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…
Water vapor from the air condenses on air conditioning ducts in humid climates. It's as normal as poorly insulated bonus rooms making occupants uncomfortable or cigarettes causing lung cancer†. Condensation on ducts is most common in crawl spaces and basements,…
If you've been hanging around here for a while, you know I encourage architects and builders to find a way to get the ductwork and heating and cooling systems inside the conditioned space of a home. In cold climates, this…
"You know where this is going, right? Codes will eventually require balanced ventilation." I've heard people say this more than once in the past year or so. As someone who has been attending the semiannual meeting of the ASHRAE 62.2…