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Buildings don’t work the way they used to.1 Folks are always saying stuff like this. But let me make the case regarding just one factor and you decide. There are other factors of course, but I want… Read More

Mold is pretty easy to understand.  No water no mold.  Any questions?  Well, there are a few.  For one we have more mold today, but we don’t have more water.  What’s with… Read More

General Limit States Design, Hygrothermal AnalysisAt a basic level a wall is an environmental separator.  It keeps the outside out and the inside in.  Easy to say, not always easy to do.To… Read More

Of course the crazy way we speak about the Second Law does not help: “In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system.” Huh? It makes you want to hate… Read More

You have got to love salesmen. They figure things out way before physicists, usually before engineers and certainly before greenie weenies. Harry Tschumi and Les Blades,1 a pair of salesmen from… Read More

Civilians seem to think that we have the technology to go into a space, do a test, and determine what is in the air. As simple as that sounds we can’t do it. We don’t have the technology.1 You cannot… Read More

So what do you do when you have an old building and the walls aren’t doing their job? What do you do when the walls look bad, leak and are falling apart? You give them a face-lift. We’ve been doing… Read More

I love wine. People think that I must know something about the stuff because I drink a lot of it. I don’t really know that much, but I do know what I like: red, and French and with a cork. Most of… Read More

Crawlspaces stink, they rot, and are just plain icky. Photograph 1 shows the modern crawlspace, which is a forest of water droplets on the underside of fiberglass batt insulation. The exposed wood… Read More

The reason we go to Kentucky for bourbon and not to Pennsylvania is because of the Revolutionary War debt. The new republic started off in a lot of debt because of the Revolutionary War. I know it is… Read More