Construction Informer

Bucket Ape System helps ease grout job cleanup. (Courtesy Bucket Ape)

Anyone who has ever cleaned up after grouting tile knows what a time-consuming and challenging job that is. Well, it appears the makers of this system have hit upon a better way to handle that job. Watch the video for the complete view (be prepared – the music is a bit over the top). If anyone has tried this leave a comment with your reaction.

Here’s some of what the manufacturer claims in its press release dated August 19, 2010:

Traditionally, a whole house tiling project involves hauling 3600 lbs of water, nearly two tons. Bucket Ape completely eliminates hauling buckets and virtually eliminates the risk of repetitive stress injury to back, knees, and shoulders. Bucket Ape achieves its low cost through leveraging common items that most people already have on hand: a standard five gallon bucket, a garden hose to supply fresh water, and another garden hose to drain dirty water outside. Bucket Ape gives new purpose to items that might otherwise end up in the landfill, and it can even reduce water usage by 60% compared to traditional tile cleaning methods. Prices range from $7.95 for the Bucket Ape itself to the most expensive kit of $29.95 for the “High Capacity Ready-to-Use” system.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:00 — 5.0MB)

Welcome to the construction Informer Podcast for August 30, 2010.

You know, you don’t have to look far to find some dissenting opinions on Waste Management’s Bagster. It’s a large polypropylene bag you set up curbside, fill it with remodeling waste or construction debris, or just the contents of your garage when you’re cleaning it out. Then you call Waste Management, it sends out a truck and the thing is carted off. Well, lately on the blog there have been a couple of comments posted that reveal challenges some people have had in using the Bagster. Not surprisingly one is from an independent waste handling professional who actually developed a PDF that covers some of the not too evident downsides. To get the link to his site and ultimately the link for downloading the PDF just scroll down the right side of the page until you reach Comments and select the top one about Bagster.

I want to break here and talk briefly about GoToMeeting because you know along with the emphasis on using local materials, and materials with low embodied energy, there is also a movement toward using processes that have small carbon footprints. One way builders, architects and engineers can reduce the carbon footprints of projects is by addressing the carbon footprints of meetings. With GotoMeeting you can all attend the meeting from wherever you happen to be. And right now, listeners of this show can try GoToMeeting free for 45 days. Just visit GoToMeeting dot com slash podcast. With everyone logged into GoToMeeting whether they’re across the country, or across town, they can see your computer desktop on their computer screen, regardless of the operating system they use. So why not try it out and see if you can trim some carbon from your projects. Try GoToMeeting free for 45 days by simply visiting Go To Meeting dot com slash podcast.

Axion’s plastic composite products are getting used in railroad bridges with some being installed for the Army.

Kwikset challenged locksmiths to pick its new lock and only one fell to the challenge. Learn about the record of a leading competitor as well.

New Orleans has a growing list of LEED certified projects including the largest community of LEED Platinum homes. Find out what else is coming up green in that community.

Workforce Management provides some tips on keeping the information that may be getting lost when the millennial generation workers move on. They tend to move around more so the technical knowledge drain can cost companies up to 50 percent of the person’s salary.Construction Informer Podcast

Stillwater Dwellings model sd152 shown here with Modern Style Package. (PRNewsFoto/Stillwater Dwellings)

Prefabs keep coming on stronger and stronger and by the looks of their designs it’s no wonder. I haven’t had Stillwater in these pages before and as I was perusing some press releases this one stood out. There are of course many others on the market with prices ranging from highly affordable to downright expensive. One in Brentwood HIlls, California, that boasts the latest and greatest in technology costs about $4 million.

Stillwater just added 10 new floor plans. It makes a point to reveal just how open not only the floor plans are, but the pricing too.

Stillwater Dwellings is uniquely dedicated to a transparent and predictable cost structure, helping clients understand building costs upfront. Rather than simply listing the base cost of a home plan, as is the industry standard, Stillwater Dwellings publishes a more comprehensive and typical budget for an entire project, including additional costs such as site work, transportation, and upgrades.

That’s refreshing in an industry where people have not always made it easy to figure out just what you were going to actually spend for one of these homes all set up.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:59 — 7.3MB)

Podcast Transcript

This month marks three years since I shared the very first Construction Informer post on August 6, 2007. As I look back at that rather anemic first post about punch lists I wonder just what was going through my mind. The audience was clearly not defined, the name, while a little catchy and somewhat descriptive, was not really a good name for the Web since it was highly unlikely anybody was going to search for it. Matter of fact, most everything about the Construction Informer was not Web, or should I say, search engine friendly.

There were no keyword goals, no attempt to define pages and categories, absolutely no planning of any kind (other than how much the hosting was going to cost) and a very casual approach to the type of information I was going to Inform about. And honestly, not much of that has changed. Somehow along the way I guess I got a little sideways of the Google god and lost the page rank. It’s never come back, even after multiple attempts at adjusting content, links and practices. So, even though the readership has grown it certainly hasn’t grown like it might have, had there been some kind of a page rank over the past couple of years.

