Most new homes in North America are built with sticks. The early home builders used bigger pieces of wood — timbers — and when the smaller dimensional lumber that we use so much today hit the market, they scoffingly referred to those…
The I-joists in the photo above run across the top of the wall between the dining room and the garage. In the old days, before anyone worried at all about air moving through those joist cavities, the builder didn't do…
Seven years ago Georgia led the nation. Yep. We were the first state to adopt an energy code that made blower door testing mandatory. All new homes built in the state had to show through performance testing that they had…
You're having your dream house built. You're into the design phase, working with an architect or looking through collections of house plans. You're doing your homework, trying to find out how to ensure you get a top quality house. And…
You can tell how energy efficient a furnace is by its official efficiency rating, the Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE). It's a measure of how much of the heat originally in the fuel that's being burned is available for delivery…
Ventilation is a great thing. Bringing outdoor air into the home and exhausting stale indoor air improves indoor air quality. Well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes the outdoor air quality is worse than indoor air. Sometimes you bring in…
The Internet age has made it easy to find information. Occasionally you can find some that's even true. That's where it becomes helpful to have someone more knowledgeable than yourself to be able to ask for advice and input on…
Here's a little conundrum for you. To get the right amount of heating and cooling to each room in your home, you need a load calculation. Rules of thumb don't work. But if you do a load calculation, the result…
When it's hot out, we want cold. At night, we like to be able to turn on the lights. During the daytime, it can be hard to find the darkness. All these things — hot and cold, light and dark,…
Are you confused? In my last article, I said buried ducts are at risk for condensation. Now I'm telling you they'll be allowed in the 2018 code. What's going on here? The answer is simple. Yes, when you bury ducts…