“Building Envelope Commissioning” or “Building Enclosure Commissioning” The terminology is so new we’re not sure which term will stick… so we’ll start with what we like. “Envelope” sounds more lovely than “enclosure.” “Building Envelope Commissioning (BECx) comes to the San Francisco Bay Area” For centuries we’ve understood air infiltration and moisture intrusion waste energy and

At Healthy Building Science we provide three primary services revolving around healthy building materials. 1) Bulk material testing. We cover this briefly in another blog post. 2) Building material research. Sometimes our clients are particularly interested in toxicity or resource conservation. Some clients concerned about climate change are asking for carbon footprint analysis in order

Sick Building Materials Smell Bad- What if it’s too late and the building stinks? At least once a week we get the following call… “We were so careful to only allow healthy materials in our project. But we just moved in and it stinks! We’re worried the building materials smell bad. Can you come test

What if you could create electricity while you worked out? Well, it turns out you can. The following article about electricity generating bicycles was written by Warren Neilson Humans convert food energy (measured in calories) into chemical energy that is used by moving muscles. The body is about 20% efficient meaning that only 20% of

Some Green Building Logos Are Scary… Green Building logos are full of leaves and trees.  Use Google Images (“green building logo”) and that’s just about all you’ll see. It’s overdone. We struggled with these logo concepts when coming up with our new logo. How do you quickly illustrate nature-loving and “green” without a leaf or plant?

Green Building Resources – 2011 These green building resources offer free educational materials about Green Building, Healthy Building, and Sustainable Building. These are really all different names for the same thing: “High-Performance Building” Healthy Building Science supports and has relied on these green building resources ourselves, so we are happy to share them with you!

The Institute for Building Biology & Ecology (IBE) is truly a remarkable organization. In the 70’s they brought very forward-thinking German design/build/testing protocols to the US. Since then the organization has flourished and many of the top environmental consultants in the country have gone through their training and certification program. There are not too many good Building

Indoor Air Quality Resources These websites offer great information about IAQ. There are many indoor air quality resources out there, and we cannot come close to listing them all, but we feel these are useful resources for most people looking for a primer. No single website will cover all the bases, so hopefully we’ve done

Asthma and Allergy Resources It can be challenging to find asthma and allergy resources that are easy to understand and helpful. We often find ourselves in homes with children (and adults) with asthma, and they are unaware of what we consider “the basics” of managing indoor irritants and asthma triggers. Some basic self education is definitely