Insulation Tips for Hot, Humid Climates The best way to insulate your house (or church, school, or office building) greatly depends on what type of environment you live in. If you look at historic houses and buildings, you can learn a lot about how to design for your climate, because early builders had to adapt to the local conditions to try to make buildings as comfortable as possible. Purple ... Read More
There's lots of talk about green building - but what does it really mean for your project? We've been impressed with many improvements in our industry that have come from the sustainability movement, often referred to as green building. However, not everything that's promoted as green makes sense. Here is the second half of my article on residential green architecture and the frequently asked ... Read More
If you are thinking about remodeling or building a home, you ought to give Houzz.com a try. It is a repository of 800,000+ pictures that various people have uploaded to the site. With this you can browse and find spaces you like and create idea books that you can share. One of our recent clients used this a lot both to help her understand what she wanted and to communicate this infromation to us. ... Read More
Last week I dicussed options for reducing the amount of water that you use inside your house through adapting your habits and installing fixtures or appliances that are more efficient. This week we need to talk about what goes on outside, because a lot of the water that you use never actually enters your house but instead gets used for irrigating landscaping. This water has been processed to make ... Read More
GREEN BUILDING As the newest member of the Heimsath staff, I have been offered the opportunity to share some of my interests through this blog. Since I am particularly interested in green building, I wanted to kick off with a series on sustainable water solutions. A little background may be helpful to explain my interest in sustainability. I grew up on a farm in Vermont where waste was closely ... Read More
Many of our clients are interested in green building but still are not sure if it is worth it. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about green building: What is green building? Can it be practical? Green building, or sustainable design, refers to a growing concern with maximizing efficiency and reducing waste and energy consumption. While many ideas are still in the ... Read More
In our hot, humid climate, the best way to beat the heat is to get some shade. For residential architecture, porches, awnings, and trellises are the classic shading devices. There also are tents, and canopies that use fabric materials for shading. A relatively new product, the sun shade, or sun sail, offers good architectural solutions that are permanent, inexpensive and very flexible. For our ... Read More
Solar Panels on the Front roof Area There is a 5.76 KW solar array on the Purple Heron House. Given that the house is a 5-star rated (or will be when Autsin Green Building finishes its process), we looked into Solar as a way to make the house even more effiecient (with the current efficiencies of the solar panels, it is usually better to conserve first and then look to generation). At the time ... Read More
LED lighting is improving in comparison to other technologies. When we consider light output, color temperature, and color rendering, the LED lights are an equal or better choice (if you don't know these terms, here's a link to my article on lighting technology). It is well past the time where this is really newsworthy, but I would like to share some of the latest ways we have successfully ... Read More
We went to my parents house for dinner and a swim. While the kids were in the pool (Grandma and Karen were watching them), I went down looked at the new fence my Dad is having built (he would have made a good architect) and thought I would share it. As you may know, code requires a fence around a pool to keep random people (especially young kids) from getting to the pool and accidentally falling ... Read More
