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…
When you turn on an exhaust fan, it blows air from inside the house to the outdoors. That air leaving the house will be matched by an equal amount of air coming in from outside. The more airtight the house…
Before 2001, the biggest construction project I had ever taken on was a bookcase. My most complicated project was probably the mahogany lamp table I built in tenth grade shop class. (I still have it!) Then I decided to build…
You'd think that after more than 12 years and a thousand-plus articles, I'd have mentioned all the major building science terms by now. Yet, here we are. I just did a search of all the articles in this blog and…
An attached garage is the source of a lot of indoor air pollutants for a great many homes. That's because we store gasoline, pesticides, paints, and other toxic materials there, and we exhaust the fumes of automobiles there as well. …
Air has weight. Air can move things, like giant wind turbine blades. Air can also crush things. I first got to see the power of air in my introductory physics class in college. The professor, Dr. Jeffrey Trahan, showed the…
