Building Science 1 of 2

uh good afternoon uh we'd like to get started on this afternoon's module uh my name is Joe Nan um I'm oneman Consulting operation out of kaka Wisconsin that's not kakona Hawaii as most people think it is occasionally anyway I've been involved in the building science Community if you will since about 1985 um recently many of you may have heard my name unfortunately or been to one of my workshops before I've been around the block a little bit I currently uh serve as technical director for the Wisconsin Energy Star new construction homes program I'm also part of the building America project and I'm also co-author of the actual Wisconsin Energy Star hommes program and uh what's interesting about being able to share time with you folks today is that being a consultant is one thing but also being a one-man consultant operation is pretty brutal in the fact that how many possible jobs could you work on at one time right I mean you're only one person what's been beneficial to me personally uh being involved in the energy star program is that we work with about 300 builders on and off uh We've certified 11,000 buildings to date and excuse me 10,000 buildings to date so we've got a lot of good information on how buildings work uh what's really excellent about the whole process is that the majority of the builders we work with and partner with allow us to take pictures on their job sites almost sometimes insist that we share those with other builders around the state of Wisconsin uh so that they may not have to go through the brutal learning curve on trying to figure out how some of these things actually work now again I mentioned in our program we've certified to date 10,000 buildings which is kind of interesting and I'm not here necessarily to promote our program it's talking about how buildings work and what's interesting is we've modeled all 10,000 of those homes on our computer software the Energy Center of Wisconsin uh did an evaluation of our program homes about 5 years ago to check and see how accurate our software was against actual actual uh energy use on site but the most important part is we've been out on these jobs working with the building community and then testing all of these buildings so that we know exactly the condition of the home and today what I find sort of interesting is that there still is not a real good uh understanding of how buildings actually function people have a pretty good idea with all the ultimate respect here for you builders in the state of Wisconsin but often times when we get into conversations about basic moisture issues Comfort issues those type of issues that may result in a call back and some lost profit when we get investigating those situations and start asking questions it's amazing sometimes the the lack of understanding of the real issues so what we're going to try and do today is look at some of those from the big picture now we call it building science you can call it what it like but I looked in the dictionary and actually in in Webster's reference dictionary it says building science knowledge acquired by careful observation by deduction of the laws which govern changes and conditions and by testing these deductions by experiment now I don't mean we're experimenting on your homes but the fact is we're testing things or it could be looked at as a branch of study especially one concerned with facts principles and methods in other words for us it's the study of buildings uh you often hear that concept buildings as a system building science and we're really not trying to make it too complicated but really we we often ask folks especially in the design stage with the architectural Community Builders lumber yards who draw plans we often ask them if a customer really came to you and actually wanted you to take their house plan all their dreams and wishes and all the amenities they wanted throw them into a box and actually make this building perform either better on Comfort better on energy cost maybe better on moisture protection what would you tell them and I usually get kind of a blank look and once in a while someone will say well I'll just do what I tried on so and so's house that works pretty good and there's no doubt that experience is a great teacher but the one thing that we're just always trying to make sure that people get the basics of is that no matter whether you like it or how you like it or not or if you like it everything in the building is connected from the footing to the ridge vent and that's the way it works when we have to go out and look and evaluate a building that's got a problem everything is AB absolutely connected and I'm going to talk about a lot of these things as we go through our session this afternoon but for instance the one that I still get a kick out of is that there's a lot of folks that want to do the right thing by air sealing a home for Energy Efficiency draft free comfort and then they still want to try and make a natural draft wood burning fireplace work in those structures without any powered makeup air that's very brutal it's just how do things draft how can you open an 8 in hole on a flu in a building that you just did a nice job of air sealing how is that supposed to actually allow air to go up so the more we try and get these things out in the General Building community so that everybody understands this I think it's a lot easier when we're dealing with customers whether we're a designer an architect or someone drawing plans at a Lumberyard but that we can go over that wish list and before we finally pull the trigger on these these host projects we can actually talk about these things hey if you do want The Open Hearth or you do want something that takes a lot of air we're going to have to deal with it because we're going to build you a draft free comfortable home which you're going to insist on but we're going to have to make sure that those components work so things of that nature um big rang hoods we often ask about that I mean when we plug in a 1200 CFM rang Hood regardless of what it's doing for airf flow most of them we test don't do a lot