Pushing Through the Hard Parts
In the summer of 1981, my grandparents gave me a 1961 Volkswagen Bug. I had just gone through my sophomore year at Centenary College of Louisiana without having a car and really wanted to have one for my junior year.…
Blog
What Is Home Performance? Part 1
Maybe you're a homeowner investigating how to make your home more comfortable. Maybe you're contractor (HVAC, insulation, remodeling...) looking to grow. Or maybe you're an artist looking for the latest trends in performance art. However you got here, I'll see…
An Unexpected Benefit of Encapsulating a Crawl Space
My friend Perry had lived in a nearly hundred year old house for six or seven years when we encapsulated his crawl space in 2005. It was a typical old country house. Originally built on piers, someone had filled in…
Is This the Worst Duct Retrofit Ever?
When Stephen Morrison of MoreSun Custom Woodworking sent me the photo above, my reaction was, Wow! Just wow! This duct retrofit is absolutely stunning. It's an elegant display of creativity not hindered by knowledge. Can you see what they've done?…
What’s the WERS?
Now's your chance. The inaugural train-the-trainer session on the Water Efficiency Rating Score, WERS, is happening in Santa Fe, New Mexico in just three weeks. Mike Collignon from the Green Builder Coalition has been doing an amazing job getting this…
How to Get the Best Possible New Tract Home
Let's say you've bought a lot in a new development and are having a tract home built. You want the home to be as energy efficient, comfortable, and green as possible. Your builder offers only a few options, like high-efficiency…
Heat Is a BTU-tiful Thing!
Every year on New Year's Eve, I head over to some friends' house here in the Atlanta area. They have the best party around—Possum Drop—and I've been going for nearly a decade now. As midnight approaches, the newly-crowned Possum Queen…
An Old Home in New Orleans Gets New Sheathing
New Orleans is the home of jazz, Mardi Gras, and rot. I grew up about 70 miles southwest of NOLA so I know a little something about the rain and the swamps and the muggy air. It makes it tough…
HVAC Hacks and Other Screwups — The Backstory
I love me some good bad photos. You know, good photos of bad stuff. If you've been here a while, you've seen some of the doozies I've posted in the Energy Vanguard Blog. Take Stumpy, the duct amputee or Release…
Can You Cool Your Home with Crawl Space Air?
I know it's not air conditioning season, but this story is too good to wait until summer rolls around. My friends at E3 Innovate in Nashville — you may remember them for finding the home ventilated with dead possum odors —…