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A Look at Low Carbon Homes
“If you are building a house in 2019, all of the embodied energy gets burned this year, which means that all of the carbon associated with that embodied energy is…
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How Households Drive Up Greenhouse Gas Emissions
As the public conversation about climate change gets increasingly serious, many Americans may be wondering: How do my individual choices affect climate change? Household consumption—food, housing, transportation, apparel, and other…
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Deep Dive into Blower Door Testing
Over the last several years I have accumulated a range of questions about how blower doors and blower door testing work. So when another new query popped up in my…
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Choosing Among the Most Efficient Water Heaters
A long-running ad campaign for Maytag featured an affable but underworked repairman who spent his days snoozing in an office chair because the appliances he sold rarely needed any attention.…
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A Breakthrough for Solar Power?
A California-based startup says it has developed a new type of concentrating solar technology that can produce temperatures high enough to replace fossil fuels in industries that so far haven't…
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Building More Resilient Communities in the Face of Climate Change
On a 2015 flight to New Mexico, Lane Johnson looked out the airplane window on the sprawling suburbs of Albuquerque and was struck by the sight of the Rio Grande,…
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Minnesota Homestead: Choosing Windows
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of posts describing the construction of a net-zero energy house in Rochester, Minnesota, by Tracee Vetting Wolf, Matt Vetting, and their son…
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Choosing a Safe Wall Assembly
Wall assemblies that are both well insulated and free of long-term moisture problems are a frequent topic for the Q&A Spotlight. Hasn't this subject been raked over enough in the…
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Still Fighting the Same Battles, 20 Years Later
When I began working at the Journal of Light Construction in 1999, I was assigned to edit the magazine’s Q&A column. At all of my various jobs since then, I’ve…
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Seizing an Air-Sealing Opportunity
The number one thing you need to do to protect a building is control water. As the Canadian building scientist Gus Handegord said, "The three biggest problems in buildings are…