anyway but nonetheless if it's rated at 1200 CFM there is a good chance that if someone did a great job on Duck design the thing may actually do 800 or 900 and then the question always comes up again where does the air come from and that answer is always the same absolutely wherever it wants to uh you can do well you can do all the passive makeup air you want and I go play mental pingpong with the Commerce department on this all the time people will say well geez Joe but I put in the required makeup there I punched in that 6inch hole in the rim well all that means is you got a hole in the rim means absolutely nothing else that's why I think the more we understand how buildings actually function regardless of the Commerce Department regardless of what the folks in pinville uh claim they happen if we understand what works I think we can do a much better job suiting our customers correctly making sure we do good for our own business reduce that potential call back so we're going to try and cover a whole bunch of that stuff today and I'm glad to be here now if we look at it I think that we should build homes to last and to be energy efficient there's a lot going on today there's lots of activities related to energy thank goodness we got the front and center stage again and I was just out in Utah two weeks ago I did a week's where of training out there and I just came back from Denver last week trying to help those folks get an energy star program started and I often ask these folks you know as people are trying to get more things going and sort of jump on this bandwagon I look them right in the melon and say hey we're all in this thing together so no matter how you spin it whether it's Energy Efficiency or green or environmental impact or carbon footprint the fact is if we change the way we build our homes start doing a little bit more air sealing adding some more insulation we're all in this together and the first time that we have a rash of failures it's going to put a hindrance on the whole movement here uh one of the items I've been working on lately was some of the things with the spray foam folks is that there's a lot of activity I can't hardly find an insulation company now who hadn't had foam two years ago that doesn't have foam either on their site now or they contract with someone else okay now if you wave that hose and actually hit a hole and actually improve the tightness of the building now how are we going to make sure that that homeowner has adequate combustion air adequate uh ventilation air all of those things so I'm trying to get even those individual component manufacturers and applicators to realize that your product changes all of the dominoes and that if we collectively go out and do a bunch of these things and then all of a sudden move all of our good efforts collectively backwards by once again introducing the old moisture problems as a guarantee in new homes we're all going to go backwards a mile a minute so I'm very concerned I've got a lot personally invested in this as du folks as well and I think through the efforts of a lot of great Builder partners and trade allies here in the state of Wisconsin we kind of worked out the whole myth uh that was floating around for a lot of years and floats around a little bit that the minute you build a nice energy efficient home in a cold climate that it's an absolute that you're going to have a moisture problem inside that is absolutely not an accurate statement and when I look at all of the cases I've investigated I'm going out at least once a week having to print a nice colored report for somebody for a couple thousand dollars to tell them what didn't work right and I'm absolutely confident that we can build very tight well insulated buildings without necessarily inducing any problems as long as everybody gets the big picture and we're going to cover all of that so today's Focus will be on the building science overview you know what are we talking about how buildings function we're definitely going to hit on building durability there are lots of folks out there making some pretty good claims about building durability that yeah if you do this the building won't have any problems if you do this it won't have any problems I sometimes wonder how reliable those statements are and we're going to also look at the overall Energy Efficiency on new housing and also uh I know you folks just ate a sandwich so if you start dozing off on me raise your hand and I'll pick on you a little bit to keep you awake but also jump in on this I've got plenty of information we're going to try and make this go to about two and a half hours but if there's something comes up you want to talk about I've got time in the schedule here uh again I really appreciate the opportunity to come down and share and discuss some of these items so if you got something as we go through Jump Right In please now what are the issues you know people often ask well what are the issues what makes building in a cold climate different than anywhere else you know you see books out on hot climates cold climates hot and humid climates we get Joe Ste and a couple of those guys running through the state every once in a while scaring us a little bit right anyway well number one it gets cold and people don't like to be cold in their buildings they don't mind how cold it gets outside they scream a little bit about operating cost but it gets cold so when we talk about what's different in building in a cold climate obviously the temperature and we're going to go through many examples of how temperature aggravates a lot of things and just how much or how little control we in the building Community actually have related to that now heck the cold and the snow is great for the snowmobilers I bet they're going gang busters this week but in terms of homes people really want to be comfortable I don't think we're going to get people building igloos out of the snow we got this week but this is more what more or less what our homes look like in Winter right all the drive down here this morning the 2 and 1 half hour drive I was taking pictures nonstop of some homes