HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
My thermal camera flags a nine-degree cold streak crawling straight up the foam board lining a freshly-framed basement wall in northern Utah — and that’s the reading that told me the homeowner standing next to me had grabbed exactly the wrong sheet off the rack. Twelve panels of silver, foil-faced polyiso were already screwed to … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
Owning a carbon monoxide detector does not automatically mean your family is safe — that’s the myth I want to dismantle right now, and a job from last spring proves exactly why. The house was a tidy 1960s ranch, nothing about it screaming trouble: solid construction, an owner who clearly kept up with maintenance. She’d … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
Thirty minutes — that’s how much longer a smoke alarm relying only on ionization sensing can take to sound compared to a photoelectric unit when a fire is smoldering rather than flaming. In a house full of sleeping people, that gap is the difference between waking up and not waking up. I thought about that … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 21, 2026
Why does a spray foam job that looks perfect on installation day turn into a moisture nightmare a few months later? Nine times out of ten, it’s not sloppy work — it’s the wrong foam for the wrong climate. I think about this every time I picture a homeowner I worked with in central Utah, … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 21, 2026
Figuring out how to size ductwork correctly for a home HVAC system really comes down to one thing: keeping a trustworthy duct sizing chart CFM residential HVAC reference within arm’s reach before you ever cut pipe — and most homeowners don’t discover they need one until a room goes cold or a register starts shrieking. … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 21, 2026
Search “why is one room in my house always hotter” and you’ll land on two competing pieces of advice: seal your ducts and pile on more insulation, or get your system a bigger return path. The first suggestion sometimes helps. The second is the one that actually solves the problem most of the time, and … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 21, 2026
The first hard freeze of the season always exposes this same story. Homeowners who dropped $2,000 or more on fresh attic insulation start noticing their heating bills haven’t moved an inch, and they can’t figure out why. I’ve crawled into dozens of these attics chasing that exact complaint, and the culprit is nearly identical every … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 20, 2026
A manufacturer’s spec sheet will tell you the model number, the voltage draw, the WiFi frequency, even the screen resolution — every detail except the one that actually decides whether your new thermostat will work once it’s mounted on the wall. Nowhere in that glossy documentation does anyone mention that most homes built before the … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 20, 2026
0.94 inches of water column — that’s what my manometer read on a three-year-old system in a newer subdivision last Tuesday, nearly double what that equipment was ever built to handle. The homeowner had phoned about two bedrooms that turned into ovens in summer and iceboxes in winter, no matter where she set the thermostat. … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 20, 2026
Almost every homeowner assumes that piling on more insulation is what finally warms up a cold house — thicker R-value, warmer rooms. That assumption is wrong, and a client in South Minneapolis found that out the expensive way last Tuesday. He’d just handed over $3,200 to have a contractor blow R-60 cellulose across his attic … Read more