Last night I arrived here in Raleigh, North Carolina for a two-day train-the-trainer session on the ENERGY STAR Version 3 guidelines for new homes. This is the third of four that the guys from EPA's ENERGY STAR new homes program…
Anyone who's been around me for a while knows that I love numbers. (If you need to know pi to 50 digits, just give me a call.) Well, this article is number 100 in the Energy Vanguard blog. Wow! Even…
The last time I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, Icynene was not a household name, and many homeowners had never heard of a Blower Door and Duct Blaster. (Well, OK, you're right. They're not exactly household names now either, but…
Having written nearly 100 articles in this blog, I've covered a lot of topics related to how buildings work. Just in the past two weeks, for example, I've written about attic kneewalls, heat pump water heaters, why house wrap isn't…
Below is a repost of an article with advice for voters from my friend Chris Kaiser at Mapawatt. Below is a repost of an article with advice for voters from my friend Chris Kaiser at Mapawatt. If you are voting…
In my last article, I wrote about how I've learned so much by visiting the parts of houses that most people don't like to go into themselves. In that article, my focus was on the problems with the attic kneewall. …
I guess you could call me a contrarian. I usually go in the opposite direction from the crowds. In 1997, for example, I spent two weeks in Portugal, where most people head for the beaches south of Lisbon. Instead, I…
Last week, I was a judge in the LightHouse Awards green home competition put on by the Hilton Head Home Builders Association (HBA). Along with my fellow judges, I visited two homes in the Hilton Head area. We saw a…
It took me a while to figure out that a building is basically just a structural framework with control layers. Yeah, there's also electrical, plumbing, mechanical systems, and finishes, but the heart of a building is the stuff that holds…
Five years ago I read a book that freaked the hell out of me - The Long Emergency by Jim Kunstler. I was drinking a lot of peak oil kool-aid that year, but that book really got to me in…