Yes if you end up achieving very good sealing, you’ll need to look at ways to ventilate the house. Energy recovery ventilators (ERV) and heat recovery ventilators (HRV) are the best way to accomplish this since they use heat exchanges to temper the incoming air.

Also most new housings for recessed lights are airtight to begin with, so they just need to be sealed properly during installation. Be careful sealing them from all sides with LED bulbs... heat output is much lower than incandescent/halogen but many of them can fail prematurely in fully enclosed fixtures if they can’t…

Yes absolutely a gas water heater will be more environmentally friendly than an electric resistance water heater if most of your electricity is coming from natural gas or coal (not to mention cheaper to run). The exception might be a heat pump water heater which should be similar efficiency and cost to a gas unit.

Your dad’s Camry could also beat my dad’s tractor to 60 mph... but guess which one i’d rather be driving.

gorgeous shot!

Some restaurant owners will even deduct credit card processing fees (usually around 2-3 percent) from a server’s tips, so a nice 18 percent tip ends up somewhere around a mediocre 15 percent tip in my pocket.

huh... who knew Bode Miller was doing hockey games now

Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but the the 9-speed used by FCA is a ZF transmission... so definitely German-engineered

Another difference: all the open space above the boxer engine allows for a lot more flexibility with the intake design.

Would recording and publishing this be illegal in Florida? I thought they have a two-party consent law there?

The mechanical engineer in me has to nitpick this one: “Higher octane fuel does not burn as easily as a lower octane fuel.”

They’re Kistler RoaDyn wheel force transducers: https://www.kistler.com/us/en/applicat…

Go check out Google’s new office on your way home! Basically right across the street: 46555 Magellan dr, novi

What’s concerning is that they are planning to recall every vehicle on the road, which implies that they don’t have a good handle on what caused the defect or whether it could affect every part or only a small batch. Usually when automakers issue a recall there is a clear understanding of what parts (made during a…

EJIW too expensive?

Mazda’s been moving in the direction of HCCI engines for a while (high compression ratio gasoline engines, lower compression ratio diesel engines). In the long run, for Mazda at least, some sort of controlled auto-ignition engine should win out over a diesel engine option since NOx is much less of an issue, though…

Agreed! An undersized system still saves money, so if you got away with it the first time, why not keep it up!

Yes he may have known this, but I don’t think the blame should be pointed at the lack of an SCR system (which requires urea injection). They have other vehicles which are affected (I’m looking at you Passat) with this type of NOx after-treatment. In all these cases, both with vehicles with the LNT (Jetta, Golf,…

VW did go to the expense of engineering an SCR system (w/ urea-injection) and has it on most 2015 models (apparently covered under this mess) along with the earlier Passat models which are also guilty of using this emissions “defeat” system.

It seems incorrect to point the finger at the lack of SCR/urea injection since the emissions system “defeat” affects vehicles with these systems (including the 2015 models), as well as engines using a lean NOx trap (pre-2015 Golf, Jetta, and Beetle).