Blog

Insulated sheathing materials can provide an air barrier along with a thermal barrier, and solve the biggest challenges of thermal bridging. The challenge of using insulating sheathing as an air barrier is to ensure that the R-value of the sheathing is high enough that it moves the dew point outside...

Solar ready sounds pretty groovy. But what does it mean? There is no uniform definition. At one level, it applies to minor changes in the design and construction of individual houses or buildings to ‘rough-in’ the necessary elements to accommodate a future photovoltaic (PV) or solar hot water (SHW) system....

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recently released a series of Sustainable Features Profiles. These fact sheets provide useful guidance on innovative technologies that can be used to make housing more energy and water efficient and reduce the environmental footprint. The research and modelling for the profiles was carried out...

    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...

It's a hard thing sometimes, to wear so many hats. Contractors and trades people are often the brains, brawn and bean counters of their small businesses. Who has time to do sales and marketing? And how do you sell what you do? And when do you find the time to...

So I'm researching the background material for our HVAC course, which of course, includes heat pumps. Ducted, ductless, combination duct/ductless. Air-to-air, ground-to-air, ground-to-water, air-to-water. Integrated space conditioning and DHW. Heat pump water heaters. SEER, HSPF, COP. And what comes across my desk but the summary from Home Energy Pros. And...

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...

There's a fine line to walk between simplifying information and dumbing it down so that it's useless. Concepts need to be understood. That's the challenge for anyone in training, but especially so for on-demand training, where there is no direct contact between a learner and the trainer. In face-to-face situations,...

We've been in the depths of production of our own courses for several months now, and we are now working with a few clients on some custom courses. We've ironed out a lot of the kinks along the way. Key to a successful and on-time deliverable? A strong project manager...

Mike Rogers, OmStout Consulting, started a conversation a few weeks ago about staging deep energy retrofits -- a very interesting conversation has been so far. I'm all about staged retrofits, myself. The opportunity to move many existing houses closer to low energy/net zero in a few affordable phases is much...

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...