We have return home from the 2013 Green Building Conference which was held in Kimberley, BC. This was a 2 day conference/expo with some very interesting workshops and exhibitors.
We started setting up our display earlier then anyone else due the simple fact of the size of our display wall. We feel it is definitely worth investing this time as people really appreciate seeing how the "open wall" concept is put together and of course love touching the beautiful dovetails. This time we finished much faster then we thought and then had the opportunity to attend the offered workshops on Friday afternoon.
Aaron attended "Air Leakage Testing and the Air Barrier System" to learn more about the importance of a well implemented air barrier and it's function in our "breathable or open wall" system. Max was at Tang Lee's workshop "Innovations for Present and Future Green Buildings" and was very impressed by how simply and cheaply "Solar thermal" can be applied to any new or existing building. We will create a post about this in more detail in the days to come.
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As already stated, we had an excellent turnout, learned a lot, met a lot of new and exciting people and had a lot of tire/wall kickers. (George Nickel from Innotech Windows even climbed our wall)
The focus of the "Green Building Conference" seemed to mostly be on high efficiency. Highly efficient products and methods are great as over time a lot less energy has to go into heating or cooling the building. We agree this is important but feel this is only one part of building green. There seems to be this large push towards high efficiency without regard to the recyclability or biodegradability of these "green" products. Is it more important to be efficient than recyclable? We strongly feel that both are important. Our landfills and oceans are overflowing with products that aren't recyclable or biodegradable. We think that "Green Building" should stress highly efficient products and methods that are natural and/or recycled/recyclable and incorporate the sun's free and plentiful energy wherever possible.
The main lessons we learned from the conference and the key note speech is that there is a trend in the building industry to:
TrappeurHomes and Bondu Log Homes are:
Aaron attended "Air Leakage Testing and the Air Barrier System" to learn more about the importance of a well implemented air barrier and it's function in our "breathable or open wall" system. Max was at Tang Lee's workshop "Innovations for Present and Future Green Buildings" and was very impressed by how simply and cheaply "Solar thermal" can be applied to any new or existing building. We will create a post about this in more detail in the days to come.
.jpg)
As already stated, we had an excellent turnout, learned a lot, met a lot of new and exciting people and had a lot of tire/wall kickers. (George Nickel from Innotech Windows even climbed our wall)The focus of the "Green Building Conference" seemed to mostly be on high efficiency. Highly efficient products and methods are great as over time a lot less energy has to go into heating or cooling the building. We agree this is important but feel this is only one part of building green. There seems to be this large push towards high efficiency without regard to the recyclability or biodegradability of these "green" products. Is it more important to be efficient than recyclable? We strongly feel that both are important. Our landfills and oceans are overflowing with products that aren't recyclable or biodegradable. We think that "Green Building" should stress highly efficient products and methods that are natural and/or recycled/recyclable and incorporate the sun's free and plentiful energy wherever possible.
The main lessons we learned from the conference and the key note speech is that there is a trend in the building industry to:
- improve the building envelope to be more efficient in order to cut down on burning fossil fuel
- create a healthier, more comfortable living environment (avoid mould growth within assembly)
- implement simple solar technologies to take advantage of the free energy from the sun
- Highly "Green" with only natural, recycled and biodegradable products used
- Very "Healthy" open or breathable wall concept (detailed post will follow)
- Super "Efficient" Log wall assembly with high R-values and a very high heat protection value of 22.3 which gives us a temperature phase shift of 15.2 hours (more detail on this will follow)
Stay tuned to read more about what we have researched and how we are implementing this into today's construction.
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