Baosol Consulting provides sustainable consulting services from their base in Masonville, Colorado to residents of Northern Colorado. Andrew Michler, founder and owner of Baosol Consulting, understands the importance of creating green buildings. Michler references the saying that the buildings where you live and work in are often called your third skin, since you spend so much time inside of the buildings.
Michler is passionate about what he does. He lives off the grid in a "near-zero" home with his wife. They use solar electric power and propane to heat water and for their refrigerator. They use wood from their forest for heat when it's cold. He even his own tire wall woodshop and incorporated a rainwater catchment system. Michler uses his own home as a sort of experimental laboratory to test ideas on how to construct self-sufficient, compact, interesting buildings.
When Michler's father lost his home to the 1992 Oakland hills fire, he renovated a home that was in great need of fixing. With his father, he rebuilt the home and further enhanced his knowledge of energy efficiency. When Michler moved to Colorado, he found himself working with heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In hindsight, Michler confesses that he cringes at the work that companies asked him to do, since homes had high energy consumption and obvious comfort issues and the solution back then was cheap equipment that didn't really resolve the problem. So, Michler started building on his own and began to understand how all of the different aspects of a building, like systems, materials and design, interact and interplay between each other. For Michler, this is the heart of sustainable building.
Michler created Baosol Adaptive Building Consulting in an effort to design and renovate buildings while keeping the interplaying aspects or a whole-systems approach in mind. With his company, Michler helps buildings become more sustainable and green by involving all of the stakeholders and keeping the environmental impact of every project as low as possible.
Michler is more than a consultant, though. He also seeks to reveal the gap between the existing knowledge of green building and the perception of green building. He is working with a partner to develop a non-profit organization that will help local green building companies to work together to make green building practices a mainstream norm.
It is business owners like Andrew Michler that are paving the way to a greener tomorrow through the excellent work they do in their private and business lives.
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