I've got a record of 14 blower door tests on my condo. Many of them were during home energy rater classes, as we'd bring them here for the confirmed rating they needed to complete. The early ones were horrible! But…
Passive house has a reputation for requiring ungodly amounts of insulation. It grew out of the superinsulation movement after all. If you're familiar with any passive house projects, you may be thinking about double-stud walls that are a foot thick…
In 2002, Katrin Klingenberg introduced the passivhaus program to North America when she built the Smith House in Urbana, Illinois. She had come to the US from Germany, where she studied architecture and got involved with passivhaus. But is this…
A lot of discoveries and research work over the past four decades have led to our current understanding of air leakage in buildings. I’ll mention a few here, but I want to focus on one: the MAD AIR paper by…
In Missouri for the ASHRAE conference, I took some time to visit with my Cajun baby sister the other day. As we were making our way to one of the local wineries outside of St. Louis, we saw a sign…
Last month while I was in Austin, homebuilder extraordinaire Matt Risinger gave me a tour of some of his projects. Afterward I wrote about something I saw on his new home construction site that was a sign of a good…
Condominiums and apartments present some serious challenges when it comes to providing ventilation for good indoor air quality. (I live in a condo that was built in 1970 with no whole-house mechanical ventilation, but that's another story.) In high-rise buildings,…
Drywall installers, plumbers, HVAC technicians. All those folks and more do a lot of the dirty work in the construction, maintenance, and renovation of buildings. It's often not fun. I've done it myself, so I know. As a teenager, I…
The word "interstitial" comes up occasionally in building science discussions. I think I've heard it a couple of times at conferences just in the past month. That may be because Joe Lstiburek was there. He's the guy who used that…
When I began remodeling my master bathroom last month, I found the exterior wall ripe for some serious improvement. It had a number of problems, and I was excited to find them. It was worse than I imagined in some…