Yesterday I observed an interesting discussion on Twitter. Carl Seville, the Green Building Curmudgeon, posted a link to his article suggesting that maybe we should just ban all batt insulation. Greg La Vardera, an architect who really understands the building…
Converting between temperatures on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales is easy. I've been doing it in my head for over a decade now. Yeah, I know I'm a weirdo, using the metric system here in the US when no one…
If there's one building science topic that confuses more people in construction than any other, I think I'd say it's the purposes and properties of the various control layers. I'm talking about the materials that are meant to control the…
We want our homes to be airtight. It saves energy. It helps keep water vapor from getting into places where it can cause problems. It keeps bad air from moldy crawl spaces and contaminated garages out of the house. It…
On 1 July 2012, the ENERGY STAR new homes program moves fully (well, almost) into Version 3. Currently, the ENERGY STAR team at the US EPA is up to Revision 5 of Version 3, and some items have been delayed,…
A lot of home builders and homeowners are getting certified home energy ratings to find out how efficient their homes are. There's also a lot of buzz about HERS ratings, with builders looking at them as a tool for marketing…
Take a look at this first photo. If you've got any building science training at all, I really don't need to say anymore. Sure, I could fill you in on some of the details, but I'm betting you already know…
In our last home energy rater (HERS) training class, we saw something very interesting on one of our field visits. We were doing a Blower Door test on a new house, and one of the bedrooms upstairs had plastic taped…
ENERGY STAR. LEED for Homes. Builders Challenge. HERS. It's easy to fall into the wrong line of thinking about this. I did it myself when I was new to the HERS rating industry. It's even easier now that RESNET is…
It's been a while since my last post on the big picture of energy, so today I present to you two more metrics that show we have a serious problem. Peak oil, as I've written here before, brings about a…