Don’t Do HVAC to Me
One talk at the 2012 Building Science Summer Camp stood out above all the others. The last speaker on Tuesday was Henry Gifford. (Yes, that Henry Gifford!) When he was done, the majority of the audience stood and applauded. The…
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This Playground Slide Can Give You a Feel for Building Science
Remember those old metal playground slides? You don't see them all that much anymore, but recently I found one. It was in the quaint little Southern town of Rutledge, Georgia, near the Hard Labor Creek Blueberry Farm where I'd been…
9 Uncommon Tips for Keeping Cool with a Struggling Air Conditioner
We went through a record-setting heat wave recently in the US. Here in Atlanta, we set an all-time record of 106° F. Homes with properly-sized air conditioners—yeah, yeah, I know they're few and far between—are sized for our design temperature…
Let’s Get This Straight — About the Energy Vanguard Blog
I started writing the Energy Vanguard Blog in March 2010 and have published more than 350 articles since then. I love doing it. In fact, I probably love doing it a bit too much. Early on I often published 4…
Amazing Breakthrough in HVAC System Efficiency and Performance!
Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems have undergone great development since our cavemen ancestors huddled around the fire in winter and fanned themselves with palmetto leaves in summer. The rapid development of efficiency and performance experienced by other industries,…
How Energy Efficient Is Your Ceiling Fan?
I was in one of the big box home improvement stores yesterday and thought I'd take a look at ceiling fans while I was there. Ten years ago when I was building a house and buying a bunch of ceiling…
Does a Geothermal Heat Pump Count as a Renewable Energy Source?
Here's another rant that goes in my Drives Me Crazy category of articles. I'm in good company, too. Green Building Advisor ran an article this week about making the choice between an air-source heat pump and a ground-source (aka geothermal)…
How to Grade the Installation Quality of Insulation
Six years ago, RESNET published a major revision of the HERS Standards, called...wait for it: the 2006 National Mortgage Industry Home Energy Rating Systems Standards. One important new feature in the standards was the grading of insulation installation quality. Before…
A Sword through the Ribs of the Building Envelope
The title of this article refers not to the two framers charging the house with a large timber but to the framing timbers already installed above the porch. Home designers, builders, and framers aren't used to thinking about the building…
The Easy Way to Convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit
Converting between temperatures on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales is easy. I've been doing it in my head for over a decade now. Yeah, I know I'm a weirdo, using the metric system here in the US when no one…