Facebook becomes a platform of sharing for this open-source collaborative of green building professionals rethinking sustainable building practices.

If you live in Maine you know that we have a lot of old buildings and a lot of cold winters. That doesn’t do much for our energy savings.

While new buildings tend to keep in the heat better, it’s not practical or sustainable to tear down all the old homes and buildings and replace them with new construction. Many non-profits make these old homes and buildings their operations, and the high heating costs cut into the services they can offer the community.

That’s the inspiration behind BrightBuilt, an open source collaborative of green building professionals designing sustainable solutions. To date, there have been two initiatives: BrightBuilt Barn and BrightBuilt Retrofit.

BrightBuilt Retrofit is a demonstration project with the goal of exploring the affordability and accessibility of deep energy retrofits in cold climates. Kaplan Thompson Architects of Portland, Maine is spearheading this effort to showcase innovation and sustainability at its best.

The target project is a 2,500 sf house owned by Community Partners, Inc. of Biddeford, ME. Project contractor, Warren Construction of Freeport, Maine will oversee the work which includes air sealing the building, adding insulated panels to the walls and roof and replacing and upgrading the existing windows.Taken together these efforts are project to reduce the energy consumption of the house by 80%.

flyte helped get the word out by redeveloping the Facebook presence, with a new landing page (seen above), and strategy around engaging the sustainable building community as well as other non-profits looking to bring down the high cost of heating oil in cold climates.

If you’re interested in sustainable building, deep energy retrofits, or non-profits, please head over to the BrightBuilt page on Facebook and give them a big thumbs up.

Rich Brooks
Baby, It’s Cold Outside