Having written nearly 100 articles in this blog, I've covered a lot of topics related to how buildings work. Just in the past two weeks, for example, I've written about attic kneewalls, heat pump water heaters, why house wrap isn't…
Below is a repost of an article with advice for voters from my friend Chris Kaiser at Mapawatt. Below is a repost of an article with advice for voters from my friend Chris Kaiser at Mapawatt. If you are voting…
In my last article, I wrote about how I've learned so much by visiting the parts of houses that most people don't like to go into themselves. In that article, my focus was on the problems with the attic kneewall. …
I guess you could call me a contrarian. I usually go in the opposite direction from the crowds. In 1997, for example, I spent two weeks in Portugal, where most people head for the beaches south of Lisbon. Instead, I…
Last week, I was a judge in the LightHouse Awards green home competition put on by the Hilton Head Home Builders Association (HBA). Along with my fellow judges, I visited two homes in the Hilton Head area. We saw a…
It took me a while to figure out that a building is basically just a structural framework with control layers. Yeah, there's also electrical, plumbing, mechanical systems, and finishes, but the heart of a building is the stuff that holds…
Five years ago I read a book that freaked the hell out of me - The Long Emergency by Jim Kunstler. I was drinking a lot of peak oil kool-aid that year, but that book really got to me in…
Up and down. Left and right. Good and evil. Black and white. The world is full of such dichotomies. Often, however, what happens between the endpoints of a spectrum is the most interesting. As a physics graduate student, I studied…
When my wife and I moved from Tampa to Atlanta in 2008, we decided to try high rise living. We were living in a 1916 bungalow, which we loved dearly, and looked forward to something fresh and new. Something that would…
One of the most common questions I get when I describe homes with insulated rooflines is, "What does that do to the shingles?" Some roofing companies have made a lot of noise about this topic, saying that if the shingles…