Energy-Harvesting Powered Wireless Sensors from EnOcean has been selected as one of BuildingGreen’s 2007 Top-10 Green Building Products by the editors of Environmental Building News and GreenSpec®. This annual award recognizes the most innovative and exciting green building products added to the GreenSpec® Directory during the past year or covered in Environmental Building News.

"Our selections of the Top-10 Green Building Products represent a wide range of product types in many different application areas," noted GreenSpec coeditor and BuildingGreen president Alex Wilson. Four of BuildingGreen’s winning products this year save energy. Two products save water. Three products are green in part because they are made from recycled or recovered material; two because they avoid hazardous manufacturing or disposal of materials, and one aids in the siting of solar energy systems. "Most of the Top-10 products this year have multiple environmental attributes," said Wilson.

BuildingGreen’s Top-10 product selections, as in previous years, are drawn primarily from new additions to the company’s GreenSpec Product Directory. More than 200 products have been added to the GreenSpec database during the past year. "New products seem to be appearing all the time, making it a challenge for our staff to keep up," said Wilson. The GreenSpec database this company maintains now includes 2,000 product listings, representing several times as many actual products.            

A big driver in the development of green products continues to be the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® Rating System (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which awards points for the use of certain product types or for the energy or water savings that certain green products can achieve. "Designers of LEED buildings are looking for green products, and manufacturers are responding," said Wilson.  

EnOcean produces a variety of energy-harvesting wireless controls for lighting and other building-automation equipment.  Developed by German engineering giant Siemens and spun off as a separate company, EnOcean has engineered radio-frequency communication to use just one-tenth the power of most such controllers, and figured out how to power these devices by harvesting ambient energy-including mechanical energy from operating a light switch or photovoltaic energy from lighting in a room. This enables the controllers to operate without batteries, thus saving the materials, energy, and waste from battery manufacturing and disposal. Because wiring is not required, advanced controls may be more widely used, thus resulting in significant building energy savings.

GreenSpec is the leading national directory of green building products. Products are selected by editors of Environmental Building News (EBN) based on criteria developed over the past 15 years. Manufacturers do not pay to be listed in GreenSpec, and neither GreenSpec nor EBN carry advertising; both are supported by users of the information. “Our policy of not accepting money from manufacturers allows us to be objective in our review of products,” said Wilson. A new 7th edition of the printed GreenSpec Directory was published in the spring of 2007. The GreenSpec product database is also available online as part of BuildingGreen Suite, which is growing quickly in popularity. Environmental Building News, founded in 1992, is the oldest and most widely respected newsletter in the green building field. BuildingGreen, Inc., celebrates its 22nd year in business this year. For information on BuildingGreen resources, visit www.BuildingGreen.com or call 800-861-0954.

More Information: 2007 BuildingGreenTop-10 Products