The 9th annual North American Passive House Conference will be in San Francisco, California on 10-14 September 2014. Confused? Maybe you heard that the North American Passive House Conference will be in Portland, Maine on 22-23 September. What's going on…
![Dead Possum Lying Next To A Disconnected Return Duct In A Nasty Crawl Space [Photo Courtesy Of E3 Innovate]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/crawl-space-return-duct-dead-possum-e3-innovate-900-annotated.jpg)
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is a big deal. It doesn't get near as much attention as energy efficiency or green building programs, but it should be one of the highest priorities for anyone who lives in a home. It's actually…
It was the stack effect that led me to Building Science Fight Club. I wrote about it two years ago and all hell broke loose in the comments, especially in the version I posted at Green Building Advisor. People get…
Heat pumps can get frosty when they run in heating mode. It doesn't happen all that often, but it's a fact of life when you're trying to extract heat from cold, outdoor air. Sometimes the outdoor coil goes below the…
Guest post by John Krigger. Last week I wrote an article on combustion safety testing based on the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab work mentioned below and opened the article with a reference to a discussion I'd had with John last…
Michael Blasnik. Joe Lstiburek. Katrin Klingenberg. Jigar Shah. Linda Wigington. Alex Wilson. The Building Energy conference in Boston next week has some big names. A lot of smart people doing great work will be there, and the list of topics…
Not long ago, Erik Henson an energy auditor with HD Engineering and Design in the Kansas City area, posted the photo below on LinkedIn. As you can see, frost has formed on the walls and ceiling inside the house. It's…
Burning fuels inside a house can lead to serious health and safety problems. Energy auditors do a variety of combustion safety tests to find potential hazards and recommend fixes. A couple of weeks ago at the Dry Climate Forum, I…
The outdoor unit† of a heat pump (that metal noisemaker that disturbs the peace on so many otherwise nice summer afternoons) will occasionally grow frost around the outside of the unit when it's in heating mode. Is this OK? If…
Three questions have been nagging at Rick Chitwood over the past 5 or 6 years. First, why is the HVAC industry in California, where he lives and works, so pathetic? Second, why have California’s strict energy standards, which have been…