Last night, I was reading Surrealizations: The Gospel According To Chicken* before I went to sleep. That's always dangerous and liberating, but one question he raised got me to thinking about all of the imaginary home performance questions I'm bombarded…
This morning I discovered that the Sustainable Building Association in the UK had linked to our site, writing: Energy Vanguard has a huge amount of excellent building science and especially air tightness info. Sadly it is US based which means…
I've written a couple of articles recently about the complexities of mechanical ventilation and the battles going on regarding when to install it, how much to ventilate, and whether ASHRAE 62.2 is worth all the resources we're throwing at it.…
With the help of people who know a lot more than I do, I'm slowly getting this stuff figured out. I wrote about my problems with using ACHnat a while back, and when I posted that article at Green Building…
First of all, let's call it what it really is. The industry likes the term "vent-free" when talking about gas fireplaces that keep all the exhaust gases in your home. I prefer the term "ventless" or, even better, "unvented." Not…
Does your heating system have a humidifier attached to it? If so, it's most likely there to treat a symptom while leaving the underlying cause of that symptom alone. The symptom is dry air in winter. Unless you're in an…
2013! Can you believe it? We survived the end of the Mayan calendar and are now living in what I like to call the post-non-apocalyptic world. I think that may well be the next hot genre for literature and film.…
I went to see The Hobbit recently. Of course, the center of the story is a dragon, Smaug, that invaded the ancestral home of the dwarves many moons ago and set them on a long diaspora. The story begins as…
Let's say your trusty old furnace is at the end of its life. You've got to buy a new one, so you call your HVAC company and they rush over to make sure you don't freeze during the next cold…
You'd never settle for a recirculating toilet, would you? Press the lever and everything in the bowl just swirls around and around. Never leaving, just recirculating. That's the image Professor John Straube painted for us last week in his talk…