Green from the Ground Up: A Builder’s Guide by David Johnston & Scott Gibson. A lively yet thorough overview by Colorado builder Johnston – I’d like to make it mandatory reading for my clients!

Residential Energy by John Krigger & Chris Dorsi. Simply the best – the appendices alone are worth the purchase price. They even include a copy on CD.

 The JLC Guide to Energy Efficiency just out from the Journal of Light Construction. Lots of real-life new and retrofit examples from JLC’s top contributors. Varied opinions, but brutally honest about what works and what doesn’t.

Close on the heels of these would be anything EEBA puts out. So what are your favorites? Comment or reply and let me know!

Building green isn’t enough – you’ve got to sell it, and that means promoting and educating. To make promotion easy, ENERGY STAR offers a wealth of free marketing materials: logos, signage, doormats, you name it! Educating your buyers starts with educating your real estate agents. Pioneer Pacific emphasizes their energy-efficiency features in weekly agent meetings, including one featuring a talk by building science guru Mark LaLiberte. Mark asked the agents if anybody knew what the ‘e’ in ‘low-e windows’ stood for, not really expecting an answer. “Emissivity,” one of them immediately responded. (Yes, that is the right answer.)

I’ve shopped ENERGY STAR homes and heard site agents say it’s an ENERGY STAR Home because it has ENERGY STAR appliances. What are yours saying? (If you need help, I offer clock-hour classes on selling energy-efficient homes.)

So far, they’re mostly being used to retrofit existing electrically heated homes or in areas without natural gas service. New home builders have been wary of buyers being put off by seeing the unit on the wall, but take a look at them below in First Lamp‘s gorgeous modern townhomes in Seattle.

The design-build firm took two steps to minimize the visual impact of the Mitsubishi Mr. Slims: 1) they located them where they wouldn’t be the first thing you saw when you entered the room, and 2) they installed them in recessed niches a couple of inches deep. The result? They closed the sales of both townhomes a week after they hit the market.

Remember that week of 100-plus-degree days we had in 2009? You can bet somebody’s going to be offering homes with DHP cooling the next time that happens – why not you?

Kudos to Nick Smith of Central Highland Builders for setting up just such a meeting for his new ENERGY STAR project, Ferncliff Village on Bainbridge Island!