The Latest from the Energy Vanguard Blog
Last August I began a series of articles on filtration and indoor air quality. You can find the list of them at the bottom of this article but let's do a quick review here: We spend a lot of our time in buildings. A lot of indoor pollutants are generated in the kitchen and not removed by the...
87 Comments | Read/write comments
So we've looked at a simple way to estimate the heat pump balance point. If you also read the comments of that article, you should be aware that there's more to the actual balance point than what I wrote in the article. Today, though, let's look at two factors that can affect the balance point....
21 Comments | Read/write comments
As the outdoor temperature drops on a cold day, a home's heating load increases. At the same time, decreasing temperature means less heat in the air for a heat pump to pump indoors. And at one special temperature, the capacity of a heat pump equals the heating load in the house. That temperature...
19 Comments | Read/write comments
My first conference after I officially left academia and got into the world of home performance and building science was in 2004. Since then I've been to a whole lot of conferences. There are even more building science conferences I could have gone to. But fifteen years down the road now, I have...
0 Comments | Read/write comments
Since more people are using heat pumps these days, even in cold climates, let's spell out the three different types of heat that conventional heat pumps provide. Why not! We've just recently covered the three main sources of home heating and then stepped back and looked another group of three...
64 Comments | Read/write comments
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.) ...
32 Comments | Read/write comments
"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...
2 Comments | Read/write comments
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...
16 Comments | Read/write comments
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...
24 Comments | Read/write comments
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...
27 Comments | Read/write comments
Pages
Subscribe to the Energy Vanguard Blog
