FAVORITE GREEN MATERIALS – PART 2B – INTERIOR PRODUCTS

After a three-week hiatus, the highly anticipated final entry in Locus’ favorite green materials for the home. I conclude with green products.

1. Paperstone. Made with 100% post-consumer recycled paper and a “petroleum-free resin”, it can be made into counters, desk surfaces, vanity tops, exterior siding, and even bathroom stall partitions. You might hope the paper you toss in the recycling bin comes back to you inexpensively as Paperstone – but not so. We’ve found it to rival concrete and lesser expensive granites. The colors tend to be in the darker spectrum, but (unlike stone) the surface is not cold to the touch. www.paperstoneproducts.com

Paperstone Counter

2. Vetrazzo. Made primarily from recycled glass and cement, Vetrazzo is a striking – and pricey – surface. We’ve yet to use it, but it’s only a matter of time. www.vetrazzo.com Both Paperstone and Vetrazzo can be found – and fondled – along with a few other locally produced options – at Natural Built Home in Minneapolis.

Vetrazzo

3. Linoleum. Manufactured from renewable materials (linseed oil, wood flour, jute), linoleum patterns range from the mundane to the wacky. Colors aren’t in short supply; you can find the color your grandmother had on the laundry room, or another that has more in common with a Jackson Pollock canvas. Typically used as flooring, we’ve also used linoleum for desktops, table tops and wainscoting. We typically specify Forbo Marmoleum, but there are others on the market. While poking around the Forbo site, take a look at the bulletin board products, a great wall surface for a kid’s bedroom.

Linoleum Colors

4. Cork. Cork is a renewable material, the self-repairing bark from the cork oak tree, a native of the Mediterranean. Harvest of the raw material requires stripping the bark from the tree, a process which apparently does not damage the tree. Harvest may commence after the tree’s twenty-fifth birthday, and can repeat every nine years for as many as 20 harvests. The finished flooring product comes in a variety of colors and can be installed “glue down” or “floating”.

5. Bamboo. We did an earlier post on bamboo. See it here.

6. Crossville Ecocycle. Don’t like the thinner resilient flooring? A stained concrete radiant floor not your thing? Consider tile. Crossville, a tile manufacturer based in Tennessee, is one of a handful of tile makers to add recycled material to a product line. Granted, clay isn’t the easiest thing to reclaim, but the Ecocycle line has 40% recycled content. We’d still prefer you buy tile at Clay Squared in Minneapolis and support our local artists, but if that’s not in the cards, Ecocycle is a good and relatively inexpensive green option.

7. FLOR. If you’re somebody that just has to have carpet, consider FLOR tiles. Manufactured with very low VOCs (volatile organic compounds – think “new carpet” smell), FLOR will take back carpet when you’re done with it. They don’t just chuck it, but turn it into new carpet product. If the myriad of FLOR options still isn’t grabbing your attention and you’re headed elsewhere, try to avoid nylon choices and consider a quality wool carpet. It’s more expensive, but a good quality wool carpet might outlive you! It also cleans easily in most cases. Not so with nylon. For a more custom approach, contact Kelly Marshall of Custom Woven Interiors. She’ll make a rug for you that will become a family heirloom.

8. Warmboard. Warmboard allows homeowners with hardwood floors to enjoy radiant heat. A thin aluminum plate molded to a structural subfloor is pretty much it. Simple? Yes, but very clever. The manufacturer has figured out how to press the plate into the channels for the tubing. Install the tubes, put down the floor and you’re done. The manufacturer is convinced a low-thermal-mass composite is better for most homes – and with that, we STRONGLY disagree for our cold climate. Nevertheless, we like the product for homeowners that want wood radiant-heat-floors. www.warmboard.com

Warmboard

9. Navien Hot Water Heaters. My friend, Bob Alf, is a local green contractor in the Twin Cities. He sent this along to me a few months back. “A recent arrival is now head-and-shoulders better than anything on the market, Navien. It is a condensing unit, 98% efficient. Get’s more gallons per minute than anything else at a 70+ degree rise. Solves the ‘cold sandwich’ issue with a mini-buffer tank. Also has a recirculating pump with timer so you can shoot instant hot water to a far away fixture without wasting much energy. Also a stainless Steel exchanger, with the best warranty in the business. Plumbers love them because the venting is easier to install than any other unit.” Sounds good.

10. Paints & finishes. Having trouble finding environmental finishes? Paint your walls with Yolo Paint or a milk paint. Lucky enough to have concrete floors with plenty of thermal mass? Try Ecoprocote concrete stains in lieu of acid-based products. Finally, for wood floors, we prefer Rubio Monocoat – a plant based finish for wood floors that is easy to clean and repair.

tgasparich

Hi Wynne,

Thanks for the Warmboard mention, it’s one of my favorite green products too!

