I've been in Lexington, Kentucky this week at the Midwest Residential Energy Conference. It was great! (And I played nice - I didn't mention in any of my talks that I'm a Florida Gator.) One of the many highlights for…
Earlier this month I went to NESEA's Building Energy conference, and I think I heard three terms more than any others: heat pump, net zero, and passive house. (The second most popular trio was beer, wine, and whisky, but that…
Heat pumps can get frosty when they run in heating mode. It doesn't happen all that often, but it's a fact of life when you're trying to extract heat from cold, outdoor air. Sometimes the outdoor coil goes below the…
Not long ago, Erik Henson an energy auditor with HD Engineering and Design in the Kansas City area, posted the photo below on LinkedIn. As you can see, frost has formed on the walls and ceiling inside the house. It's…
Burning fuels inside a house can lead to serious health and safety problems. Energy auditors do a variety of combustion safety tests to find potential hazards and recommend fixes. A couple of weeks ago at the Dry Climate Forum, I…
The outdoor unit† of a heat pump (that metal noisemaker that disturbs the peace on so many otherwise nice summer afternoons) will occasionally grow frost around the outside of the unit when it's in heating mode. Is this OK? If…
I get asked from time to time if a gas furnace dries out the air in a home and makes a humidifier necessary. I've written about humidifiers and psychrometrics before, but it's still worthwhile making this point explicitly. Even some…
They say you can't fix stupid. They're wrong. When it comes to ice dams, we know how to fix what is the most common cause.† If you know a little building science, you can look at the photo below and…
She lives in a small, simple house in southern Mississippi. It's only 1700 square feet. Why then, she wondered, were her summer electricity bills running more than $600? She didn't have anything that could be a big energy hog, like…
Many of the problems that people experience with cooling their homes are pretty straightforward — simple to fix and often simple to prevent. Of course, there are also bigger problems, like bad insulation, air barriers, and duct installations, but today my…