pretty buried in the snow i' got down about 11 below zero at the windchill last night in kakana where I live that that bugger was getting cold so just the sheer fact that it gets cold changes the temperatures not only in the building but on the building materials and if we're going to make buildings last a long time we have to recognize the limits of products being able to eliminate all of our challenges that we have in the building industry now a little historical perspective if you don't mind but you know when I drive around and I look at older buildings I just I just love to stop and take a look at the buildings and then this one is a classic it's still over in Stevens Point but I often look at it and I say okay obviously it's an old nasty building they weren't worried about heating cost comfort back then but look at where the chimneys are I mean I just often do a whole full full eight hours on just fireplace design and so forth and I look at this I thought okay at least those guys knew or gals how chimneys worked right they knew that the exit Point had to be at the highest point now where do we put fireplaces today well we go right to the outside wall I mean you read any design manual even the stuff that's put out by the Midwest Hearth products Association I mean they got a whole list it's absolutely free on the violations that we do religiously with fireplaces now it's not such a big deal on closed combustion fireplaces but if you're going to try and make a natural draft fireplace or an open wood burning Hearth product work on the outside of a building with about five or 10 ton of stone at least out there that's 20 below zero you'll burn up half your wood Source before you even get to Fluor so these folks simply knew the basics of science they might not have called it that but they just understood how things in the real world worked now there you can see a nice shot I mean these buggers were probably pretty uncomfortable I don't know what they were burning at that time for fuel there was obviously at least four combustion devices in the building but they did a great job I mean those those chimies are exactly right on the top now the other thing I want to point out I got back up for a second if we look a little closer they also knew something about gravity right if you look at the step flashings here and I've stopped at this house many many times it's now been repainted but they knew about Water Management they knew that everything that was probably talked about in one of your morning workshops today about Water Management they knew that gravity will always take water down and as long as things are overla shingle fashioned we don't have to worry about adhesives falling apart we don't have to worry about tapes falling apart gravity will do the job some of these old Craftsmen really knew the basics I can't imagine some of the dinnertime conversations they might have had years ago they probably were more worried about keeping them warm than they were about durable now the other thing about our older buildings right a lot of us can remember when we had balloon framing I go out help people fix a lot of these old animals uh where we didn't have the typical platform framing so combined with the uninsulated walls I mean these things were basically chimneys every 16 in you had a chimney right into the Attic So the first thing we do on a lot of these older homes is we have to go up and cap them off on top but they were uninsulated they had all of this air movement nonstop nonstop they were burning coal or wood or whatever they had in those stoves it was going out the building as fast as they could shove it in the flu was taking all this house air out which had to be replaced with outside air because they were not closed combustion at that time those buildings were just being ventilated like it was going out of style you see older photos where they had the pot of water on top of those open stoves trying to put some humidity in the air because when the buildings leaked that bad it not only took the heat out of the building but the little moisture that the occupants were generating was going right out with it as well so the buildings definitely were not what we're doing today and if you look at a little bit of newer construction I helped this gentleman take this house apart in Oshkosh about six years ago because I didn't have any of these big wide honken boards and apparently years ago before we had sheet Goods they had the big boards they'd cut them must have been 2T wide maybe an inch thick but we also didn't have the ability to kill and dry that Lumber right so they could put them on with their nice rectangular head nails and get them nice and tight initially but by the time the lumber acclimated and dried out these are the nice boards I got a couple of those in my office yet complete with the w with the rectangular nails and you can run that wood through a table saw it cuts just like it's brand new it's just discolored a little bit but after that building dried a little while that's what it looked like right I mean I see that all the time when when I drive by farms and that's that stuff they're corn cribs so the reason farmers put their product in open containers like that so there's lots of air movements to dry it out right so you can imagine a building like this with no insulation no concept of air sealing the building was just a honk and chimney non-stop so these what was that over on the right hand side oh I don't know I just was took a nice picture of the Corn Crib there they got two of them nice excellent but that's the deal and so these older homes that's why you see so many of them laying around right they're still standing there some of them racking a little bit they didn't quite know the engineering part but a lot of that old Lumber just sits there and gets soaked over and over and over but it's got a lot of air movement to dry it right and if you think about it nowadays if I take this shirt off and put it in a bucket of water for 15 seconds it'll be completely soaked but you all know how long it takes to dry it right I got to throw it in a Clos dryer