Tales from Two Cities: Portland Green Building Slam and the NW Green Building Slam Summit in Seattle

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Tales from Two Cities: Portland Green Building Slam and the NW Green Building Slam Summit in Seattle

PDX 2019 Green Building Slam

This years’ Green Building Slams and Summit put on by the NW Ecobuilding Guild was by all accounts a fantastic success. Attendance was high and the presentations covered topics from the odd to the inspirational. Among my favorites were Scott Kosmecki of Hinge-Build’s delightful deconstruction of an aging Portland bungalow and the notion that older houses have ’good bones.’ Another we loved was Caitlin Pope Daum and Kyla Tanaka of Studio Wild Landscape Architecture’s illumination of multi-layered ‘high-performance’ landscaping that benefits not only human inhabitants but local ecosystems and looks great to boot.

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ThermaCork: Seven Reasons Why We Love This Durable, Sustainable Building Material

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ThermaCork: Seven Reasons Why We Love This Durable, Sustainable Building Material

Small Planet Supply has been importing and selling ThermaCork expanded cork since 2012. While we’ve been sold on the outstanding qualities of cork for years, we may not have been as great at communicating to others why we think it is one of the best building materials on the market today. So, in honor of seven years of ThermaCork, we’re going to share seven reasons why we love ThermaCork.

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Small Planet Supply & Hayward Healthy Homes Announce Merger

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Small Planet Supply & Hayward Healthy Homes Announce Merger

Small Planet Supply’s CEO Albert Rooks and Hayward Healthy Home’s (H3) CEO Bill Hayward are excited to announce that they have merged operations.  The merged company will operate under the name of Small Planet Supply USA under the direction of current CEO Albert Rooks. 

Merger’s Positive Impact

This merger is an exciting development for both companies, as well as for builders and consumers.  Small Planet Supply has been supporting the growing energy-efficient building market since 2010, offering building materials and education in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. H3 has been providing healthy home systems to homeowners and builders in California and Southwestern states since 2014.

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New KlimaGuard Line Helps Small Planet Supply ‘Stick’ to Its Values

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New KlimaGuard Line Helps Small Planet Supply ‘Stick’ to Its Values

Starting in April, Small Planet began offering a new line of high-performance building tapes called KlimaGuard.  Since we already offer a number of high-performance tapes, you may be wondering why we’ve added another line to our inventory.  The answer is quite simple: incredible value.  

Small Planet Supply CEO Albert Rooks made this change to address an unmet demand in the market.  “Builders want to construct better buildings,” Rooks said, “But the high cost of high-performance tapes makes it difficult to stay within budget.”

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New Zehnder Q and ComfoPost Arrive Right on Cue for New West Vancouver Passive House

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New Zehnder Q and ComfoPost Arrive Right on Cue for New West Vancouver Passive House

Last Tuesday, Small Planet Supply’s Albert Rooks met with Shawn Barr of Naikoon Construction to complete the final commissioning of the first Zehnder ComfoAir Q and ComfoPost in North America at the Radcliffe Passive House in West Vancouver.

The installation of the new Q system wasn’t an accident. Radcliffe Passive House owner James Dean was aware that the Q would soon be released in North America and wanted it installed in his new home since it represents a whole new level of heat recovery ventilation. 

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Using a Change Model to Better Gauge Customer Readiness for Change

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Using a Change Model to Better Gauge Customer Readiness for Change

If you’re an architect or a high-performance builder, you may not think that you have much in common with behavioral health professionals, but in certain cases you’re doing the same work that we do: getting people to change their behavior.  If you’re one of the lucky architect/builders who only gets clients who are 100% motivated to build energy-efficient homes, this isn’t the article for you.  If you find yourself frustrated and unsure why a client who seemed really motivated just disappeared, this article might be worth a read.

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Have Truck, Will Travel: Reflections on the First Half of our BC Airtightness Workshops

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Have Truck, Will Travel: Reflections on the First Half of our BC Airtightness Workshops

It was with a mixture of excitement and fear that Small Planet Supply accepted the contract award to provide mobile airtightness trainings across the BC Province.  The grant was a combined effort of Fortis BC, BC Hydro, the Province of British Columbia and BC Housing.  It wasn’t teaching the classes that seemed intimidating; it was the thought of navigating the sheer size of British Columbia, how to connect with communities across the region and how to replicate the hands-on portion of the BCIT held classes in local trainings.   Since late September, we’ve conducted twelve classes and trained 143 people. Here’s a little of what we’ve learned so far:

Build It Small

The most impactful part of the BCIT airtightness training has been participants’ ability to apply the concepts on a real building.  We didn’t want to lose that – so we built smaller buildings with the help of RDH’s James Bourget who designed and then constructed the buildings with Geoffrey Kirkpatrick.

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Cork on the Outside of the Bottles

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Cork on the Outside of the Bottles

Last Friday, Albert Rooks and I were in Lisbon for our third Amorim Cork Conference. The two-day conference highlights innovations in cork use. Amorim is the world's largest cork producer and manufactures cork flooring, cork stoppers for wine and our own Thermacork.

This year, following a tour of the factory (more on the factory tour soon), we were surprised with a site visit much more fun then last year's school tour - Fitapreta Winery, located outside of Evora.

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