Well, it's official. It may have taken 3.8 years to make it happen, but my Zehnder ComfoAir Q600 energy recovery ventilator (ERV) is running now! I started it up on 29 December, so it's been helping to clean my indoor…
There's a new type of flashing for window sills on the market now. It's the Rissan 430 grey corner from Siga, which is a piece of pre-formed flashing tape that fits perfectly into the corners of door and window rough…
If you've seen any of the articles or videos about my basement renovation, you probably know I'm using a product called InSoFast to insulate the floors and walls. You can see it on part of the basement in the photo…
In the comments of my last article, RoyC made an interesting point. "I don’t usually run my bathroom exhaust fan during a shower when it is hot and humid out," he wrote. I'm sure that statement shocks a lot of…
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…
Bathrooms need some way of exhausting air. Mostly it's to keep the humidity down, but, depending on who lives in the house, the bathroom also can be a source of a lot of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Not all homes…
![Understanding Wet Bulb Temperature Is Easy When You Know How It's Measured [Photo By Marco Van Der Haar, CC BY 2.0 Deed
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That gorgeous photo of a Massachusetts lake above illustrates some interesting psychrometrics. Those little bits of mist are tiny water droplets full of molecules that not long before had been part of the lake. In the air between those misty…
Look at that photo above. Is condensation really responsible for all that moisture you see? We use the term "condensation" a lot when talking about water vapor interacting with materials. But when it comes to porous materials like wood, concrete,…
Cold air is dry air, right? Think about the humidity in your house in winter compared to what it is in summer. If you're in a humid climate, it's going to be drier in winter. Even in dry climates, it's…
Vented crawl spaces are often nasty, dirty buffer spaces that can flood your home with a variety of indoor air pollutants. A lot of it starts with moisture, of course. Water comes up from the ground beneath the crawl space,…