Unusual building materials
2004-03-24 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
archershipshttp://michaelmcdonough.com/WholeEarth/wholeearthres.htm
e-House 2000 category: Wood, Wood Products, and Related Items
Lumber that is fast growing, farmable, and never cut from a temperate rainforest (it' s predictable in price, long, and strong, as well).
Engineered Wood-I-Beams and LVLs
Georgia-Pacific Corporation
www.gp.com
OK, imagine this: Some building scientists and lumber companies get together with a manufacturer that makes a naturally occuring preservative and pesticide so safe it is also the basis for a hand cleaner. Then they make a sustainable building technologies-style preserved lumber that requires no special handling, lasts for decades and is available through a lumber distributor near you. Addled-headed optimism? Nope. Just the facts.
Wood Preservative/Lumber/Lumber Products Alliance
SmartGuard(TM) Protected Building Products
www.smartguard.lpcorp.com/overview.asp in alliance with:
Louisiana-Pacific Corporation
www.lpcorp.com/
U.S. Borax Inc.
http://www.borax.com/
Osmose, Inc.
www.osmose.com/home.htm
Formaldehyde-free, guaranteed true and straight, made from fast-growth lumber, makes for superior strength floors and walls. One contractor I know had never tried the product; now he says he will never buy regular plywood again.
Engineered Oriented Strand Board Structural Panels
AdvanTech by Huber Engineered Woods
www.huberwood.com/products/advantech.htm
Take a prehistoric grass that grows a meter a day, cleans the atmosphere, acts as an oxygen pump and carbon sink, is stronger than steel, and make a flooring more stable than oak from it. Oh, I almost forgot: it's gorgeous.
Rainforest Alternative Bamboo Flooring
Smith & Fong Company
www.plyboo.com
Alternative tech traditional wood siding and trim from a Vermont mill in business for about 150 years. Take your pick of colors and finish, and they factory spray it, and give you a fifteen year guarantee. Who knew it: parsimonious persnickety New England Yankees as culture heroes.
Prefinished 15-Year Guaranteed Vertical Grain Wood Sidings
Granville Manufacturing
/www.woodsiding.com
New idea for a tee-shirt: Need a tropical hardwood that will last 20 years without preservatives or paint, but can't stomach the idea of taking wood from a clear cut rainforest, and want responsibly harvested products while demanding respect for all indigenous peoples anywhere near the cutting? Me too.
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certified Wood Products
EarthSource
www.earthsourcewood.com
What if a guy struggled for years to almost single-handedly promote the bamboo plant industry, and, while lobbying successfully to change outmoded governmental regulations, learned how to grow and guarantee the plants at temperatures as low as 20-degrees-below-zero Fahrenheit, established a nursery that designed and sold dozens of species all over the world, then set-up a way to monitor and care for them via the Internet? And then he moved to Florida…
Bamboo Plant Resources
Tornello Landscape Nursery
www.tornellobamboo.com
Piece of eco-lumber here; piece of recycled-steel there, improbable custom designed 57-degree angle…gotta connect them 35-feet in the air or the building falls down….
Structural Connectors for Engineered Lumber
Simpson Strong-Tie
www.strongtie.com/
e-House2000 category: Computer Aided Design Software, Networking, and Related
Hey, I got this idea for a building, only I want to sketch it, then make contract drawings from it, then get a materials list and price projection, then make a 3-dimensional virtual model, then make it look like a photograph, then make a movie from it, and e-mail it and publish on my web site… all in the same computer program… oh yeah, in color….
Java Compatible CAD and Visualization Software
MicroStation/J. Bentley Systems, Inc.
www.bentley.com
IBM or Mac; Mac or IBM; IBM or Mac; Mac or IBM, ahhh…who cares
Cross-Platform (IBM-Mac) Networking
Miramar Systems, Inc.
www.miramarsys.com
Take a plane, fly it over a big piece of land with a 24,0000 dot-per-inch resolution scanner, and get a survey that is accurate to one-tenth of an inch per vertical foot of elevation. And it costs about one-tenth as much as a regular survey…
Aerial Digital Mapping And Photogrammetric Surveying
Land & Mapping Services
http://landmapping.com/index.shtml
e-House 2000 category: New and Recycled Content Cements
Limestone production consumes vast amounts of ozone depleting fossil fuels, but it is a major component in concrete. Slag is a stable waste product resulting from the production of steel. Replace the latter with the former and you have saved the ozone layer one big headache, and made the concrete stronger and better able to receive color.
