HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
There’s a photo still sitting in my phone’s camera roll that I pull up every time a homeowner insists their carbon monoxide detector “would have caught it.” It’s a cracked brass fitting on a gas line tucked behind a water heater, my combustible gas analyzer’s readout glowing right next to it, and — just out … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
“It’s running fine,” the homeowner kept insisting, arms crossed, watching me check her thermostat display in her Phoenix living room last summer. It read 74°F. Sure enough, the AC had been cycling all morning like clockwork. Yet the air in that room felt like a locker room after a workout — thick, clingy, wrong. She’d … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
Bare copper — that’s what greeted me on the last four feet of suction line before the wall penetration, on a mini split system that was barely 14 months old. The Draper homeowner who owned it had paid a handyman, not a qualified technician, to hang an 18,000 BTU ductless unit in his master bedroom. … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
Here’s the myth I spent years reinforcing without meaning to: that a portable air purifier is basically a placebo if your HVAC system already has decent filtration. I told clients this constantly. Then my own sinuses forced me to check my own advice against reality. Last spring I ran a controlled 30-day trial in my … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
$6,800. That’s the price tag a contractor slapped on an emergency furnace replacement for a homeowner last February, insisting the same day that her heat exchanger was “severely cracked” and leaking carbon monoxide. Her kids were home, she was scared, and he wanted a signature before he pulled out of the driveway. She called me … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
How many smoke detectors does your house actually need to be safe? If your honest answer is “however many came with the place when I bought it,” you’re not alone — and that’s exactly the assumption that nearly cost a family outside Salt Lake City everything. Nice family, two kids, three-bedroom ranch with a finished … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
Early on, I made the call myself: tape over mastic, because it went up fast and left a tidy-looking seam. Three years later, back in that same attic, I watched that same foil tape curl away from the collars in long strips — and that one mistake still shapes how I answer the question I … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 28, 2026
Search “attic cooling fix” online and you’ll run into two opposite camps: one tells you a powered attic fan is the quickest way to pull heat out and take pressure off your AC, the other insists passive ridge-and-soffit venting is all you need and that electric fans are a waste of money. The powered-fan camp … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 28, 2026
The season’s first real heat wave has a way of exposing every weakness your house has been hiding all year — the bedroom that never cools down, the utility bill that jumps for no obvious reason, the scratchy throat you wake up with even though the system ran non-stop overnight. If any of that sounds … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 28, 2026
What a manufacturer’s spec sheet never mentions — and what no code inspector flags during a final walkthrough — is what happens to the air trapped inside a house once every last gap has been sealed shut. Mike, a homeowner just outside Charlotte, North Carolina, found that out the hard way last spring. He’d gone … Read more