Earlier this month I went to NESEA's Building Energy conference, and I think I heard three terms more than any others: heat pump, net zero, and passive house. (The second most popular trio was beer, wine, and whisky, but that…
When I started Energy Vanguard in 2008, I didn't know how it would evolve and had thought early on that I may get back into home performance contracting. I did a couple of jobs, the last one being a crawl…
To those of us in the industry, the term "high-performance home" has a clear definition. It's one with a good building enclosure. That is, it's airtight and insulated well. It has properly sized, installed, and commissioned heating and air conditioning…
Today is Pi Day, named for that special number, 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288... The three dots at the end mean that I've exhausted my memory of the digits of pi, but pi doesn't care. It just goes on and on. Anyway, Pi Day…
The debate over how much to ventilate a home has been going on a long time. Last year, Building Science Corporation introduced their own standard to compete against ASHRAE 62.2 because of problems they felt weren't adequately addressed in the…
The truck below is the one I spent my teenage summers in and around when I worked for my grandfather, the most senior of the Allison Arthur Baileses. It was a great truck and had almost everything on it that…
The 9th annual North American Passive House Conference will be in San Francisco, California on 10-14 September 2014. Confused? Maybe you heard that the North American Passive House Conference will be in Portland, Maine on 22-23 September. What's going on…
![Dead Possum Lying Next To A Disconnected Return Duct In A Nasty Crawl Space [Photo Courtesy Of E3 Innovate]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/crawl-space-return-duct-dead-possum-e3-innovate-900-annotated.jpg)
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is a big deal. It doesn't get near as much attention as energy efficiency or green building programs, but it should be one of the highest priorities for anyone who lives in a home. It's actually…
It was the stack effect that led me to Building Science Fight Club. I wrote about it two years ago and all hell broke loose in the comments, especially in the version I posted at Green Building Advisor. People get…
Heat pumps can get frosty when they run in heating mode. It doesn't happen all that often, but it's a fact of life when you're trying to extract heat from cold, outdoor air. Sometimes the outdoor coil goes below the…