With our changing climate, more people are having to deal with higher humidity for longer periods of time this summer. I'd say this has been probably the worst summer for humidity since I moved to Georgia in the summer of…
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…
So you're getting a new air conditioner! Well, what size should you get? Unfortunately, too many contractors use only one input for sizing an air conditioner. Yup. To them, it's just a matter of floor area. Forget the windows, the…
Humidity control is becoming a bigger deal than it used to be. As Joseph Lstiburek, PhD, PE said to me one time, "the gap between stupid and hurt is narrowing." Building codes and best practices are getting better, which is…
It was two years ago this week we had the nasty old fossil gas natural draft water heater removed. (That's it in the photo below.) Outside of running a gasoline powered generator inside a house, this kind of water heater…
A few months ago, I wrote about the confusing world of dehumidifier capacity. That quantity tells you how much water a dehumidifier will produce in a given amount of time. Here in the US, we use pints per day, but…
Every area of building science has its jargon. And I'm not just talking about the acronyms, initials, and abbreviations that get thrown around casually. I've been making a list of the most interesting, useful, or stupefying BS terms and giving…
Dehumidifiers have one job: to turn water vapor into liquid water by moving air over a cold coil that's below the dew point. The capacity, or size, of a dehumidifier is just the rate at which it does that conversion. …
That dehumidifier you see in the photo above is in the Energy Vanguard office here in Decatur, Georgia. The compressor doesn't come on often, but this past week I've heard it running quite a bit. Depending on where you're from,…