The 120-volt plug-in heat pump water heater is here! The effort to bring these things to market began in 2018, and now they're available to buy. This technology has some significant advantages over the standard 240-volt heat pump water heater. …
![Pulling Air From The Crawl Space To Cool The House Is A Really Stupid Thing To Do With Air [Photo Courtesy Of E3 Innovate In Nashville, TN]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/cool-air-intake-crawl-space-e3-innovate.jpg)
The Talking Heads said it best: "Air can hurt you, too." And it does it in so many ways. It can hurt your pocketbook. It can make you uncomfortable. It can make you sweat. It can make you sick. And,…
![Understanding Wet Bulb Temperature Is Easy When You Know How It's Measured [Photo By Marco Van Der Haar, CC BY 2.0 Deed
]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/understanding-wet-bulb-temperature-psychrometrics-lake.jpg)
That gorgeous photo of a Massachusetts lake above illustrates some interesting psychrometrics. Those little bits of mist are tiny water droplets full of molecules that not long before had been part of the lake. In the air between those misty…
![A Kitchen Range Hood Sucks Air Out Of A House. Do You Need A Range Hood Makeup Air System To Go With It? [photo By LG, CC2.0]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/kitchen-range-hood-full-cropped.jpg)
Kitchen ventilation is critical to having good indoor air quality in your home. Cooking, as the research shows, produces a lot of indoor air pollutants. The best way to deal with that is to have an exhaust ventilation system that…
Have you ever thought about how suction cups work? It's got to be suction, right? Or is it? As it turns out, all we need is some basic physics to explain suction cups. And of course there's a connection between…
Look at that photo above. Is condensation really responsible for all that moisture you see? We use the term "condensation" a lot when talking about water vapor interacting with materials. But when it comes to porous materials like wood, concrete,…
If you travel with a hygrometer, as any seasoned traveler should, what I have to show you here is nothing new. But if instead you've never measured the relative humidity in a hotel room, I've got something interesting for you…
The electrification movement is accelerating, so let's go back to this topic again and look at how to electrify an older house. In part 1 of this series, I listed some important questions to ask. Today, I'll cover some steps…
With the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) rebates and other energy efficiency incentives out there now, it's a great time to start using a heat pump to heat your home. If you're currently heating with a furnace and have an air…
I mainly talk about air source heat pumps here. But ground-source heat pumps are an important type of heat pump, too. So today, let's look at the issue of open-loop vs. closed-loop design when installing this type of heat…