When can doing something good for your house turn into something bad? Hmmm. There are way too many answers to that question, so let me narrow it down. Is it possible to make your ducts more airtight, a good thing,…
Oh, the controversies of duct design. Standard versus high-efficiency filters. Radial versus trunk and branch. Central versus dedicated return vents. Flex versus sheet metal ducts. But there's another duct debate that centers around the location of the filter. In our…
The quote below is a classic from the 1893 book, Ventilation and Heating, by John Shaw Billings. The imagery of wearing someone else's dirty underwear may shock you, but Billings makes a compelling point. We essentially do something worse whenever…
The DIY box fan air cleaner known as the Corsi-Rosenthal Box (or the Comparetto Cube, in a slight variation) has really taken off in the fight against COVID. I wrote about it here in September 2020, with instructions on how…
It's the last day of the year, so let's wrap it up with some lists. Whether you missed some of the articles I wrote this year or are just curious about what other people were reading here, I've got three…
Here we are at the end of another year. It's been a weird one! I certainly won't go into all the weirdness of 2021, but let me give you the Energy Vanguard wrap-up, divided into five categories. Four of them…
That photo above is the bottom side an air conditioner in a crawl space on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Those droplets tell us something important: A property of the air in that crawl space aligned with a property of…
It's that time of year again. The cold weather has begun here in the Northern Hemisphere, and people are talking about raising the humidity of the indoor air. I'm certainly no fan of bone-dry air, having experienced too much of…
Ventilating homes in any climate has its challenges. In Duluth, Minnesota, it's the extremely cold weather in winter, which leads to extremely dry air when you bring it indoors. In Phoenix, Arizona, it's the extremely hot weather in summer, which…
One of the most frequently asked questions regarding the type of balanced ventilation devices known as the energy recovery ventilator (ERV) and the heat recovery ventilator (HRV) is: "Can I get that in red?" OK, not really. Everyone knows that…