12/5/2011

Water scarcity and purity are local and worldwide challenges.  The EPA has been setting increasingly higher standards of water efficiency for plumbing fixtures for two decades,.  WaterSense is managed by the EPA program and is the nation's only water efficiency certification program.  Other programs, such as LEED, set benchmarks for selected products, but do not provide product certifications.  For more information about WaterSense, click here.  For detailed water-efficiency requirements, see the Alliance for Water Efficiency's comparison table created in August 2010 from the most current standards here .

 

11/21/2011

The University of Maryland won this year's Solar Decathalon, with Purdue University and Victoria University (New Zealand)  took second and third awards.  The teams had $250,000 to creat energy-efficient houses that could be transported and built on the Mall in Washington D.C.  Winners were also gauged on individual categories such as Architecture, Market Appeal, Engineering, Affordability and Energy Balance. Check out the interesting designs and lessons learned here.

 

11/14/2011

The International Living Future Insitute (ILFI), administrator of the Living Building Challenge, has anounced that they are spinning off Net-Zero Certification into it's own program.  This action is in response to the need for verification of net-zero claims, and also to encourage projects that may not pursue all of the imperatives of the Living Building Challenge to focus on energy.  Certification for Net-Zero includes 12 months of post-occupancy performance monitoring....so certification is not based on modeled results, but the true energy use and production.  If the annual energy use is equal to or less than energy production, the project meets the Net-Zero goal.  Curious?  Check out more detail here.