Dr Joe Lstiburek “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Thermodynamic Lunch” Lecture
rockies63
| Posted in General Questions on
This video, entitled “There is No Such Thing as a Free Thermodynamic Lunch” by forensic building scientist Dr. Joe Lstiburek (the “L” is silent) for the Green Home Institute’s Youtube channel is probably the most important, far reaching and funniest videos you will ever see on the numerous ways buildings can fail and how to prevent that failure from happening.
The lecture itself is about 55 minutes long and then there is a 30 minute question and answer session afterward. Watch all of it, and probably take notes.
My Valentine’s Day gift to you all – enjoy!
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Replies
... but some lunches are more expensive than others.
Some of my favorite lines from the video:
"Spam is the OSB of luncheon meats."
"Between the fireproof layers is a layer of compressed napalm. That's a Dow Corning product."
"The air gap was arbitrarily set at one inch because that's the thickness of a brick mason's knuckle. If we'd used lawyer's fingers it would be 3/8 inch."
"Ugly is not sustainable."
"We used krypton-filled windows, that's a Lex Luther Industries product."
I think so many people get caught up in solving one particular issue in a building (what product to use, how do I fix this, etc) that they neglect the big picture, which is to treat the building as an entire system, and if you change one aspect of the system it usually changes everything else.
Very pragmatic and very entertaining and no dogma.
Agreed. A great resource and reinforcement of the laws of entropy :-)
There are various permutations of this lecture on youtube and they're all worth watching. It's especially interesting to see how his thinking has changed somewhat over the years, e.g. don't do a vented roof in the South (now) versus vented roofs work everywhere (then).