The Home Innovation Research Labs (HIRL) does an annual survey of home builders to find out what they're doing. The results of their 2019 survey of the homes built in 2018 are out now, and they recently published an interesting…
The first thing to know about the velocity of air moving through ducts is that the slower you get the air moving, the better it is for air flow. That was the main point of my last article. In fact,…
It's obvious that moving air too quickly through ducts can be a problem. Faster air means more turbulence, more resistance, and more noise. But I run into people who think that low velocity also can be a problem in ducts. …
One of the topics I've hammered on for years is the inadequacy of using rules of thumb for sizing air conditioners. The standard one ton of air conditioning capacity for each 400 to 600 square feet of conditioned floor area…
I never read Robert Fulghum's book, All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, but I have a clear memory of learning about one thing in the book: Most of the dust floating around our homes is actually…
Last August I began a series of articles on filtration and indoor air quality. You can find the list of them at the bottom of this article but let's do a quick review here: We spend a lot of our…
So we've looked at a simple way to estimate the heat pump balance point. If you also read the comments of that article, you should be aware that there's more to the actual balance point than what I wrote in…
As the outdoor temperature drops on a cold day, a home's heating load increases. At the same time, decreasing temperature means less heat in the air for a heat pump to pump indoors. And at one special temperature, the capacity…
My first conference after I officially left academia and got into the world of home performance and building science was in 2004. Since then I've been to a whole lot of conferences. There are even more building science conferences I…
Since more people are using heat pumps these days, even in cold climates, let's spell out the three different types of heat that conventional heat pumps provide. Why not! We've just recently covered the three main sources of home heating…