By Tim King CONSIDERED BY SOME to be something of a novelty just a few short years ago, today there are more than 20,000 heat pumps in use in homes and businesses throughout Maine. While it may be hard for some of us to understand exactly how they extract heat from cold air, there’s no…
By Tim King DON’T LET THE name fool you – there’s nothing passive about constructing a high performance building worthy of passive house certification. In fact, achieving what many consider to be the pinnacle of building energy standards requires a substantial amount of activity – before, during and after construction is completed. The payoff, however,…
By Kurt Johnson WE KNOW THERE are things in our homes that can make us sick. According to the EPA, our #1 environmental threat is indoor air pollution. And the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Cancer Institute, have reported that 80% of our cancers are caused environmentally. Considering that the average American spends 90% of their time indoors today, flushing our…
By Heather Chandler & Chris Briley There are a lot of loosely defined terms used to describe how “green” a house is. Luckily some professionals in our industry have worked very hard to find ways to quantify this almost intangible quality, and in so doing, have generated new nomenclature that can often sound foreign to those outside the industry. LEED, for example,…
Editor’s Note: The submissions for homes featured in this post came from home owners, builders, architects and renewable energy professionals across the state. We reviewed data for all of the submissions received and selected the five homes that you will see featured in these pages. As you will see, they represent a diversity of size,…
With the Winter chill in the air, we decided to catch up with Scott Libby, owner of Royal River Heat Pumps in Freeport to learn more about heat pumps and how evolving technology can help us efficiently heat our homes. SRG: What is a heat pump and why are they so popular right now? SL:…
By Merritt Carey If you’ve heard of heat pumps before, you’ve likely heard of them in the context of geothermal heat pumps. There are two types of heat pumps, geothermal and air source. Air source heat pumps have long been used in warmer climates for cooling, but now, thanks to rapidly improving refrigerant technology, air…
By Merritt Carey Most of us have heard of pellet stoves before, but pellet boilers are a relatively new phenomenon here in United States. Pellet stoves are a secondary heating source, in contrast, pellet boilers fully replace existing heating systems. In much of Europe, pellet boilers are commonly used as a primary heating source. Over…