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How 18 Building Science Podcasts Make Me A Better Person

Shawna HendersonJune 07, 20221 comment

Listening to podcasts is a great way to expand your understanding of the world. As a podcaster myself, I love to ask questions and then sit back and listen to other people’s stories and their takes on our industry, and how the built environment affects each and every one of...

Energy Advisor: What's the Business Case?

Shawna HendersonJune 24, 2021

Blue House Energy is inundated w/requests from folks interested in becoming an Energy Advisor.  We’re not complaining!  No, no, no, we’re super excited to answer all of your questions. So this is the first in a series on the business of being an EA, reflecting some of the common questions...

Valuing the role of the appraiser in home performance

Shawna HendersonJanuary 12, 20158 comments

Here's something near and dear to the heart of anyone involved in the home performance industry: how to make energy efficiency sexy, appealing, and properly valued. When you're up to your eyebrows in insulation and you know that you are adding significant value to a house, it's sometimes hard to...

A deeper discussion of deeper energy efficiency measures

Shawna HendersonSeptember 25, 20142 comments

    Here's a good read from Nate Adams from Energy Smart Ohio, on problems associated with energy efficiency programs, single-action bias and low-hanging fruit. It comes with the above GREAT graph showing the fallacy of diminishing returns on energy efficiency measures. The red line indicates what we think happens...

Building Science and HVAC stuff

Shawna HendersonSeptember 16, 2014

There is this disconnect in our industry. It's around building science and the ways that all the systems in the house work together or against each other. It looks like this: evaluators and raters know about house-as-a-system and can look at a house and see some solutions and fixes that...

Scaling the picture

Shawna HendersonApril 03, 2014

There is so much to focus on when working in energy efficient, low energy, high performance, green, sustainable houses: materials, assemblies, performance, HVAC, energy sources. Broad categories like these can be broken out into a dozen subcategories each, then another dozen sub-subcategories again. And there's two sets of the top-level...

Value Chain and Core Competencies

Shawna HendersonMarch 05, 20141 comment

Training in building science and energy efficiency is essential to moving the house building industry forward into Net Zero Energy, successfully. Many people in our industry do not see the entire value chain. It’s a complicated one – easy to see in this diagram how the home building industry is a hot, fragmented mess of experts and expertise, completely at odds with itself sometimes.