HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen · July 5, 2026
I spent a Saturday last summer crawling through my own attic with a flashlight, chasing down why the guest room upstairs refused to drop below 80°F no matter how hard the system ran. My house is only three years old, built with a properly sized 4-ton unit and a solid air handler, and flex duct … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 4, 2026
Insulation gets credit for saving houses money that it never actually saved. Piling batts into an attic does almost nothing if the ceiling underneath is riddled with gaps — and last fall, in a suburban Salt Lake City attic, I found exactly that. Gorgeous, fluffy R-38 fiberglass covered every inch of the floor. The homeowner … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 4, 2026
Picture this: a furnace filter pulled from its slot, coated so thick with gray fuzz it looks less like a filter and more like a wool blanket somebody forgot to wash for a decade. I’ve got that image saved on my phone, and I show it to almost every client who asks me why their … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 4, 2026
Halfway up the attic ladder in a Draper two-story last spring, I already had a good guess why the homeowner below me was so frustrated. She’d handed a contractor $4,800 to redo the ductwork in her house, and six months later the upstairs bedrooms were still baking every afternoon. One look at what was actually … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 4, 2026
My meter clocks 2,400 PPM at seven in the morning, sensor still sitting on the nightstand where I left it overnight, inside the master bedroom of a newer, tightly built townhome. Fifteen-plus years running home performance assessments, and this is one of those readings that instantly reframes a whole case. The couple living here had … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 3, 2026
Owning a slick air quality gadget does not mean your household is protected from carbon monoxide poisoning — and that false sense of security nearly caught up with a client of mine. Picture a homeowner (we’ll call her Karen) who’d just splurged on one of those trendy smart air monitors, the kind with a polished … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 3, 2026
A four percent gap in coverage is enough to wipe out half your insulation’s rated performance — and that’s almost the exact math I was staring at last fall when a homeowner called me in a near-panic. She’d just paid a contractor good money to insulate her attic with batts, and somehow her heating bill … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 3, 2026
Does a smart thermostat actually pay for itself, or is it just a fancy dial that makes your living room look futuristic? Short answer: it can absolutely pay for itself — but only under the right conditions. I came into this skeptical too. HVAC work exposes you to a parade of “game-changing” gadgets that quietly … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 3, 2026
Years back, I made the same call the fire marshal ended up making on Greg’s case — I told a worried customer their detector was probably just faulty and needed swapping out. That bit of advice very nearly cost someone their safety, and it’s a lesson I still carry into every CO call I run. … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 2, 2026
Search “furnace short cycling” online and you’ll run into two clashing pieces of advice. One thread tells you to replace the thermostat first, since it’s the flashiest part to point a finger at. Another insists you call a tech out immediately, treating every short cycle as proof of a cracked heat exchanger. The first is … Read more