Ten years ago, Georgia led the United States in adopting a new energy code. Perhaps the biggest advance was that it required all new homes to meet a threshold for airtightness (7 ACH50). Now most states require blower door tests…
So you want to have better indoor air quality at home but you aren't sure what to do. If you read my last article, you know you shouldn't buy an electronic air cleaner. Instead you should stick with the tried-and-true…
The pandemic has brought a huge amount of attention to indoor air quality, even without full acceptance of the aerosol transmission of COVID-19. Unfortunately, it has also brought a huge amount of money to companies selling questionable electronic "air cleaners." …
You may not want to think about this but every time you inhale, you're breathing in air that came out of someone else's lungs. One of my favorite ventilation quotes drives this point home. In a book titled Ventilation and…
The two kinds of people in the world are those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. Regarding how COVID-19 spreads, the data are becoming more and more complete now. And the facts and analysis all point to this deadly virus…
What happened in Texas this winter has a lot of people thinking about our dependence on electricity and what happens when the power goes out in extreme weather. Recently I wrote about Gary Nelson's house in Minneapolis that's heated by…
The US Energy Information Agency does a Residential Energy Consumption Survey a couple times each decade and in the 2015 data, they showed that the average energy use per household member per year is 30.3 million BTU, or 8,800 kilowatt-hours. …
In case you're dying to know the answer, I'll go ahead and blurt it out right here: Yes, heat pumps work in Minnesota and in other really cold places, too. Today I'll tell you about one particular house in Minneapolis,…
You may recall that I bought a ranch-style house a couple of years ago and have been doing some work to improve it. The house was built in 1961, so it turns 60 years old this year. That may seem…
![Design Temperature And Degree Days Are Different [Photo By NOAA ESRL, From Flickr.com]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/thermometer-cold-design-temperature.jpg)
People new to building science and HVAC are confronted with a lot of terms for things that are related but different. Load and capacity. Energy recovery ventilator (ERV) and heat recovery ventilator (HRV). Hot water heater and cold water heater. …