Blog

Ann Edminster, M.Arch, LEED AP (a long time colleague) is a recognized international expert on green-home design and a principal developer of the LEED for Homes rating system. Here’s a story about Ann’s house in Pacifica, California, in interview format with Jim Gunshinian from Home Energy Magazine. This Q&A originally...

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...

An air barrier stops air from moving in or out of the conditioned space, effectively blocking the air pressure differences that drive the stack and wind effects. Air barriers can be in place anywhere in the building envelope, and there can be more than one air barrier. Air barriers can...

The original basement: rubble, damaged, water issues at the slab, scrabble, rock and broken thin slab floor, insulation stuffed in window wells with cracked glazing in the frames, daylight visible between window/wall, cellar door/wall, joists/top of wall, and even peeking through between some of the rubble. Two monster oil-fired boilers...

A drainscreen is a self-draining material (often a proprietary mesh or netting) between between stucco or cement cladding and the drainage plane/waterproof layer, especially common with insulation finish system (EIFS) wall assembly (which is often also the exterior air barrier in EIFS assemblies). Drainage paths allow the water to get...

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...