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I'm going to go out on a limb and make what you may think is an outrageous statement: Water is the most interesting substance in the world. Some of you may immediately respond, "Oh, yeah! What about beer?" (Or wine or Sidecars, Negronis, or Sazeracs or whatever your drink of choice is.) ...
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"Don't sweat the small stuff," they say. You know what, though? That may be great advice for your emotional life but it's terrible advice for just about anything to do with buildings. Whether you're designing them, specifying materials, putting them together, or fixing them later, buildings have...
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Earlier this week I wrote about the three main sources of heat in homes. At the end of the article I threw in a fourth one, solar energy, but then I dismissed it as something that people tried in the 1970s and '80s and have since abandoned for home heating. And that's still mostly true, but my...
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It's wintertime in the Northern hemisphere and that means we're heating our homes. The new year started off a bit on the warm side, with the temperature at nearly 70° F (21° C) here in the Atlanta area. In terms of heating degree days (HDD), we've gone from about 12 HDD/day at the beginning of...
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The ASHRAE conference and AHR Expo were in Atlanta last week. Because I live here, I didn't have to stay in a hotel but a lot of people I know came to town and did stay in hotels. One of them, John Rockwell of ERV & HRV manufacturer Zehnder, sent me the photo above of the window in his room...
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A lot of people don't understand the best way to defog their car windshield in wet, cool weather. About 30 years ago, I was on a group trip on a hired shuttle bus. The outdoor temperature was probably in the 40s Fahrenheit and it was raining. Perfect conditions for fogging up the interior glass...
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Over the past few months, I've taken a look at some critical issues for indoor air quality. Starting with the issue of how much time we spend indoors, I then wrote about kitchen ventilation, the panoply of indoor air pollutants, problems with filters in general and with high-MERV filters. Now let...
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When you get into the world of building science, it's inevitable that you'll hear about the study that proved fiberglass insulation loses half its R-value because of convection within the insulation. Or it could be you're a homeowner who's been told about this problem by an insulation contractor...
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Welcome to another January, this time in the year 2019. The month, of course, is named after the Roman god Janus, who has two faces, one looking backward, one forward. Because, you know, to really know where you're going, you have to understand where you've been. 2019 may be a brand new year,...
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Happy birthday to Willis Carrier! He invented modern air conditioning and changed the world. In his quest for a device to control humidity in the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York, he invented a device that changed migration patterns in the United...
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