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Building Science Insights
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Building Science Insights are short, informal discussions that highlight one or more building science principles. Like all BSC publications, they are grounded by solid research and experience. Unlike most BSC publications, however, they may also feature anecdotes, opinions, and even a joke or two (or three…).
Lively and engaging, Insights provide a fresh perspective on important industry issues. Enjoy them with your morning coffee or any time you need to wake up your building science brain.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. If someone invented wood today it would never be approved as a building material.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. What we call things tells us a great deal about how much we understand things.
This Insight is in response to questions from clients and interested members of the public and academia, I have recently written about some aspects of the German PassivHaus housing standard as it applies to cold climates.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Mold is pretty easy to understand. No water no mold. Any questions? Well, there are a few. For one we have more mold today, but we don’t have more water. What’s with that?
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Higher levels of thermal resistance and reduced heat gain across building enclosures has forever changed the performance of buildings—and not necessarily in a good way.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Stucco was once viewed as a cladding system that solved moisture problems—it is now viewed as one that causes moisture problems. What happened?
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. The current industry standard wall is being replaced by a 2x6 frame at 24-inch centers with single top plates, two stud corners, no jack studs, no cripples and single headers (and in many cases no headers at all).
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Two of the hottest places in the world, where no one with any sense should build, are Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Las Vegas in the United States. Who would ever have thought that Dubai could learn from Vegas?
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Wood frame walls are pretty impressive technological creations. How come they look the way that they do? How will they look in the future?
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. In a strange world with strange connections one of the strangest connections of all exists among Jan Laverty Jones, John Rushworth Jellicoe, British Dreadnoughts, German U-Boats and Svante Arrhenius.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Those of us who are no longer young remember how easy it was going to be to save energy by caulking and insulating.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. You build things that seem like they are obviously going to work and then the real world intrudes and reminds you that you are not as smart as you think.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Spain gave Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States giving up any claims on Texas. Nobody really wanted to live there except the Seminoles until air-conditioning was invented.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Sheathing does more than deal with wind. Sometimes it doesn’t even deal with that. It wasn’t always that way.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Five fundamental changes to building construction have occurred in the last 50 years – they happened so gradually, so insidiously that we missed their enormous significance.
A concise history of the improvements to traditional buildings through design and materials.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. I do not have a problem with dense packing walls. In fact, dense packing walls typically results in remarkable performance. It is the dense packing of unvented cathedral ceilings or unvented flat roofs that is the problem.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a mistake, especially when the mistake does not seem to be a big deal.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. “When you insulate your basement on the inside, the rubble foundation will freeze apart, and you will get swelling from the freezing soil collapsing the wall, and adfreezing will lift the wall so high you will need a ladder to get down from the sump pit.”
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. One of the more difficult questions regarding enclosures is can we insulate the interior of a mass wall in a cold climate without causing damage from freeze/thaw cycles? The answer is usually yes, we can insulate. But, and there is almost always a “but,” it depends.