With respect to high mass, what about it is better for a cold climate? Our way of thinking is that the purpose of any radiant panel is to deliver the heat from the tube to the living space as effectively as possible. Any low mass system, especially ones constructed with a highly conductive material (aluminum), will allow heat to be stored efficiently in a central location then delivered when and as needed to the living areas. A high mass system conversely stores the heat in the radiant panel where it may or may not be needed, creating what is in the industry called overshoot and undershoot. Here’s a link to a document with more detail.

http://www.warmboard.com/public-relations/warmboard-radiant-heat-blog/

Warm regards,

Tony Gasparich
President and COO
Warmboard, Inc.
- http://www.locusarchitecture.com Wynne Yelland
  
  Thanks for your note Tony.
  
  I would guess Warmboard is a perfect solution for delivering heat in your home climate of Aptos, CA. I lived in and around the Bay Area for 20 years, where it can be 45 degrees F in the morning and 80 by 3pm. When selling the benefits of Warmboard, your sales people often cite these kinds of days – the classic overshoot/undershoot conditions. Here in MN, the weather is not generally like this. In any given year, MN witnesses, on average, 6 days where the temperature swings 35 degrees F between high and low temperatures. It is a rare day where a home needs heat at one point in the day and cooling in another – or even heat in one part of the day but no heat in another. Starting about October 15th, we have about 200 straight days of cool to downright cold weather. Whatever heat we can take in passively is heat we don’t have to purchase via fossil fuel. That’s money in the pocket, and less stuff we have to import from elsewhere.
  
  Many of Locus’ homes are designed to be passively cooled and heated to the extent possible, given site and budget. We feel this is simply a responsible design strategy to save energy. Warmboard doesn’t give us the option – to my knowledge – of collecting heat and transferring it back to a central location to be utilized later. For this storage, we use mass. Does this mean our homes occasionally overshoot on a sunny afternoon? Sure. Perhaps our clients have to crack a window or two (as you outline on the Warmboard blog) on a handful of days to maintain temperature. We don’t look at this as negative – most people get so little fresh air in the heating months in MN, opening a window is great! Furthermore, we don’t feel any of the negatives (responsiveness, lack of constancy) suggest we chuck high mass systems in exchange for low mass systems. We recognize each has a place in the market.
  
  On the Warmboard blog, Terry writes, “Conductivity is King…Mass is Not!” He says high mass systems have an “Achilles heel,” are “inconsistent” and cause “discomfort.” That’s heady stuff. In fifteen years of designing homes in the upper Midwest, I have not had a single client complain of the lack of responsiveness or lack of comfort of a high-mass radiant floor heat system. To be completely honest, most of them rave about their radiant floor heat – both high mass systems and those where we’ve used Warmboard. If we felt sluggish response were a big issue, we would work with a client to program a setback thermostat to mitigate the undershoot/overshoot problem – but we’d also discuss the compromise between instant responsiveness and energy savings. Whatever the sales pitch, we’re not talking about wool coats in the morning and tank tops in the afternoon. My business partner Paul lives in a house chock full of thermal mass, and after attending several Warmboard presentations, he’s confused. He says he is not aware of the overshoot/undershoot problem.
  
  There have been studies linking worker productivity to changing daylight conditions in office environments; I don’t have any basis for this, but perhaps there is some benefit to having your thermal environment change slightly as the day goes by. I would guess there is a physical benefit to avoiding static environments – visually and thermally.
  
  I don’t have any problem with Warmboard as a product. We use it. We like it. We don’t agree that high-mass systems are inherently poor. I would agree with you Warmboard is perfect for someone that absolutely demands the responsiveness of forced-air systems but also covets the obvious benefits of radiant heat. Warmboard is also great for clients who want radiant floor heat and wood flooring. We’ll continue to use it for homes, cabins mainly, where the owners only intermittently use the building. However, we still feel passive homes in our climate will use less energy with high thermal mass as interior storage – despite minor thermal fluctuation. Given the problem of Trombe type walls competing with the view, the easiest place to deploy mass is on the floor – with radiant heat. We will continue to design our homes with this thinking, until we feel we’ve found a better solution.
  
  Thanks!
  Wynne
tgasparich

Hi Wynne,

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I agree that there is a place in the market for every product., and I am flattered by your comment that Warmboard offers forced air response times with all the benefits of radiant! While this is a slight overstatement (Warmboard takes a little longer to react than forced air) it’s true that it is indeed faster than most other radiant systems.

Keep up the good work! Oh, and as a cycling enthusiast, I particularly enjoyed reading about ARTCRANK.

All the best,

Tony
- http://www.locusarchitecture.com Wynne Yelland
  
  Tony,
  
  Right on! Should I sign you up to purchase one of those beautiful tread signatures? Keep ‘em spinning!
  
  Thanks,
  Wynne

FAVORITE GREEN MATERIALS – PART 2B – INTERIOR PRODUCTS

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