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 Our story starts with a self-important politician taking a shower in a new home in Las Vegas in the mid 1990’s and ends with ten’s of thousands of houses with leaks and litigation. Our story will… Read More

After one hundred and fifty years the Illinois cottage1 is undergoing some pretty interesting changes and the ghosts of George Washington Snow and Augustine Taylor2 are cautiously eyeing the result.… Read More

General Limit States Design, Hygrothermal AnalysisAt a basic level a wall is an environmental separator.  It keeps the outside out and the inside in.  Easy to say, not always easy to do.To function… Read More

Flanged windows and foam plastic insulating sheathing.Sometimes I don’t get it.  Why would anyone deliberately recommend a thermal bridge when it is completely unnecessary?  The window industry must… Read More

I did a bunch of wood foundations in the early 1980’s.  Time of Blondie, Kim Carnes and the Police.  I learned a great deal…some good…. some bad.  The bad taught me a lot of things to avoid.  At the… Read More

You have got to love salesmen. They figure things out way before physicists, usually before engineers and certainly before greenie weenies. Harry Tschumi and Les Blades,1 a pair of salesmen from… Read More

“gas separation processes and open cell low density spray foam”1Lots of attics insulated with open cell low density spray foam (Photograph 1, Photograph 2 and Photograph 3) are having problems – in… Read More

So what do you do when you have an old building and the walls aren’t doing their job? What do you do when the walls look bad, leak and are falling apart? You give them a face-lift. We’ve been doing… Read More

There.  I said it.  It just does not work.  OK, it works sometimes1.  But it does not work in tight building enclosures and certainly not in new houses, apartments, townhouses and row houses. … Read More

Water causes enough trouble by itself, but when we add salt we go to a whole different level, especially where porous materials are concerned. What is the deal with porous materials? Simple, porous… Read More