Monthly Archives: May 2012

Blueprints-what are they

The term “Blueprint”  is a common name for printed building plans that actually grew out of the printing/developing process that rendered a large sheet of paper blue resulting with white lines on a blue background. This was replaced by the diazo print process that used ammonia gas as the developing agent and changed the look to blue lines on white background. Young graduates were delegated to running the prints when needed and there are many from that era that surely passed out on occasion from the obnoxious ammonia fumes. We gladly shoved the FSB ammonia printer out one of the upper floor windows years ago when the new technology introduced electrostatic plotters that produce a copier quality product on a large paper format which appears as black lines on white background. Continue reading →

The 1965 film adaptation of the novel by John le Carre with the same title stars the ever charismatic but mysterious Richard Burton. While the film is based on the cold war spy industry and is steeped with figuring out who are the real undercover agents and possible defectors, our story is much simpler but hopefully does not have a tragic ending like the movie.

The S… coming in from the cold in our case is the structure that is continuous from interior to exterior and entails figuring how to limit the baggage it is trying to carry from the outside to the inside. The baggage is the transmission of the exterior cold to the inside conditioned space of the building. In reality the physics of the situation is that heat is being lost at such a rapid rate through the structure to the cold exterior that it lowers the temperature of the inside structure near the perimeter to the point where moisture in the air will condense on the surface and drip down on interior finishes. Bad situation. Continue reading →