Ed Hudson, MBA April 18, 2013 To Park or Not To Park: The Real Value of Garages (Part 1) It’s a common dilemma: household storage inevitably manages to encroach upon space in the garage, previously reserved for vehicles. Boxes, furniture, power equipment, and other things sit on the garage floor in the spot where we’d…
Ed Hudson, MBA January 11, 2019 Builders Identify Top Challenges in Meeting New Energy Code Requirements In December 2018, Home Innovations Research Labs fielded our Omnibus Survey of 300 U.S. home builders, which included dozens of questions from sponsoring manufacturers. We also included some of our own questions to gain insight into current building construction…
Michelle Foster November 19, 2015 Don’t Mess with FTC: Substantiate Your Green Marketing Claims A growing number of consumers are interested in green products. Despite what naysayers insist, that is fact. Consider green cleaning products. In 2010, less than 20 percent of American consumers surveyed said they had bought a green cleaning product in the…
Michelle Foster September 18, 2015 Kaizen is Key to the Success of NGBS Green Kaizen is the practice of continuous improvement; a belief that big results come from many small changes accumulated over time. In the six years since Home Innovation played a critical role in the development of the National Green Building Standard ICC-700…
Ed Hudson, MBA August 30, 2019 Study Finds Current Labor Climate is Both Opportunity & Barrier for Offsite Housing Solutions At Home Innovation Research Labs, we’re continuing to monitor the building industry climate and market opportunities for offsite housing construction through our surveys of home builders. Most recently, our August 2019 Omnibus Survey of builders…
Michelle Foster November 26, 2014 3 Simple Green Home Marketing Rules Market research consistently confirms that mainstream Americans care about sustainable choices. Yet builders are dogged in their conviction that consumers don’t care about green. The problem isn’t that consumers don’t care about green. The problem is that consumers don’t necessarily care about green in…
Damiyen Wilkerson December 16, 2022 Deep Dive into Chapter 5: Lot Design, Preparation, And Development Constructing a green building is a process that should begin well before the foundation is poured and settled. Chapter 5 of the ICC 700-2020 National Green Building Standard® (NGBS) awards and acknowledges the careful selection, design, preparation, and development of…
Deanna Williams Seale, PE March 4, 2022 #WillItCorrode: Stick A Fork in It This year, the Home Innovation lab team is on a mission to test some everyday gadgets in our salt spray chamber to find out #willitcorrode. Typically, we test products such as nails, screws, anchor bolts, bollards, stair nosing, gutter clips, ladders, cable, baluster,…
Bob Hill, PE November 21, 2013 Up Close and Personal with “The Racker” In my last post I talked about our two universal test machines (UTM) and noted that machines like these, especially the smaller bench top units, are somewhat common in testing labs. Here I want to describe a custom piece of equipment in…
Michelle Foster October 9, 2015 Is It Really All About That Price? Not Likely! Many builders mistakenly believe that green certified homes are a niche product; that only the most environmentally-conscious consumers care about green features. Instead, they reason, homebuyers are all about the sales price. That might be the case. That is, of course,…