Today, there are 586 posts spanning 20 categories with many of those posts time sensitive. There’s a running commentary here on the housing market meltdown and the resulting construction collapse. There are interviews with builders, manufacturers, software and hardware vendors, architects, engineers and a few other professions. There are more product reviews and overviews than I can count and somewhere in all of that there are many opinion pieces, mostly my own, that rant, cajole or expose some of the thoughtlessness I see in the world.

Then too, there are podcasts, maybe about 30 of them. Nothing here has ever directly generated money and the reality is I have looked upon it as simply a place to showcase my writing. That aspect has generated some significant income from companies who needed some of the kinds of writing that I do.

Special Offer

Recently, I have taken on an ad campaign associated with the podcasts I produce and I was happy to do this because the campaign was for a product I think is really great, especially for the AEC industry. That product is actually more like a service and it’s called GoToMeeting. You can get everybody together right online with GoToMeeting so it can save you a lot of time and angst over trying to get people physically together. And the neat thing is, listeners of this show can try GoToMeeting free for 45 days. All you have to do is visit GoToMeeting dot com slash podcast. With everyone logged into GoToMeeting whether they’re across the country, or across town, they can see your computer desktop on their computer screen, regardless of the operating system they use. So be my guest, try it out and get your team together the easy way. Try GoToMeeting free for 45 days by visiting Go To Meeting dot com slash podcast.

New Web Site

I also want to let you know that my posts on this blog are going to be spread kind of thin for awhile because I have a new venture. It’s called Construction Cloud Computing dot com and it’s about, you guessed it, cloud computing for construction, and also for architecture and engineering.

This idea for the site grew out of conversations with builders, architects and engineers about the challenges they face everyday in not only running their businesses but in having to manage computing hardware and software too. It seems they are really more interested in building than in running IT operations. Cloud computing holds the promise of freeing them to pursue their true passions. Construction Cloud Computing is bringing  together information from across the cloud computing spectrum. It’s set up on the WordPress platform, which has actually become a very robust content management system. So, it has the feel and immediacy of a blog and the flexibility to incorporate a wide range of information.

It’s my goal to bring you important information about cloud computing so you understand it, and can see ways to leverage it for your own, unique business. You can depend on our coverage being objective and well-sourced, with references noted so you can be sure we aren’t just creating content for search engine digestion.

Computing is moving steadily to the Internet. In the not-too-distant future content creation, manipulation and consumption will happen largely online. The devices that connect you to the Internet will no longer need to have massive hard drives and buckets of RAM since the power of computing will reside in huge data centers running all the latest hardware and software.

Cloud Computing

The Internet has often been represented by a cloud in schematic diagrams, thus the term cloud computing. But all it really means is the computational power happens on remote hardware and the interaction between the user and the hardware happens via the Internet.

For construction, architecture and engineering, this portends to be technology nirvana. The smallest contractor will have the computer power of the largest, and the one-person architecture or engineering shop will no longer be hamstrung by the costs of hardware and software.

Kumar of the Glasgow Caledonian University, UK, and J.C.P. Cheng, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology authored a paper called, “Cloud Computing and its Implications for Construction IT.” The authors describe cloud computing as “anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet.” They reported that 90 percent of the construction sector is small to medium-sized businesses. Cloud computing they wrote, holds promise for construction because of the pricing model. The idea is that you pay as you go, and only for the computing power and applications that you need at any given time.

This time I did a boatload of planning so I can hopefully please not only the readers, but the inevitable search engine that might stop by as well. So, hop over and visit, Leave a comment if you are inspired to do so, or even contribute. If you have information about cloud computing you’d like to share, just let me know. I’m always looking for relevant material that will help AEC businesses leverage what could be the greatest technological breakthrough for them since CAD. That’s at www dot construction cloud computing dot com.

And that’s it, for this edition of the Construction Informer podcast. Until the next time…build well.

BIM Risks and Rewards article very clearly outlines the legal aspects of the technology.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is delivering a new process to construction that is forever changing the way the human world is being built.  Being able to see a 3-dimensional representation of a structure before it is built, and while it is in the design stages, has advantages that closely parallel being able to see into the human body with X-Rays and MRIs to diagnose and treat medical problems. A clear vision enables exacting design criteria and eliminates conflicts while saving money and time.

As construction, and its related fields of architecture and engineering adopt the new technology they have to do it within the framework where they have always operated until that framework catches up to the changes that are going on. So, BIM in some regards is hamstrung by the “old ways of doing business.”

I have read many papers on BIM, its advantages and disadvantages and challenges, but one recently written by Michael J. Cremonese and Chad A. Wissinger is elegantly simple yet very insightful in explaining the legal aspects. For a fluid and understandable view of BIM read this.