The Princeton Environmental Commission has organized a second annual Green Home and Garden Tour for Saturday.
The tour, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., will be held simultaneously with Hopewell Township Environmental Commission’s Greener Living tour.
The two free, self-guided tours will feature area homes, gardens, commercial buildings, and a school that exemplify different aspects of environmental sustainability.
Last year’s Princeton tour won a 2008 New Jersey Environmental Achievement Award.
Homes and public buildings on this year’s Princeton’s tour were selected to demonstrate the major kinds of environmental sustainability recommended by the U.S. Green Building Council.
The Princeton tour will include Lasley and Brahaney’s new LEED-compliant (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) office building. Architect Leslie Dowling’s home includes a salt-water chlorinated pool, ample sunlight, and, to cut down on heat and air conditioning, a green roof planted with succulents. Another home on the tour has a geothermal well. The tour also features a newly built, earth-friendly home. A sustainable renovation by architect Ronald Berlin shows how to add space without greatly increasing a home’s footprint, and how to combine many smaller green features to improve the efficiency and healthfulness of an older home.
Sustainable gardens on the Princeton tour include a rain garden at the Princeton Senior Resource Center. This garden shows how to reduce storm-water run-off, thereby protecting ground water from pollution. An organic garden features drought-resistant and native plants, shows how to maintain a lawn without chemicals, and demonstrates how root-collar excavation improves a tree’s health.
The Whole Earth Center will display the green cleaning materials it sells and signpost a self-guided tour of its LEED-compliant, energy-saving renovation. It will also offer free cups of locally-roasted, organic, Fair Trade coffee. To end the tour, Terra Momo Corp.’s new green-built restaurant, Eno Terra, which features locally-grown food and composts its food waste, will host a $10 wine-tasting with light refreshments between 2 and 4 p.m. Saturday.
Princeton tour maps are available at area locations or at www.princetontwp.org.Maps of Hopewell’s Greener Living tour are available at area libraries, at Hopewell Township’s Municipal Building, and at www.hopewelltwp.org.
On the Hopewell tour, Master Gardeners will explain different ways to compost kitchen and garden waste at their Mercer County Education Garden near Pennington. The Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association will show photovoltaic panels and water-conserving restrooms. Renovations to Timberlane Middle School include a geothermal HVAC system, a 50KW roof-mounted photovoltaic system, Energy Star roofing, and occupancy sensors. Several homes on the Hopewell tour will also show photovoltaic systems, one of them with battery storage. And Terhune Orchards in Lawrence will explain its drip irrigation and integrated pest-management systems.
Perhaps most innovative of all is an off-the-grid, hydrogen-powered house. This East Amwell renovation uses 56 photovoltaic panels on the roof to change sunlight to electricity, which, in turn, runs an electrolyzer that extracts hydrogen from water. The hydrogen is then stored in tanks for future use. The owner thus makes all the fuel he needs. Since building the system, he has paid nothing for electricity, oil, gas, or gasoline to fill up his hydrogen-powered car. The house’s only waste product is water, which can be pumped right back into the system.

