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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
Pagination
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