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Chicago is well known for a bunch of things—among them a baseball team that does not win, fabulous pizza1, and uninsulated masonry buildings. The Windy City2 does not want to be known for its… Read More
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Ballast is necessary in ships for stability, balance, trim and to otherwise keep them upright because the alternative is not pleasant. The amount of ballast necessary varies based on the type of ship… Read More
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“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate . . .”1In what is turning out to be an unfortunate turn of phrase the terms “unvented attics” and “unvented roofs” have entered the lexicon. A lot of… Read More
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Prologue - Folks sometimes ask me how do I know “that”? How could I possibly know that “that” would happen? I chuckle and answer “that’s because I have good judgment…and good judgment is based on… Read More
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We live at the bottom of an ocean of air. Each of us is carrying around 14.7 pounds per square inch when at the beach in Miami1. We are powerful creatures indeed. Imagine carrying around 101,000… Read More
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Putting ductwork outside is bad enough, but putting ductwork in an attic is even worse (Photograph 1). Attics are even hotter than outside during the summer and as cold as the outside in the winter.… Read More
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Life was simple when I grew up in Canada. Winters were long and cold, we had no air conditioning, walls dried to both the outside and the inside and the Toronto Maple Leafs would win Stanley Cups.… Read More
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When Mother Nature came up with wood it gave it magical properties that try as we might we mere humans find it difficult to improve upon or to transfer to other materials we come up with.1 One of… Read More
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"I've looked at life from both sides now . . ."~ Joni Mitchell1Walls can get wet from the inside, walls can get wet from the outside. Walls can start out wet. Wet happens. Because wet happens walls… Read More
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“If there is a pile of manure in a space, do not try to remove the odor by ventilation. Remove the pile of manure.” Max von Pettenkofer, 18581Gotta love those Germans. Especially the really old ones… Read More
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Excessively high exhaust flow in a tight enclosure. Surely no one would be dumb enough to do this? Quick quiz. What is currently the most common ventilation approach in houses, apartments and… Read More
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If you take rocks and melt them and blow air through them you get fluffy rocks. And fluffy rocks don’t burn. If you take gypsum and make it into sheets you get “sheet rock”. And guess what? Rocks don… Read More
Very Cold, Cold
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One of the dirty little secrets that never gets talked about is that water leaks through building papers, building wraps and housewraps and runs down between them and the sheathings that they cover.… Read More
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To claim that something that has holes in it can act as a water control layer is a pretty interesting argument. It is both true and untrue.I have it on good authority, that for there to be a leak you… Read More
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I remember sitting around listening to stories my dad and his friends would tell when they were hanging around in the basement playing cards. They would laugh uproariously, tease each other, get… Read More
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This all started pretty innocuously. I just wanted a client to have a warm floor. How complicated could that be? Well some seemingly innocuous code language made things irritating but not difficult… Read More
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Seventeen years ago we bought an old house—a fixer upper—over a hundred years old—in Westford, MA. I was going to make sure it would end up energy efficient. Did the rubble foundation thing well—very… Read More
Cold
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It is a beautiful building. Quite stunning actually. It is an embodiment of everything that is right and wrong with architecture.1 An orgy of glass and concrete. It is a thermodynamic obscenity while… Read More
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Walter Payton[1] does Permeance - Reservoir claddings are not easy especially with sun and air conditioning where it rains. Pretty much everywhere folks want to live… It is sunny in Minneapolis and… Read More
Very Cold, Cold, Mixed-Humid, Marine, Hot-Humid, Hot-Dry/Mixed-Dry
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Oh the games people play nowev’ry night and ev’ry day nowNever meaning what they say, yeahnever saying what they mean.
