Blog

SketchUp 7 Released

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Last Friday a few of us gathered around a phone behind the closed doors of one of the conference rooms here at BuildingGreen and had a chat with John Bacus from Google's team of SketchUp developers, and Aaron Stein, one of their PR folks. The supersecret talk was about the next release of that program — SketchUp 7 — which within the last couple hours has gone public.
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USGBC, 15 Years Old, Looks Back

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In honor of itself (hmm... was really the best way for me to kick off this post?), the USGBC has done a kind of a cool thing. A letter released to its membership says,
... when we reflected on how best we could mark our anniversary as a community of leaders called the U.S.
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Video: Household carbon emissions are... creepy

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If M. Night Shyamalan did a movie on carbon emissions, it might look something like this. The Alliance for Climate Protection has a video that helps homeowners visualize their carbon emissions. After all, they're colorless, odorless, and come with a nifty time-delay of consequences that can lull a person into thinking that it's all going to be fine. Everything was fine... until someone left the coffeemaker, but who? The bed is made, but no one's home. Whom does the dryer tumble for? The ancestral photo in the hallway?

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Solar Water Heating

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Brattleboro, Vermont is fortunate to have a long history with solar water heating. When I moved to the area in 1980, the company Solar Applications had been installing solar hot water systems for five years, and a spin-off company, Solar Alternatives, was manufacturing quality flat-plate solar collectors--many of which are still in use in the area. While Solar Alternatives closed down in the 1980s with falling energy prices and the end of solar tax credits, Solar Applications, has continued to install and service solar water heating systems for more than thirty years.

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Foot Spa: Rhymes with "Chutzpah"

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The editors and researchers for GreenSpec get more submissions from manufacturers wanting to get their products listed than we can keep up with. As GreenSpec is a "best of the best" directory reserved for the top 10% or so of the most environmentally preferable products available to contribute to a sane built environment, we end up rejecting most of them for not meeting our high standards. Sometimes we get pitches for fine products, but they just don't represent the top of the heap.
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Passive solar heating

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BUILDING FOR A COLD CLIMATE ideally means protecting the North side of the house - this earth sheltered home does a good job of that. In the winter, North facing windows are a prime source of heat loss. That's why there are only a few small one's here. They do contribute to cross ventilation in the warmer months.

Following the first energy crisis in 1973 there was a rush to heat homes with the sun. It was a tinkerer's paradise, with all manner of solar heating systems migrating from garage workshops to commercialization. Patent offices were working overtime.

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