Having an airtight house is good in many ways. Last week I wrote about seven of them. And shortly after the article went out into cyberspace, three people emailed me or commented in the article about a glaring omission from…
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…
One of the best things you can do to improve your home is to make it more airtight. Yeah, it's good for energy efficiency, but that shouldn't be your main motivation. It's good for indoor air quality. A good air…
If you've seen any of the articles or videos about my basement renovation, you probably know I'm using a product called InSoFast to insulate the floors and walls. You can see it on part of the basement in the photo…
With our changing climate, more people are having to deal with higher humidity for longer periods of time this summer. I'd say this has been probably the worst summer for humidity since I moved to Georgia in the summer of…
Things are heating up in my basement now. Really. Our outdoor temperatures have risen since I began my basement renovation in early February and I still don't have heating and cooling down there yet. So it's getting a bit warm…
Controlling the flows of heat, air, and moisture is where building science begins. This is so important that I devoted more than a third of my book to the building enclosure and control layers. As much as I love discussing…
My wife and I bought our 1961 house in 2019, and it came with a basement in pretty rough shape. It smelled musty. There was evidence of moisture damage. The slab was cracked along the perimeter of the exterior walls. …
A lot of volunteers gathered in Decatur, Georgia this past weekend for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Service Project. They worked at a number of sites doing all kinds things to improve the homes of low-income senior citizens. The…
Have you ever thought about how suction cups work? It's got to be suction, right? Or is it? As it turns out, all we need is some basic physics to explain suction cups. And of course there's a connection between…