Green Thursday: Your Basement Band Joists

As we have discussed in our earlier Green Thoughts posts, sealing you home's building shell and air ducts is vitally important for making sure that you and your family living and breathing in clean & conditioned air and not wasting in your good air and energy dollars to inefficiency or leaks. We have worked from the top down, first demonstrating ways to seal your attic and then showing how to seal the duct system throughout your house. Now, we are going to focus on correcting a major trouble spot for leaky basements- the band joists (also called rim joists).

In basements where the interior walls are the foundation walls (or are right up against them), Edge Energy, our Green Energy Experts, often finds major air leaks along the band joist, which is located at the basement ceiling. The band joist is the joist that surrounds all the rest of the joists in the floor above the basement. The floor sits on top of the foundation wall and, because the band joist is on the outside, this joist is the part of the floor that comes in direct contact with the foundation wall itself.

This seam along the band joist above the foundation wall is often left unsealed by builders and thus allows air to stream into your home. There is no really simple way to fix this and since the gap is usually a long seam and not just a small hole, retrofitters (like Edge) have to cut holes in the ceiling along this seam to sprayfoam and seal the gaps. They then close up all the holes, re-paint the ceiling and leave your basement looking just like it did before they started, but with a lot less of a draft.

--Band Joist Sealing



To see more Green Thoughts on Thursday posts, please go to www.SumofChange.com/greenthoughts

Full Disclosure: EDGE Energy hired us, as Sum of Change not individuals, to produce several videos for them including the ones in this post. We have not been hired to distribute, recommend, or advertise for EDGE Energy, rather we are using these videos to explain a vital service and we appreciate them letting us do so.

To learn more about the energy audit from Edge and see more of our videos, please go to www.edge-gogreen.com and see Edge's youtube page

Livefeed: Health Care Summit

Thanks to the good folks at MSNBC, we bring you live coverage of the health care reform summit.:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"C-Span! Dot Mother *^$%&#* Org!"

Tomorrow morning is the long-awaited, smack-down extravaganza that we have come to know as the health care summit. When I came across this video, I just could not resist sharing it with you folks:


Too good right? Health care! Health care! Health care! Join us on twitter during the showdown tomorrow morning for some good conversation.

Planned Parenthood Under Attack In VA

Thanks to the good folks at BlueCommonwealth for bringing this to our attention.

Anti-choice organizations are working to get Planned Parenthood defunded, entirely, and calling on the radically anti-choice Governor for help. That means no money for HIV prevention (how very "pro-life" of them!). That means no money for birth control (which is abortion to anti-choice activists). That means no money for adoption counseling and basic family planning. Yet that would do nothing about abortion, because there is already no money for abortion in the State of VA and all across the country.

Planned Parenthood has stood for years as a stronghold of reproductive justice. A place where anyone, regardless of economic or social status can receive help needed surrounding a number of reproductive issues.

This attempt to defund Planned Parenthood is 1) Cruel and 2) Baseless. This directly hurts the poorest amongst us. Planned Parenthood has never and is not using funds from the state of Virginia for abortion. There is no logic you can find to argue otherwise. This is oddly similar to the frantic, yet uninformed, anti-choice outrage
over national health care reform. The religious right faction of the conservative movement has demonstrated time and time again that it has no problem taking any means necessary to prevent abortion and make the lives of abortion providers, patients, and activists more difficult.

Specter/Sestak Senatorial Forum

At the PA Progressive Summit, we got the chance to catch a Senatorial forum with Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Joe Sestak. This election is sure to be one of the most watched, and both campaigns have quite a long road ahead of them. They were asked the same questions, so we threw their answers back-to-back for you folks:

Question 1- What Do You Think of a Partial Spending Freeze?


Question 2- What Would You Do To Increase Manufacturing Jobs in the US?


Question 3- What is Your Opinion of Same-Sex Marriage?


Question 4- Will You Vote For The Employee Free Choice Act With Card Check?


Question 5- What Are you Going to do About the Trade Deficit?


Question 6- Do You Support Comprehensive Immigration Reform?


Question 7- What Should We Do About the Filibuster?


For more videos from the PA Progressive Summit, visit www.SumofChange.com/paprog

Training Tuesday: Prioritizing Your Campaign and The Importance of Time

For this Training Tuesday, which was filmed at a Democracy for America Campaign Academy training session, we'd like to help you focus your campaign on what is most important. As our trainer, Kendra-Sue Derby, mentions, when you have limited resources you have to know how and where to focus them. Now to many, resources equals money, but in actuality, money is never your scarcest resource- it might not be easy, but there is always more money to be raised. In reality, the most important resource to focus up on is that of time. Time machines don't exist- the most time you will ever have on your campaign is on Day 1- so it is important to plan accordingly.

In these videos, Kendra-Sue first discusses the Three Campaigns Assets- Money People and Time and how you should juggle them. Next she goes into more detail about why your campaign should be Prioritized Based on Time. Finally, she encourages you to Use a Voter File, the item that will most help you organize your campaign to fight against the clock.

--Three Campaign Assets: Money, People, and Time



--Prioritize Based on Time



--Use a Voter File




For more Training Tuesday posts from Sum of Change, please visit www.SumofChange.com/trainingtuesday

Chris Hayes' Speech At Sum of Change/Grow the Hope House Meeting

Yesterday, we were humbled when folks from the DC/MD/VA area packed into the living room of David Hart, founder of Grow the Hope, for a fundraiser to help us cover the annual Netroots Nation conference. We could not have been more thrilled with the level of energy in the room.

Our featured speaker, Chris Hayes, the DC Editor of The Nation, gave a rather fantastic speech about health care, Netroots Nation, and the importance of grassroots online video that we wanted to share with you all right away:


To contribute to our efforts to cover Netroots Nation please click here.

The video we showed folks right before Chris' speech was from last year's Netroots Nation panel @FDR Is There A New New Deal? And Chris is absolutely right that the video was only 1/5 of the story. You can find Nicholas Beaudrot's flowchart over at Donkeylicious.