Boilers for heating homes are common in some areas. Not here in Georgia, where I live, but my friends in the colder climates have them. This type of heating equipment takes a fuel like natural gas or fuel oil, burns…
Of course, everyone knows that caulking your windows and weatherstripping your doors won't help you much. Right? Well, all the cool kids do anyway, and that includes you because you're here reading this article. A lot of the standard advice…
Caulk your windows. Weatherstrip your doors. It's that time of year again. No, I don't mean the time of year when you should do those things. I mean it's the time of year when all the news stories that include…
The best green building program you've never heard of is probably Enterprise Green Communities. Everyone knows about LEED, of course. Regional programs, such as EarthCraft House and Minnesota GreenStar, also have name recognition in their areas. But unless you've been…
A zero energy building is one that produces on-site at least as much energy as it uses. As I've written here before, the US Department of Energy has been mulling over the various ways to define and calculate zero energy…
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about whether homes that produce as much energy as they use should be called net zero energy or zero net energy homes. Several readers offered up another choice: zero energy homes. I've also…
Sagging flex duct is bad for air flow. We all know it. We all talk about it. It turns out there's research data to prove it, too. Texas A&M did a study a few years ago to look at the…
A typical BPI Building Analyst spends four to five days in a class learning how to do blower door testing, along with all the other stuff they need to know. HERS raters get all that but also have to learn…
Some people call it a net zero energy home (NZE). Some call it a zero net energy home (ZNE). The controversy has caused good friends to come to blows. I'm talking Building Science Fight Club on steroids! (Of course, I've…
To this point, we’ve taken a look at what exactly psychrometrics is and defined the top nine psychrometric quantities. Now we're going to delve into how we can combine those quantities and create the psychrometric chart. As you might expect,…