Where else but Portland? It's not often you're going to see a plumber riding a bicycle to give estimates. You might not have to look too far, in eco-conscious Portland, to find a company with a fleet of ethanol- and biodiesel-fueled vehicles. But how many plumbing companies can say it makes a side income through the sales of its work uniforms-fleece hoodies with the company's logo on the front and Skull-and-Crossed-Wrenches logo displayed Jolly Roger-style on the back, all in a nice subtle shade of Retina-Reaming Yellow
All of that would pretty well describe Black Cat Plumbing in Portland, though. The five-year-old, full-service company's six plumbers, one apprentice and one-woman office staff run a half-dozen service trucks and the aforementioned bicycle through the company's service area: "I have a bicycle here at the office and, if I'm going somewhere within reason I will ride," said Black Cat president Mike Perrotti. "I do that for my own well being."
Perrotti said it was his grandfather who stressed to the young Perrotti and his brother the value of an education in the trades. Grandpa's logic was those skills are mobile-they move with you as you move around the country. 
Perrotti said his attraction to plumbing may not have had as much to do with transportable skills as Grandpa may have liked. See, one day, Perrotti's uncle, a plumber, pulled into his parent's driveway in a new Corvette: "I asked him how he got it and he said he had done a couple boiler swaps that weekend," Perrotti said. "I ended up a plumber. My brother ended up an electrician."
The young Perrotti paid his dues with a couple of different companies in his native Boston, and even racked up some time as a musician, as he said, "floating around for a while." Along in there his green consciousness developed.
"These recycling programs came out and I just went along," he said. "I didn't know anything about this stuff at first, but I felt like we needed to stop putting so much stuff in the landfills-it made sense to me. I was learning on the fly.'
After a decade working in Boston, Perrotti said it was early 2002 when a vacation trip to Portland turned into three more visits there by the end of that year. Being driven to the airport for yet another trip back home to Boston, he said decided to pack up his stuff and, "be back here in my own personal truck in eight weeks," he said. "And that's exactly what happened."
Perrotti said he had gained some experience with solar water heating a few years ago and it's still a staple at the company. Black Cat made its green bones during an episode that saw it installing the first "no-flush"-type urinals in a privately owned downtown Portland building undergoing a complete green makeover. The 115-year-old structure known as the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center was undergoing renovation to LEED Gold standards. Now called the EcoTrust Building, its tenants included the city's Office of Sustainable Development. [Check the project out online.-Ed.]

Mike Perrotti came to plumbing after seeing its potential rewards as a youth in his native Boston.

Another interesting item on the company Web site is that all of its vehicles-except the bicycle-run on biofuel. Sort of: "They're not Flex-fuel capable, but we're able to put the blend in," Perrotti said, adding he hasn't seen a large impact on the monthly fuel bill. "We use an ethanol blend in the gas-fueled trucks and a biodiesel blend in the diesel trucks. I'm not looking for an impact on the financials; I'm just looking to do what I can." 
An interesting project that recently involved some outside-the-box thinking from the folks at Black Cat, although the plumbing was straightforward, he said, was The REX Project. It's not a remodeling project for a family named Rex. It's an acronym for "Reuse Everything eXperiment," a complete demolition and rebuilding of a Portland home that re-used as much material from the old structure as possible in the new one. 
"This was a project for Shannon Quimby, author and featured design expert on HGTV's 'Country Style' program," Perrotti said. "The old house was demoed and rebuilt with no waste-all the old house components were incorporated into the new one. Even the old drywall was stripped of paper and the gypsum was ground up and put into the soil."
Black Cat did the entire plumbing system, but there isn't any solar or radiant or other spiffy systems incorporated in the house. It's just a basic plumbing system: "All the old plumbing came out. The fixtures went over to the ReBuilding Center with the exception of the tub, which got stolen off the job site," he said. The ReBuilding Center in Portland accepts, "used building and remodeling materials, providing resources for the benefit of communities with the goal of promoting sustainable practices," according to its Web site.
Everything else was stuffed into storage containers on the street. Perrotti said much of the old plumbing system couldn't be re-used, but as much as possible was salvaged-the old kitchen sink was moved into the garage for a shop sink, for example. Some of the old pipes were re-fabricated into hanging material and even welded yard sculpture: "The project really helped to open my eyes," he said. 
Having open eyes is a good thing today. The unsavory fact is that all manner of charlatans, flimflammers and other no-goodniks have a tendency to set up shop at a time when there's a lot of money to be made in a new, expanding field. High-tech green plumbing, including solar and other technologies like radiant heating, are prime examples of areas subject to greenwashing and/or shoddy, poorly designed and inefficient installations slapped up by installers who'd have a problem building a cube with Lego blocks and a blueprint. Those types are something for consumers to worry about, Perrotti said. But today's consumers who are savvy enough to be looking into solar and similar advanced technologies are also savvy enough to do some reading and find out how the systems work, what to expect from them and maybe even how much they're going to cost to install. 
"There are a lot of inferior products out there that people are trying to push into the marketplace," Perrotti said. "I can see right through them and I will share that information openly with customers. What we're dealing with right now in high-efficiency water heating and solar thermal are customers who don't call me up and say they want a tankless water heater. They call me up and tell me they want a specific brand and a specific model. If they come to me with one I haven't had good experiences with, or if I know there's a big downside to that product I will attempt to bring them up to speed and get them into something they're going to be happy with."
The hardware side of the equation is advancing, however, and the days when even trained, knowledgeable installers will have to construct systems using adapters to connect Company A's collector panels with Company X's heat exchanger may be ending. 
"What we're seeing with solar right now is kind of a mixed bag of manufacturers. That's coming to an end-Rheem is coming out with a complete solar hot water system," he said. "They didn't have the panels before, but they made the only double-wall exchange tank that could be installed in Oregon simply because it was a double-wall unit. Then we married the tank to all sorts of different panels. Now for Rheem to step back up to the plate and introduce a line of solar panels is what I like to see-a system designed and built by one manufacturer where everything goes together and is compatible. Before we had to get special adapters. And this isn't new. It's just new here."