air-conditioning / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

  How to cool a home without AC While it's true that no matter where you live, be it urban, suburban or rural, the hottest days and nights of summer may have you dreaming of coolers climates. However, those living in dense urban areas will feel it the most, where ambient temperatures can be 5 to 9 degrees Celcius highe...

Heat Pumps explained simply When it comes to residential heating and cooling systems, few types of heating systems are as energy efficient as heat pumps. But what exactly are heat pumps and how do they work? In short, a heat pump is simply an electrically powered device that is capable of transferring heat from one pla...

After a difficult first half to 2020, heat waves then took hold across North America, from Canada down into the Southern and Central USA. These extreme summer temperatures pose a very real health risk to the most vulnerable members of society.   There are some tips to help keep a home cool during a heat wave, but faced...

Geothermal Heating Systems for Homes Domestic Geothermal heating systems can be a great way to heat a home, replace a furnace, and are labeled as money savers. Question is, are they worth the hype? Here's a quick view first of how they operate. Starting at depths of between 6 and 10 metres, the temperature of the earth...

Approximately 100 times more water vapor is carried into our walls by air leakage than is carried by vapor diffusion. That makes air barriers 100 times more important than vapour barriers, so why is no one talking about them? We don't talk about air barriers because we are too busy talking about vapor barriers. An air ...

Air Tightness in Houses - All about Balancing Air Pressure in the Home We go on incessantly here about the importance of air barriers in home construction to reduce air leakage, but no matter how hard you worked to make a house airtight, if the pressure isn't balanced you will be sucking air in or forcing it out and, d...

The Ecohome Demo House has a vapor permeable exterior air barrier, and with an ACH rate of .69 it is  several times more airtight than the average new home. Air leakage can be responsible for up to 1/3 of the total heat loss of a home and cause significant moisture damage in walls, as one small hole can be responsible ...

Homes built in the last 40 years in Canada are relatively airtight. Before that we generally relied on leaky uninsulated walls to provide fresh air and prevent mold and mildew, and they did that very well. Cost and comfort had us adding insulation, but not necessarily sealing our walls. The folly of this was quickly re...

We cannot overstate the importance of airtightness in homes and attic rooms. A proper air barrier reduces heat loss in winter, overheating in summer, and prevents moisture build up in walls which can lead to mould and rot. We recently had a chance to try out a product that at first sounds too good to be true, but one t...

Almost daily, new products come on the market that are more efficient, more effective, and/or more innovative. The ones we are really impressed with will make it here to our product of the month feature. Today we look at a new solution for changing the air in your home while maintaining excellent energy efficiency in h...

This heat recovery ventilation (HRV) system is very different than what people are probably used to seeing, where air is directed to a centralized core for a heat exchange before being exhausted from the house. Lunos is a decentralized system with a series of self-contained units, each with their own ceramic heat exch...