Cement And Recycled Slag Additives
New Cem, Blue Circle North America
www.bluecirclena.com
With a little help from your flowable fill friends you can engineer poor soils with weak concrete slurries and make them suitable for use with geothermal heating systems where none seemed possible. In other words you can re-engineer the ground.
Concrete Additives/Flowable Fills
Grace Construction Products
www.wrgrace.com/bigframes-welcome.html
Take dumb-old concrete, add some of this and some of that, cut it into blocks and panels, bake it, and you have a concrete that is 20% lighter than the conventional stuff, just as strong, provides as much insulation as any insulation batt or board per inch of thickness, is sound-proof, and bullet-proof, insect and moisture proof, uses a readily available mortar that is 1/16" thick and stronger than the block itself, and will install much faster than conventional concrete block. Too new to be reliable you say? It's been around since 1927 and is used in 60% of Europe's new housing. Sources for special tools and connectors noted.
Autoclaved Aerated Concrete Block
Matrix PAAC
www.matrixpaac.com
AAC Compatible Parges & Stuccos
Sider-Oxydro, Inc.
http://www.sider-oxydro.com
AAC Saws and Miscellaneous Tools
PAACE
(e-mail) paac_equipment@worldnet.att.net
AAC Anchors and Fasteners
Powers Fasteners
www.powers.com
e-House 2000 category: Roofing, roof decking, flashing and decorative parapet caps
What if you had a high-tech roofing material that looked somewhat like conventional metal roofing, only you could paint it any color you wanted (or leave it natural) and it got stronger in salt-laden air and industrially polluted air by bonding with air-borne chemicals and impurities. And a guy they called "Doctor Z" invented it? And it lasted for decades?
Stainless Steel/Zinc-Coated Roofing Products
Follansbee
www.follansbeeroofing.com
Alternative tech, recyclable, ages beautifully, flexible, superb as weather flashing, formable as parapet caps, and uses no adhesives. Why not?
Copper Sheet Products
Revere Copper Products, Inc.
www.reverecopper.com
OK, so now you have a roof deck and a giant stair and you need an Energy Star certified, recyclable content roofing material that works perfectly with adjacent metal details and is slip-resistant and nearly paper thin, and so good in rain and wind that it is sold as waterproofing and used as underlayment in planted green roofs??
Roofing and Waterproofing Systems
Sarna / Sarnafil Divsion
www.sarnafilus.com
e-House 2000 category: Thermal and Acoustical Insulation Products
Recycled-content and recyclable plastic insulation board that will help super-insulate your home.
Polyisocyanurate Insulation Panel Products
Johns Manville/Roof Insulations
www.johnsmanville.com
What if you could manufacture a glass and air combination sheet that it was strong, lightweight, able to be saw cut, provided high-efficiency thermal insulation, was insect and moisture proof, and lasted sixty years or more with no deterioration?
Cellular Glass Insulation Products
Pittsburgh Corning Corp.
www.foamglasinsulation.com
In a world where policy makers are always searching for new markets for recycled products there exists a humble construction board that is 100% post consumer recycled newspaper. Basically baked and pressed industrial papier mache, it is used for everything from acoustical insulation to roofing panels, and has been in continuous for the better part of 100 years
Recycled Post-Consumer Waste Paper Products
Homasote Company
www.homasote.com
Another insulation product with recycled and recyclable content, this one is thin aluminum foil pressed together with plastic cells, and relies on reflectivity to achieve energy savings. Inexpensive and easy to install, it can be considered an integral part of any radiant heating system.
Reflective Insulation
Low-e/Environmentally Safe Products
www.low-e.com
This is recycled Levi's Jeans cuttings that have been made fire-retardant and insect proof with borax, and useful as thermal and acoustical insulation because of a patented 3-dimensional weave. No, really….
Natural Fiber Insulation
Bonded Logic, Inc.
www.bondedlogic.com/company.htm
e-House 2000 category: Panelized Building Systems
I'll take a high-efficiency insulation sandwich made with, ah, let me see… OK, oriented strand board, hold the adhesives, deliver it to my site, and have it set up with a small crew and a lightweight crane. Oh, yeah, and built my house with in two weeks….
Structural Insulated Panel Products
Winter Panel Corp.
www.winterpanel.com
e-House 2000 category: Finishes
The problem used to be that in order to get paints to dry quickly you had to have bad things like volatile organic compounds. Then some researchers figured out how to make the paint dry by eliminating almost all of these bad VOCs, and almost all the paint odors associated with them. Healthier; less down time. Win-win.
