HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen Dana Sorensen · June 24, 2026
55°F on the supply air probe — that reading is what settled a very expensive standoff last August, inside a house that had already burned through two other contractor visits that same heat wave. The homeowner had one company tell her the system needed a fresh refrigerant charge. Another walked through, shrugged, and told her … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 24, 2026
Nearly every homeowner operates on the same unshakable assumption: if carbon monoxide starts building up inside a house, the alarm on the hallway ceiling will sound before anyone gets hurt. Fifteen-plus years of running combustion safety inspections has taught me that assumption is flat wrong, and nothing proved it faster than a family I met … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 23, 2026My own basement gave me this lesson years before I ever thought to write about it. I’d walk across my hardwood floors on a January morning and swear the boards were colder than the driveway outside, even though the furnace ran constantly and the basement below felt perfectly warm. By that point I’d already swapped … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 23, 2026
Guess wrong on vapor barrier insulation when to use it, and the mistake won’t show up for months — sometimes years — by which point you’re looking at a repair bill several times larger than the material would have cost. That’s the stake sitting underneath what sounds like a simple question. If you’re already unsure … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 23, 2026
Pull up a photo I still have saved from a job in Gilbert, Arizona, and you’ll see exactly why this topic makes me want to grab homeowners by the shoulders before they sign a contract. The picture shows a sheet of radiant barrier foil lying flat across an attic floor, shiny side facing up, with … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 22, 2026
Last spring, I was crouched at the edge of a homeowner’s attic hatch, flashlight in hand, while she read me three insulation quotes off her phone. Her 1,400-square-foot attic had racked up bids of $1,800 for blown fiberglass, and $7,500 and $9,200 for closed-cell spray foam from two other outfits. Every one of those three … Read more
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