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How hard can it be to insulate a flat sheet of concrete? I mean you only have three choices – on the top, on the bottom, or on the edge. OK, you might have some combination of the three as well.Ah,… Read More
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The Parthenon was constructed around 450 B.C. as a temple to the Goddess Athena (Photograph 1). More recently a temple overlooking Vancouver was constructed by the contractor Gauvin the Younger to… Read More
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A hockey1 puck is 1 inch thick and 3 inches in diameter (Photograph 1). You can easily slip one into the airspace between a brick veneer and building paper. Now a single puck in an airspace like that… Read More
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It was the ants that finally did it.1 It wasn’t the shingles that needed to be replaced. It wasn’t the three-dimensional airflow network in the roof assembly. It wasn’t the lack of racking resistance… Read More
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One of the most difficult buildings to build is a building with a swimming pool because–wait for it–there is a swimming pool inside. It gets even worse when the pool is in a ski resort on a… Read More
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As my friend Mac Pierce likes to point out: you could get a blindfolded drunk epileptic to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire without a net, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. There are some wall… Read More
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Folks are building houses and retrofitting existing houses with increased airtightness, and this is great. They use a blower door to help measure leakage, and this is also great. But then they think… Read More
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This green roof stuff is getting out of hand. It is dumb to do a green roof to save energy. If dirt were energy efficient, we would call it insulation and put it in walls. It is just dirt. Insulation… Read More
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Decks are disarmingly simple. The ones we are going to deal with have conditioned space under them. They are nothing more than roofs that you walk on. But we tend to mess them up royally. Perhaps it… Read More
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Historically, so many problems have occurred with parapets that we have a name for it: “parapetitus.” They have a long history—which of course is not always clear—that allows me to embellish without… Read More
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Imagine a three-dimensional molecular billiard game with billiard balls that are sometimes sticky, and where the rules depend on where you are on the table. Then assume that there are many different… Read More
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Spray polyurethane foam (SPF), the high-density stuff,1 is the only product (so far) that can perform all of the functions of the principal control layers of the “Perfect Wall.”2 The functions are… Read More
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You can’t replace experience and judgment with lab tests and a computer simulation. But when you add lab tests to the experience and judgment and have an adult supervise the process, you might be… Read More
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Ice dams (Photograph 1) happen when the outside temperature is below freezing, the roof deck temperature is above freezing, and there is snow on the roof.1 The warm roof deck causes the snow on top… Read More
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Double Rubble Toil and Trouble1“When you insulate your basement on the inside, the rubble foundation will freeze apart, and you will get swelling from the freezing soil collapsing the wall, and… Read More
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Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a… Read More
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I love cellulose insulation.1 In fact, I love all insulations. The more insulation, the better. There is no such thing as a bad insulation, only bad applications.2 But, it irritates the heck out of… Read More
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Blue Hawaii[1]Hawaii is a magnificent place – except if you want to build there. Huh? What’s so difficult about building on islands in the middle of the Pacific? Check out Photograph 1. Waikiki… Read More
Hot-Humid
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It’s pretty easy to deal with new basements. They are not hard to insulate. The majority of them do not leak or smell and the buildings on top of them are generally not rotting.1 If you want a… Read More
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Canadians do live in igloos. Unlike the Inuit snow block version they’re typically taller than 10 stories and they are made out of foam. Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF’s) are beginning to come into… Read More
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Folks are always asking – “how come we seem to have so many problems with buildings today?” We never seemed worry about rot, corrosion and mold before. What’s going on? What’s different? Is it… Read More
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Sheathing does more than deal with wind. Sometimes it doesn’t even deal with that. It wasn’t always that way. We didn’t even used to have sheathing. We had a timber structural frame (or not,… Read More
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Spain gave Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States giving up any claims on Texas. We all know how that turned out. Nobody really wanted to live there except the Seminoles until… Read More
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Little things can be big things. You build things that seem like they are obviously going to work and then the real world intrudes and reminds you that you are not as smart as you think. You then… Read More
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Stop me if you heard this before. It was anything but easy when we tried this the last time.1 Not because it was hard, but because we didn’t know what we were doing.It is amazing to me that most… Read More
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Our story starts with a self-important politician taking a shower in a new home in Las Vegas in the mid 1990’s and ends with ten’s of thousands of houses with leaks and litigation. Our story will… Read More
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How did we get here? Where are we going? Fundamental questions that should be asked as they tell us who we are. I am of course talking about walls. Wood frame walls are pretty impressive… Read More
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Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, at least as far as building science is concerned, because what happens in Vegas from a building science perspective is rather good. Two of the… Read More
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North of the Arctic Circle there are only two seasons—this winter and last winter. Who would ever want to live there? Being human, we can’t help ourselves. We’ve been there a long time. And, we are… Read More
Very Cold
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After one hundred and fifty years the Illinois cottage1 is undergoing some pretty interesting changes and the ghosts of George Washington Snow and Augustine Taylor2 are cautiously eyeing the result.… Read More
Pagination
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