As I wrote in a recent article, controlling exterior water is the starting point for solving and preventing moisture problems in a house. In that article, I included a video showing how the water drains in my yard and what…
When it comes to the air moving through your HVAC system, filter bypass is not a good thing. The lead photo above shows a bad case of bypass. What you're looking at is an old-style high-efficiency pleated filter. I don't…
It's time for another update of my ongoing personal heat pump case study. I wrote here in 2020 about how the inverter-driven mini-split heat pump serving most of my main floor is undersized for cooling and for heating. And I…
My four mosquito death buckets have been set up in my yard for two weeks now. So how are they doing? Well, that's not enough time to reduce the adult population of mosquitoes yet, but there are three things we…
I usually focus on the building science of homes, HVAC, and indoor environmental quality. Today, though, I'm going to cover a topic of outdoor environmental quality. I've had mosquitoes in my backyard since we bought the house in 2019. This…
Which do you think would have the bigger impact: Building better new houses or fixing existing homes? Well, let's do the numbers. In 2024, building departments across the US issued just shy of 1.5 million building permits for new homes…
Let's talk about the blower door today. It's one of the most important tools for analyzing the performance of a house. And it's THE tool for quantifying air leakage. That, of course, is related to energy use, comfort, indoor air…
What you see in the photo above is common at construction sites. Once a house gets framed, the next step is drying it in. For the walls, that means installing a drainage plane. The one they used on this house…
![A Little-known Component In Most Water Heaters Holds The Key To Decades Of Service [Photo Courtesy Of Larry Weingarten]](https://www.energyvanguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/new-and-old-anode-rods-1200.jpeg)
A water heater is a significant investment, no matter what kind you have. When you install a heat pump water heater, it's even more important to keep it going as long as you can. So how do you do that? …
If you have moisture problems in a house, it's likely that they began outside. And there are two primary places to investigate once you go outdoors: the roof and the ground. The basic rule for controlling water on the outside…