Wednesday Morning Wanderings
Building permits Still Not At Bottom: The number of building permits issued nationally in April rebounded a little from March but if this indicator’s past record in predicting housing slump turnarounds holds true then the bottom still isn’t here. The April number was 978,000, up 46,000 from March but still well above past turnaround points. Once again the southern region had higher numbers of permits issued than the other regions and the northeast had the lowest showing.
New Evidence Paperless Saves Time: Paperless drywall was shown in a BIM model to accelerate the construction of an assisted living facility by 10 weeks. This drywall uses fiberglass instead of paper facings so it can be installed before the building is completely weathered-in. Turner Construction did the modeling using Georgia-Pacific’s DensArmor Plus. Especially in commercial buildings there are always a lot of spaces where the drywall needs to be hung before electrical, plumbing and HVAC installations so this allows that to happen making it possible to bring those trades in earlier. In a hospital project in South Carolina the schedule was cut by nine months by using this kind of product. There are case studies and more here.
Reduce Risky Glass Block Installations: Architects and designers are often leery of specifying glass blocks due to the integral nature of installing them. Now, and we should have seen this coming, Pittsburgh Corning is offering the first in a line of pre-fabricated customizable panels of glass block. The first offering is a bit on the heavy duty side. It will be a blast resistant panel and is due out this month. This panel will flex under blast pressure from things like explosive devices. The company says it will release other versions of this product throughout the year.
New Tool Helps Verify Green: For those who want to verify the effectiveness of their green installations like green roofs, solar power and wind turbines without the hassle of running a lot of cable there is at least one wireless solution. Called the HOBO U30 Remote Monitoring System these units are rugged data loggers that have Wi-Fi. Plug the sensors into the unit and access the stats and analysis online and around the clock. There are sensors for air temperature, relative humidity, sunlight, wind, kW, kWh, AC voltage, AC amps, DC amps, pressure, CO2 and more.
