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…articulaciones* y esquinas y penetraciones...much more stylish…much more interesting than English.  The battle to control water entry is won at building joints and corners[1] not so much at… Read More

How can you take a system with thousands of years of history and screw it up?  Easy.  Keep improving it until it does not work.  Babylonians used it. Egyptians used it. Greeks used it.  Romans used… Read More

Maybe not. For years I have said that dog won’t hunt1. I have come around. The engineer in me likes tools. I can’t help it – it is a genetic defect we engineers are born with. With therapy we… Read More

Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious. And sometimes the not so obvious becomes obvious. For example installing leaky ductwork1 in a vented attic is a pretty dumb idea (Figure 1). It leads to… Read More

Putting ductwork outside is bad enough, but putting ductwork in an attic is even worse (Photograph 1). Attics are even hotter than outside during the summer and as cold as the outside in the winter.… Read More

Life was simple when I grew up in Canada. Winters were long and cold, we had no air conditioning, walls dried to both the outside and the inside and the Toronto Maple Leafs would win Stanley Cups.… Read More

You can’t replace experience and judgment with lab tests and a computer simulation. But when you add lab tests to the experience and judgment and have an adult supervise the process, you might be… Read More

As in most things gone horribly wrong, it is a bunch of seemingly small things that come together to create an almost unimaginable nightmare—in this case the “perfect stucco storm.”Unlike most water… 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

“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