excess thermal energy from the power plant, a groundwater heat exchanger that is the first of its type, and an air-conditioning system cooled by ice made with excess power during off-peak hours. The building will even have waterless urinals and use water collected from the roof to flush toilets. Together, these systems are designed to earn the building a Platinum rating-the highest possible-from the U.S. Green Building Council when construction is completed in 2008 and, the builders hope, will also save the kind of green that ma
tters to shareholders.
"Green" Considerations
With an emphasis on sustainability, water efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and energy and atmosphere, the Bank of America Tower will be constructed largely of recycled and recyclable building materials. It will feature a wide range of sophisticated environmental technologies, from filtered under-floor displacement air ventilation to advanced double-wall technology and translucent insulating glass in floor-to-ceiling windows that permit maximum daylight and optimum views. It also will include a state-of-the-art onsite 4.6-megawatt cogeneration plant, providing a clean, efficient power source for the building's energy requirements.
The Bank of America Tower will save millions of gallons of water annually through such innovative devices such as a gray-water system to capture and reuse all rain and wastewater, while planted roofs will reduce the urban heat island effect. Taking advantage of heat energy from the cogeneration plant, a thermal storage system will produce ice in the evenings, which will reduce the building's peak demand loads on the city's electrical grid. Daylight dimming and LED lights will reduce electric usage while carbon dioxide monitors automatically introduce more fresh air when necessary. By fundamentally changing the way buildings are conceived, Bank of America Tower will lead the change in the way high-rise buildings are built.
Environmental advantages
Building site of Bank of America Tower, seen from Bryant ParkThe design of the building will make it environmentally friendly, using technologies such as floor-to-ceiling insulating glass to contain heat and maximize natural light, and an automatic daylight dimming system. The tower also features a greywater system, which captures rainwater and reuses it. Bank of America also states that the building will be made largely of recycled and recyclable materials.[5] Another innovation is that not only is air entering the building purified to a high degree, but the air exhausted is also cleaner, thus effectively making the tower a giant air filter for Midtown Manhattan.[6] Bank of America Tower is the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.[5]
Features
The Bank of America tower is constructed using a concrete manufactured with slag, a byproduct of blast furnaces. The mixture used in the tower concrete is 55% cement and 45% slag. The use of slag cement reduces damage to the environment by decreasing the amount of cement needed for the building, which in turn lowers the amount of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas produced through normal cement manufacturing. (One ton of cement produced emits about one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.)
Control of the temperature of Bank of America's tower, and the production of some of its energy, will be done in an environmentally-friendly manner. Insulating glass will reduce thermal loss somewhat, which will lower energy consumption and increase transparency. Carbon dioxide sensors will signal increased fresh air ventilation, when elevated levels of carbon dioxide are detected in the building.
The cooling system will produce and store ice during off-peak hours, and then use ice phase transition to help cool the building during peak load, similar to the ice batteries in the 1995 Hotel New Otani in Tokyo Japan.[3] Ice batteries have been used since absorption chillers first made ice commercially 150 years ago, before the electric light bulb was invented.[4] New green building architects are just now rediscovering the old cost-effective ice battery technique.
The tower has a 4.6-megawatt cogeneration plant, which will provide part of the base-load energy requirements. Onsite power generation reduces the significant electrical transmission losses that are typical of central power production plants.
