I've been on the road this week. I flew to Chicago on Tuesday and gave two presentations at the Better Buildings: Better Business conference put on by the Energy Center of Wisconsin. After I was done there on Wednesday, I…
Relative humidity is what everyone likes to talk about. It gets the attention, but it can be confusing, especially when the temperatures drop. The truth is that, despite a high relative humidity, cold air is dry air. For example, at…
A new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) makes a bold claim that increasing ventilation rates can cut the number of student absences related to illness. The lead author on the paper, Mark Mendell, is quoted by LBNL's News…
I was in Austin a couple of months ago, and I got a chance to watch the bats fly out from under the Congress Avenue bridge. (See my video at the end of the article!) I also saw a great…
Let me drop a few names on you: John Straube, Peter Yost, Scott Pigg, Keith Williams. Impressed? If you know who those folks are, you probably realize how much you could learn from them. If you don't recognize the names,…
I spoke at Serenbe,† a beautiful green community southwest of Atlanta, this weekend and got a chance to visit a net zero energy home while there. Built by Luis Imery, one of the home energy raters we're a HERS provider…
I was searching the Interwebs for data on what percentage of buildings are designed by architects this week when I came across the Home Design Trends Survey from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). (If you can point me toward…
Now, I know exactly what you're thinking. Those painters didn't want to paint insulated buildings because building science hadn't been invented yet, and they thought the insulators were jumping the gun. Or was it that painters thought that stuffing the…
You have two choices when change happens: You can embrace it, or you can fight it. Some parts of the home building and home improvement industries are in the first camp. These are the home performance contractors, green builders, and…
To say spray foam insulation has become popular in green building over the past decade is like saying Peyton Manning is a good quarterback. It's an understatement. Although it's certainly not used in every green building project, it's become one…