Energy Vanguard Blog

Neville poked his head up through the scuttle hole into the attic and surveyed the situation. Troy immediately heard a scream erupt and had to get out of the way as Neville quickly jumped down off the ladder.

You may not realize that among his many other accomplishments, Dr. Joseph Lstiburek, the well known building scientist and Canadian firebrand, invented the Turbo Thermo-Encabulator Max. He's tried to keep this secret and you won't find anything about it on Building Science Corporation's website. I've known about it for a while, though, and I was perfectly content to keep it a secret...until last week.

Hidden deep within the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act, recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, is a provision that outlaws insulation in all new buildings. Citing its potential as both a cause of pandemics and an all-hazard, the bill's authors concluded that insulation is a national security threat and must therefore be banned.

Last night, I was reading Surrealizations: The Gospel According To Chicken* before I went to sleep. That's always dangerous and liberating, but one question he raised got me to thinking about all of the imaginary home performance questions I'm bombarded with, so today I'll tackle a few. But first I'll start with Chicken's question about his ceiling fan.

2013! Can you believe it? We survived the end of the Mayan calendar and are now living in what I like to call the post-non-apocalyptic world. I think that may well be the next hot genre for literature and film. To celebrate our non-demise, I did my usual thing and went to what one attendee described as "the best party in the universe."

I went to see The Hobbit recently. Of course, the center of the story is a dragon, Smaug, that invaded the ancestral home of the dwarves many moons ago and set them on a long diaspora. The story begins as a band of justice-seeking dwarves, having conscripted the reluctant Bilbo Baggins from the Shire, set out on their journey to take their mountain home back. Preparing Bilbo for the dangers ahead, they describe the dragon to him: "Think furnace with wings," one of them said.

Halloween can be a lot of fun. Well, let me soften that a bit - Halloween can be fun if you don't stuck doing an energy audit of a haunted house, as I did one year. If you're in the home performance business, you'll never lack for materials to make a costume. This year, my friend Doug invited me and my wife to his annual Halloween party, and the theme was the Milky Way galaxy. Well, I thought, I'm sure I can throw something together that looks alien-like.

The most terrified I've ever been was was the time I got called to do a home energy audit of the haunted house-as-a-system down the street. I still shudder when I think of that night. Yes, it was nighttime. The caller who hired me, a woman with a sultry voice, said that was the only time I could get into the home. The money was good, and I had no idea what perils awaited me there, so I agreed. Once I got into that house, though, I thought that was going to be my last night in this mortal life. I'm lucky to be here now, telling you this story.

Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems have undergone great development since our cavemen ancestors huddled around the fire in winter and fanned themselves with palmetto leaves in summer. The rapid development of efficiency and performance experienced by other industries, however, seems to have bypassed HVAC in recent decades.

New houses certified in the LEED for Homes program will be required to have 100% windows in all above-grade walls once the new 2012 update is approved by US Green Building Council (USGBC) members this summer. The LEED certification program has grown tremendously over the past decade, and in the process, thousands of LEED Accredited Professionals (LEED APs) have learned what it takes to make a building sustainable.