Low VOC Paint Finish Products
Eco-Spec / Benjamin Moore & Co.
www.benjaminmoore.com
e-House 2000 category: Appliances, Equipment, and Related Products
Lord Rumford invented a reflective fireplace around two-hundred years ago, but it was so good nobody seemed to believe it was true. It looks like a regular masonry fireplace, but is so efficient it outperforms and burns cleaner than those metal ones with the glass doors. You also have to be careful to put in a small, cost effective one, or -- even with just one or two logs -- the heat it generates with overwhelm you and drive you out of the house.
High-Efficiency Heating Fireplace and Masonry Oven Products
Rumford Fireplaces
www.rumford.com
If you have an old, non-Rumford fireplace and want to high-tech-ify it so that it burns with extraordinary efficiency, buy one of these.
High-Tech Fireplace Grate
Andiron Technologies, Inc.
www.ecofire.com
Compact dishwashers and washer-dryers engineered by tough-minded Swedish people who demand compact, elegant, long-lasting, energy-efficient machines that minimize the use of detergents, and maximize the life-span of whatever is being cleaned…and get exactly that.
Energy-Efficient Appliances
ASKO USA, Inc.
www.askousa.com
Present technology: build your vacuum into the walls, and empty everything into one easily maintained bag in a basement or closet; then add a portable steamer to clean and sterilize without chemicals Future technology: have a robotic vacuum do it for you.
Whole-House Integrated Systems/Robotic Vacuum Cleaners
The Eureka Company
www.eureka.com; www.eureka.com/whatsnew/robotvac.htm
If I only had a brain, I could really cook it, and I'd be made by robots, and I'd have computer controls in my backside, if I only had a brain… this one does.
Networkable CAD-CAM Modeled Manufactured Cooking Equipment
Garland Commercial Ranges Ltd.
www.garland-group.com
e-House 2000 category: Heating and Cooling Systems
Ja! We are German but expanding into the United States with amazing radiant heating and cooling and snowmelt technologies that run in little tiny plastic pipes in your floors and ceilings and roofs. Really efficient. Und we also distribute the biological process in plastic tanks that go into your basement, and process waste water and sewage so cleanly that drinking water you can be getting.
Radiant Heating And Cooling Products
Roth Industries
www.roth-usa.com
Biological decentralized sewage treatment
Busse GmbH
/www.busse-gmbh.de
And if we're NOT German? OK, OK, let's see if this stumps you: I need a whole house heating system that also gives me unlimited amounts of hot water, both produced with almost no energy. It should be controlled by a computer chip for maximum performance at all times, and the whole thing has to be about the size of a small suitcase…. Shippable when you say? Now?
High-Efficiency Instant Domestic Hot Water/House Heaters
Baxi S.p.A.
www.ocean.idroclima.com/ingnet/seconda.htm
distributed in the USA by:
Big John Sales
www.bigjohnsales.com
and
Dick Quinn Associates
www.q-assoc.com
Energy Saving Ventilator Products
Venmar
www.venmarvent.com
Ultra-Efficient Dehumidifier Products
DEC International, Inc.; Therma-Stor Products
www.thermastor.com
e-House 2000 category: Home-Automation/Whole House Electronic Controls
Control freaks dream come true: Little computer chips in your home appliances and heating equipment access information and provide on/off commands made by a software program that tracks energy efficiency. And sensors track roof leaks and other undesirable moisture accumulation, and provide an early warning system for problems in your house. The whole thing is transmittable anywhere I the world you might want to be using a hybrid satellite system that provides "always on" high-speed broadband download - uplink Internet access using the same antenna. Oh, yeah, and you can watch TV on it.
Home Automation Products
X-traWeb Inc.
www.x-traweb.com
High Speed Satellite Internet Access
Hughes Network Systems
www.hns.com
e-House 2000 category: Alternative Energy/Uninterruptible Power Source Equipment
California leads the nation in trends, so picture this: Your power goes out. OK, so you're like, whatever, dude. You have an uninterruptable solar powered power source that clicks in instantaneously so that you don't know your power is off, man. That's because it all happens, like, at the speed of light or something, and has battery back-up in case the sun isn't shining. And you can sell your excess solar generated electrical capacity back to the power company that is, like, overpaying for fuel and stuff. So, you are the power company, man. Or maybe you just use that hydrogen powered fuel cell that throws off recoverable water and heat as waste products, to, like, power your organic greenhouse. And the stuff costs, basically, not too much more than fossil fuel powered generators, man. Its awesome.
Photovoltaic Products
BP Solar
www.solarex.com
Photovoltaic Controls/UPS Products
Trace Engineering
www.traceengineering.com
Thermal-Solar Collector Products
Thermomax
www.thermomax.com
no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 05:20 am (UTC)Re: doubt
Date: 2004-03-26 08:31 pm (UTC)