Yesterday I returned home from the North American Passive House Conference. It was great, as it always is. Wait. No, this was the best one yet. On the 10th anniversary of the first conference, PHIUS put on an amazing conference.…
There's a ton of new construction and remodeling going on in Atlanta. On a lot near where I live, a developer tore down the old house and is building two new ones. This weekend, I took the opportunity to check…
I've been working on my presentation for the 10th anniversary of the North American Passive House Conference. It's on the global warming impact of insulation, a followup to my latest article about Alex Wilson's work on that subject. One of…
Air conditioner sizing rules of thumb must die. That's what I wrote in my last article. The most common rule of thumb is to use 500 square feet per ton to determine the size of air conditioner needhttps://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/more-on-air-conditioner-sizing-rules-of-thumbed. Or 400…
We design a lot of heating and air conditioning systems at Energy Vanguard. When I talk to potential clients, a lot of them tell me their contractor wants to size their air conditioner using a rule of thumb. The rule…
Remember my bathroom remodeling project? I took the liberty of gutting our outdated, decaying bathroom while my wife was out of town in April. I found some interesting air leakage pathways when I opened the walls. I fixed that. I found…
I get asked a lot of questions about spray foam. Do I need an ignition barrier? Should I use open cell or closed cell spray foam? Will open cell spray foam really rot my roof? But the question I get…
I've seen some crazy things done to homes. It's usually someone's attempt to make things better. Sometimes that someone is a homeowner or other occupant. Sometimes it's a contractor. But it always seems to be a solution to a problem…
In the beginning, there was passivhaus. That was way back in the 1990s. Then the Passive House Institute US, having been thrown out of the party for blasphemy, said, no, passive house started in North America in the 1970s and…
There's this thing called passive house. It's a terrible name. Almost everyone agrees on that. Look at how its adherents are driven to a frenzy and you'll see that the name doesn't really fit. The houses themselves aren't passive either,…