Field-based testing can substantiate your green building claims and set your homes apart from competitors.
It's time once again for our annual Editors' Choice Awards for the year's best tools, accessories, and jobsite solutions. This year, we spotlight 13 great products that will help you save time and avoid trouble–two of my biggest pet peeves as a builder and employer.
Regional utility company Xcel Energy chose Boulder, Colo., as its first Smart Grid City. This makes the town a test bed for an innovative energy management pilot program that will help Xcel increase its electrical distribution efficiencies and provide customers unprecedented home-energy management options and real-time data thatíll help them reduce their costs.
The look in Tim Kenney's eyes when he's showing you his shop says it all: 'I was born for this job.' And it didn't take him long as a kid to know this self-truth. 'When the other kids were playing sports, I was in my basement scavenging model airplane engines and making rockets,' he says.
There's an interesting dynamic at play within the tool industry that I'm trying to figure out. On one hand, there are clear effects on the industry of the historic decline in new-home construction. It has affected everyone from jobsite subcontractors to tool store suppliers. We've never seen anything like these conditions, which some are calling The Perfect Storm: months and months worth of unsold housing inventory, subprime mortgage failures, and newly emerging credit problems all adding up to an unpredictable market and recovery time frame. As a result, some tool industry executives have told me, U.S. tool sales are down at least 5%.
