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Maybe not. For years I have said that dog won’t hunt1. I have come around. The engineer in me likes tools. I can’t help it – it is a genetic defect we engineers are born with. With therapy we… Read More

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

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

As in most things gone horribly wrong, it is a bunch of seemingly small things that come together to create an almost unimaginable nightmare—in this case the “perfect stucco storm.”Unlike most water… 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

If we don’t call things by their right names we don’t really understand how things work.1 If we don’t understand how things work how can we prevent problems from happening? Or how can we fix problems… Read More

The difference between site and source energy is a vital concept to understand when looking at the energy performance of buildings—failing to account for the difference will result in an apples-to-… Read More

Driving rain on building facades is on of the largest sources of moisture that impacts durability of enclosures. Several approaches to predicting driving rain on buildings have been developed over… Read More

This digest reviews the moisture control principles that must be followed for a successful insulated retrofit of a solid load-bearing masonry wall. Two possible approaches to retrofitting such walls… Read More

That part of any building that physically separates the exterior environment from the interior environment(s) is called the building enclosure or building envelope. Environmental separator is another… Read More