Yesterday I visited a home being built by a national production home building company. As you can tell from the title of this article, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that building enclosures have improved,…
Lloyd Alter, architect and prolific blogger at Treehugger, has a new book. Titled Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle,* the book is an exploration of what it takes to live within a pretty strict carbon budget. That means tracking the carbon…
It's that time of year again. The cold weather has begun here in the Northern Hemisphere, and people are talking about raising the humidity of the indoor air. I'm certainly no fan of bone-dry air, having experienced too much of…
The two primary ways you can heat your house are by burning a fuel (e.g., fossil gas, fuel oil, wood) or using electricity. Furnaces and boilers distribute the heat from combustion to heat a house. Electric resistance heat makes sense…
Building your first house as an owner-builder can be hectic, nerve-wracking, and wildly exhilarating. I experienced all those things and more when I built a house for myself 20 years ago. I've written a bit about it here in the…
My how the time flies. Ten years ago right now, I was David. A large insulation company was Goliath. They came after me for criticizing fiberglass batts in an article where I showed 7 photos of poorly installed fiberglass…
Climate zones for energy code purposes are defined in the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Every three years, that code gets updated. The map that was in the last version of the IECC, which came out in 2018, had been…
David Wasserman and I worked together at the Southface Energy Institute back in 2007-08 and have been friends since then. Before Southface, he was an engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab. We also call on him for occasional help with…
I won't keep you in suspense here. The answer is yes, absolutely. Uninsulated ducts damage your siding in a humid climate in some cases. I recently visited a house in Atlanta that has that very problem. If you haven't scrolled…
Relative humidity is such a confusing way to talk about moisture in the air. I've been hammering on this point for a decade in this blog, covering it in several different ways. (See the related articles below for more.) But…