The Nest thermostat has been around since October 2011, quietly collecting data on how your home — and the homes of hundreds of thousands of your neighbors — operates. It gathers information about indoor temperature, relative humidity, air conditioner runtime,…
Move over powered attic ventilator. There's a new boss in town. For decades, concerned homeowners have looked for ways to keep their attics cool: gable vents, ridge vents, turtlebacks and whirlybirds. Then they moved from passive to active and latched…
Do you know when the US last raised furnace efficiency standards? It was 1987. Do you know how long the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been trying to change that? At least since 2007. The past eight years have…
I'm writing this on St. Patrick's Day so let me tell you a wee bit about the O'Mearas. Kevin and Svetlana O'Meara live in a beautiful home in Utah that's oh-so-close to being a net zero energy home. After I…
Remember those two furnaces I showed you photos of last week? You know, the ones that had ducts placed—or taped, in one case—right in front of them to bring them combustion air. I told you it wasn't a good way…
A while back I wrote about the incompatibility of putting an atmospheric combustion furnace in a sealed attic. Most often the attic is sealed by installing spray foam insulation at the roofline, thus bringing the attic inside the building enclosure…
We used to build houses without giving much thought to heat flow through the walls, ceilings, and floors. The main thing was to provide some resistance against wind and rain, and then we'd get a fire going to try to…
What is it about the number three? You've got the Three Musketeers, the Three Little Pigs, and the Three Stooges. Then there's three strikes (what every pitcher wants), three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial), and the three kinds…
Degree days are a combination of time and temperature. We looked at their uses and where they come from in part 1 of this series, and now it's time to go a little deeper. The temperature enters as a temperature…
Let's say you did some work on your home to make it more energy efficient - air sealing, more attic insulation, and a duct system retrofit. You've got your energy bills for 12 months before and 12 months after you…