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Five Integrated Pest Management Strategies to Consider Pests include insects and animals that have a harmful effect on humans, food or living conditions.  Pests include insects, termites, ants,… Read More

Dirty Harry Does Insulation[1] “A good insulation always knows its limitations….” After all these decades thermal performance should be pretty non-controversial.  How complicated can it be to… Read More

One of the most common foundation approaches to residential construction are concrete basements.  They can be insulated on the inside or the outside.  The basis of all basement foundations is as… Read More

Where Does The Vapor Barrier Go?You have a concrete parking garage under a building.  You have to insulate the underside of the structural slab between the building and the parking garage.  The… Read More

Liquid Flow Due to Capillary SuctionOne moisture transport mechanism that is often overlooked in building construction is capillarity or capillary suction.  Capillary suction acts primarily to move… Read More

Sometimes obvious things are not so obvious.  And when you miss them, they can be expensive….and embarrassing.  And often the embarrassing is worse than the expense….”that was dumb”…”.that hurts”…and… Read More

We have hurricanes, we have floods, we have wildfires….It is hard enough to deal with these as it is…but when we also want high levels of thermal performance…We are going to look at roofs…not because… Read More

Wall assembly design and construction needs to consider rain, temperature, humidity as defined by the hygro-thermal regions, annual rainfall and the interior climate classes as environmental loads… Read More

Yes, we have done unvented conditioned attics before….but mostly with spray foam and rigid foam insulations.  But we do not have to use spray foam and rigid foam insulations.  You can use almost… Read More

Concrete slab-on-grade foundations should be easy to insulate…but they are proving not to be easy to insulate.  We were here more than a half decade ago (BSI-059: Slab Happy, April 2012) and again a… Read More