heat pump news

A Holland engineering company has designed a heat-absorbing road that bridges winter and summer. Road Energy Systems: using summer sun to clear icy roads. (Credit:Ooms Avenhorn) The Road Energy System, from Ooms Avenhorn Holding, is essentially an asphalt road with tubes placed underneath. Water circulates to siphon off the heat from the road and it […]

Team Germany’s winning SurPlusHome (Credit:Department of Energy) A high-tech building covered on all sides with solar cells has won an international contest for the best home powered only by the sun. Team Germany, which also won in 2007, took first place in the Solar Decathlon, beating out teams from Illinois and California. At a ceremony […]

There’s a movement afoot to make homes greener, but the impact will be limited if only wealthy people can afford them. Start-up ZETA Communities is trying to expand that movement’s reach by making market-priced, “net zero” multifamily homes. In the next two weeks, the San Francisco-based company expects to complete its first demonstration building, a […]

BOSTON–The cutting edge of building science these days seems to be more about expanding foam than solar power research. Last Wednesday, I stopped by the Building Energy Conference put on by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). If there was one theme that jumped out, it was energy efficiency. Insulating and air sealing a building, […]

Combination dehumidifier and water-purifier WaterMill creates up to 13 quarts of water a day. (Credit:WaterMill) Summer has officially come to a close, yet it seems still to linger in the air. Baseball playoffs are just getting underway, BBQ parties are still going strong, and it’s still hot out. It’s downright humid, in fact. So hot […]

Last month, I joined about 40 other volunteers, armed to the teeth with materials to weatherize a two-family home. Despite the rain and a few errant squirts of insulating foam, we made the leaky New England home significantly more energy efficient, largely by sealing all manner of leaks. We won’t know the financial impact of […]

If you ask Andy Kruse, the CEO of wind turbine maker Southwest Windpower, about technology, he’s more likely to talk about software and WiMax than turbine blades or inverters. Kruse is in Washington this week lobbying to improve the subsidies for installing small wind turbines, one of the fastest growing segments in wind energy. Southwest […]

Small wind turbines attached to individual homes work fine unless you have lousy wind. That’s the upshot of a multi-site study called the Warwick Microwind Trial project, a year-long survey on the performance of roof-mounted turbines done in the U.K. done by Encraft, a low-carbon technology consulting firm. The researchers picked 26 sites in the […]

Clothes dryers are the second biggest hog of household energy, according to the Department of Energy. Most are so similar in terms of power hunger that the Energy Star label of efficient appliances doesn’t even mark dryers. By this fall, however, consumers could enjoy faster, greener, and safer clothes dryers that draw half the power […]