She lives in a small, simple house in southern Mississippi. It's only 1700 square feet. Why then, she wondered, were her summer electricity bills running more than $600? She didn't have anything that could be a big energy hog, like…
You just never know what you'll find in a hotel room. I'm a curious guy so I have to check things out, and this week I found some interesting stuff in the air conditioner of the room they gave me…
Peripeteia and anagnorisis. Not the kind of words you expect to hear from people who do 'dirty jobs.' Of course, Mike Rowe doesn't do dirty jobs for a living the same way that most of the people he covers do.…
All I was trying to do was find some football scores on Yahoo the other day when I saw it. I don't go looking for this stuff, and when I do see it, I try to ignore it. But this…
If you have a home with a crawl space—or are building or buying one—you have several options on what to do with that particular foundation type. Most crawl spaces are vented to the outdoors, but over the past decade, encapsulating…
Earlier this year I got a question about a home that had spray foam insulation in the attic. Nothing unusual about that. A lot of builders and homeowners are going with spray foam insulation because of the airtightness benefits. But…
I confess that, back in the '80s, I might have done the same thing this couple did. I remember reading Mother Earth News and Practical Homeowner magazine articles about folks who collected discarded materials to use in their existing homes…
A year or two ago, I remember getting trapped in my car one evening listening to Ira Glass's show This American Life. It was an episode titled When Patents Attack, and I was riveted. They described how a seemingly small…
Psssst. Want a $2000 tax credit for that energy efficient new home you're building? A lot of home builders have taken advantage of this incentive since it was introduced in 2005. (37,506 homes got that $2000 in 2010 alone.) The requirements…
Yesterday I got to see something I learned about only two weeks ago at Building Science Summer Camp. That's where I found out that 85% of all expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam insulation in Germany is grey because it has graphite…