Blog

Across North America, more States, Provinces, and Municipalities are integrating PH into their building standards. One of the more recent adopters is the City of Toronto.

We took some common New Year resolutions and put our SWA spin on them. This year, make resolutions to improve the built environment in 2020!

As members of the HERS Rating community, we are very excited about the recent study conducted by Freddie Mac determining that homes rated under RESNET’s Home Energy Rating System (HERS) between 2013 and 2017 sold for an average of 2.7% more than comparable unrated homes.

Between gift shopping and trying to keep up the holiday spirit with decorations at home, it can be frustrating to try to remain sustainable. It may feel as though you’re forced to choose between enjoying the holidays and feeling guilty…

CYMI: The code change proposals for the 2021 IECC are open for voting by Governmental Member Voting Representatives (GMVR) from Monday, November 18th through Friday, December 6th, and your vote is instrumental in making buildings consume less energy!

A high-level summary of the code development process with respect to the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), aka the “model” energy code.

The residential energy efficiency industry has been using blower door testing since the mid 1980’s to measure the air tightness of homes. Since then, we’ve evolved from testing single family homes, to testing entire apartment buildings.

As part of the Climate Mobilization Act, and in accordance with the its greater carbon emissions reduction goals, New York City passed Local Laws 92 and 94 in April 2019, mandating the installation of rooftop solar photovoltaic systems and/or green…

In a world where everything seems to be packaged in two layers of plastic, where we are encouraged to constantly discard items to make room for new ones, and where social media drives our desire to consume the newest trends,…

Many of us in the building industry believe that, combined with a good continuous air seal, the highest insulation value makes the greenest enclosure, helping to reduce a structure’s carbon footprint and combat climate change. It may come as a…

As an engineer who admittedly knows nothing about cars, I feel like the information out there on EVs is either slightly biased (i.e., published by EV manufacturers) or not transparent enough with the math to convince me. So I set…

Before you can really dig deep into the advanced design concepts of embodied carbon analysis and whole building energy modeling, you must first perform some bare minimum prep work.