Bubble Experiment with a Blower Door

To try and seal the last nasty little leaks in the Mento 3000 roof membrane, Corbett and his Dad try an experiment using soapy water and a flipped-around Retrotec blower door.

How the rain screen was installed: https://youtu.be/ZTfVb9NXAOc

How the Mento 3000 was installed: https://youtu.be/hOh28nYrCzI

Learn more at: http://HomeDiagnosis.tv/atlanta-homestead

Heroes of HOMEChem: Paula Olsiewski, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Meet Dr. Paula Olsiewski, the Orchestrator of HOMEChem. More at: https://HomeDiagnosis.tv/homechem

HOMEChem Daily Vlog Series

Corbett and Grace report from HOMEChem in Austin during the open house extravaganza.

Grace and Corbett report from the frontier of indoor air quality, HOMEChem (House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry). This is their crash course in the instruments that were assembled for this experiment, and the experience of having those millions of dollars of chemistry instruments take a long, hard smell of your offgassing.

Grace and Corbett tour the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources with THE TRAVELER of HOMEChem, Lea Hildebrandt-Ruiz. She shows off her atmospheric chemistry laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, where she's been testing the harmful effects of pollution on tiny pieces of people!

Corbett freaked out about particles from mosquito repellant and spray sunscreen, especially for his 3-month old little girl. Luckily, he has two of the world's top indoor chemistry experts to advise him and Grace.

Welcome to HOMEChem's last Festivity-Associated Kitchen Emissions Study (FAKESgiving) complete with turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce cooked like you'd drive a submarine. As House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry wraps up, we're digging deeper and deeper into how our cooking, cleaning, and hanging out habits affect the air we breathe in homes.

Body Splash or Body Sprays- these teen-loving products carry more than what is listed on the bottle. What is lingering afterwards and what is the chemistry looking like as the school day ends?

Grace and Corbett brain dump on the last day of HOMEChem, as researchers swab the Test House's surfaces for microbe samples.

I Turned My A/C Off All Day at 106 Degrees

Dear Corbett:

I thought I would send this your way.  I live in the Central Valley of California.  Yesterday it reached 106 degrees.  I did an experiment with my house.  My 1,883 sq./ft. house had a deep energy upgrade over three years ago.  The heating and cooling unit is a 2 stage/2 ton heat pump with no back-up heat.  The second stage of cooling is disconnected so I am cooling with 1.4 tons.  That is one ton for every 1,345 sq./ft.

Yesterday morning I left the house at 7:40 am.  It was 75 degrees in the house and 75 degrees outside.  I closed all of the blinds, turned the HRV off and turned the Heat Pump off.  In other words, I let the house float.  It got up to 106 degrees in Stockton yesterday.  Luci my bride got home at 5:40 in the afternoon and the house was 78 degrees.  She turned the thermostat back on and it brought the temp back to 75 in 30 minutes.

This stuff really works.
Keep up the GREAT work;
Dick Rome

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Dear Dick-

You are awesome. I'm not sure I know many other home performance experts who have fixed their own homes- most of our families have to suffer at home while we help other people get comfortable. Thanks so much for sharing the good word!

~Corbett