Journal of Poor Homebuilding v.3

May 19, 2012
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    Week three…this is a New England classic. So many homes in the northern US predate oil and gas heating and have (or had) wood heating. Chimneys were basically a giant, centrally located thermal mass that helped warm the building. We’ve seen some of the problems with the framing around the chimney. Here’s a [...]

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Air Barrier Materials…I Can’t Think Of How To Make That Amusing

May 19, 2012
Air Barrier Materials

  After introducing air barriers ages ago, I wanted to talk more about their materials. I then promptly forgot about it and wrote for 8 months about insulation, heating and air conditioning. C’est la vie. What we build our houses from has always been important. In some way or another, we need to keep the [...]

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Journal of Poor Homebuilding v.2

May 12, 2012
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    Week two…this isn’t poor homebuilding so much as former best practices that didn’t turn out. Asbestos at one time was a miracle substance. Great insulator, nearly indestructible on a residential scale and fire impervious. I mean, stone fibers don’t exactly light with a matchstick. Here’s the photo. From an energy history standpoint, this [...]

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How Does Air Conditioning Work?

May 12, 2012
air conditioning and how does it work?

  It’s time to turn to cooling thoughts, even though Maine didn’t actually get a winter this year. It’s true; we had an extremely long fall. Then sometime around 2 AM on January 17th, we had winter, then moved right on to spring. And moving on to spring means pulling down the insulating plastic films [...]

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Can I Install Insulation Over Vermiculite?

May 8, 2012
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  I often say my blog is about answering common customer questions, and in any home where we discover vermiculite, the customer asks whether you can just blow insulation over it. I was thinking of just writing ‘No’ for this entry and calling it a day. Maybe I could send it to Guinness to see [...]

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