One of the topics I've hammered on for years is the inadequacy of using rules of thumb for sizing air conditioners. The standard one ton of air conditioning capacity for each 400 to 600 square feet of conditioned floor area…
I never read Robert Fulghum's book, All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, but I have a clear memory of learning about one thing in the book: Most of the dust floating around our homes is actually…
Last August I began a series of articles on filtration and indoor air quality. You can find the list of them at the bottom of this article but let's do a quick review here: We spend a lot of our…
I'm going to go out on a limb and make what you may think is an outrageous statement: Water is the most interesting substance in the world. Some of you may immediately respond, "Oh, yeah! What about beer?" (Or wine…
"Don't sweat the small stuff," they say. You know what, though? That may be great advice for your emotional life but it's terrible advice for just about anything to do with buildings. Whether you're designing them, specifying materials, putting them…
Over the past few months, I've taken a look at some critical issues for indoor air quality. Starting with the issue of how much time we spend indoors, I then wrote about kitchen ventilation, the panoply of indoor air pollutants,…
What is a hair's breadth? A strand of the finest human hair is about 20 micrometers (also called microns) in diameter. Take a piece and slice it in half. Then take one of those halves and slice it in half…
Indoor air quality (IAQ) researchers have established that little bitty invisible pieces of stuff that float around in the air are bad for human health. Of course, being scientists, they don't call it little bitty invisible pieces of stuff. They…
That face above is of a physician, alchemist, and astrologer named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He is deemed the father of toxicology and is better known by the name Paracelsus. I begin this article with him because Dr.…
Energy efficiency is a gateway drug to building science. When you really start learning about it, you come to the inescapable conclusion that there's so much more to making homes better than just saving energy. A house is a system,…