add some energy some actual heat and a lot of airf flow so once I vaporize the liquid again get it in the Airstream now I got to ventilate it out of the Clos dryer Barrel that's why this is just crazy for some of us that may still believe that buildings shouldn't be built tight that buildings have to breathe people should be able to breathe but building should be as bag tight as possible and we're going to go through all of those reasons today but that's the deal when we have buildings that leaked they pretty much took care of themselves they were massively uncomfortable you couldn't hold enough moisture in there to get a static shock even I mean they were dry now if we looked a little newer on right a lot of us remember the 70s well you guys might have been doing something different than myself in the 70s but I remember going out looking at color lock iding a couple of guys may be wandering around behind little animals back then but anyway look what we had we had color lock siding we had tar paper or building felt whatever you folks prefer to call it but underneath there we had real plywood right I mean they realized they could figure out how to skin a tree and then pull it off in sheets so we went from the old boards with gaps big time every foot or so we went to sheet Goods so immediately when they went to sheet Goods the buildings changed I mean like right honking now without even knowing anything about air sailing without grabbing a cocking gun without grabbing a piece of tape nothing the minute they went from the old boards to sheet Goods the buildings immediately got much tighter so right from that point on the buildings no longer operated anywhere near like they did before and everything started to snowball all of a sudden by default with better products as we'd call them the buildings immediately got Tighter by a factor of 10 big time so now you started to see some issues however ever the plywood was like they call it real wood and we had a whole different animal also you might have covered this in this morning's session but the old color lock siding right that stuff locked together and we had to COA it around the windows and doors so it was considered a face sealed material so we were caulking it and the interlocking mechanisms actually provided the weather protection on the outside from wind driven rain well nobody wants to ca anymore for the most part so when we got rid of the color lock and then went to vinyl siding steel aluminum B I mean those things are made to allow water to blow right through them because nobody wants to caul and we want that pressure drop to occur across the siding so the water deposits itself right behind the siding and follows your drainage plane down and out that's why you see so many homeowners really compromise their existing buildings when they take an older building that had a face sealed cladding on it like like color loock not knowing anything they're just thinking thank goodness I can get rid of the cocking now let's just go hang some of that plastic stuff you know you can take the stuff and slide it all over it's not meant to be airtight it'll never be airtight it is designed to intentionally to be leaky so when wind driven water blows on it it goes through the holes loses its velocity and then deposits it exactly like a snow fence does exactly the same concept so they take an older building and sometimes really compromise it because they don't understand any of this stuff and a lot of folks in the building business don't quite get that concept either but we're working on it and people in Wisconsin are doing a pretty good job another one that we're seeing a kind of a recurrence if you will this building is obviously a building that's being moved and the point I want to make with this slide is that it obviously had brick we don't have to be too experi here to figure out that those are brick ties and it also had our old building paper or felt we're seeing lots of problems with brick veneer on new construction homes in Wisconsin we're seeing a lot of them a lot of them a lot of them I mean big time and it it got so bad that in your new code language coming out in January for enforcement in April will be requiring some specific application methods of brick veneer on every wood frame building in the state of Wisconsin covered by The Uniform Dwelling Code they are going to require venting above grade every 2 feet not below grade with a rope every two feet above grade on the bottom it must be vented on the top it must have a free unobstructed airspace behind and it must have two layers of building material behind it that will be enforceable in the Uniform Dwelling Code coming up in April that's because we're seeing so many moisture your problems with misapplied brick veneer in the state of Wisconsin and it will be en forceable language what happens is I think when I look at the history of the situation back years ago when we didn't have the big powered mortar mixers or whatever you call the adhesive people actually mixed it by hand so someone doing that by hand was probably a little cautious on how much they buttered the brick right well nowadays we have a lot of young folks using gas mixers and I know that they're told never take a brick off always over butter the brick cuz you never take it off you can't make money if you're getting paid by a piece so you watch him the guy over there mixes a great big batch of material doesn't have to do it by hand he just hits the button now they throw it on the hawk the guy grabs them butter Butters the brick Taps it down just like that regular Symphony they do and when they scarf off the excess mortar where do they put it they never throw it on the ground cuz they'd have to pick it up they never throw it back on the hawk because it may have a chip in it they always throw it right behind each row of brick so if you look on your job sites they're welding your masonry material right to your house wraps now house wraps are not supposed to have any of that masonry material especially the mortars up against them it ruins a lot of the properties of that building paper or the house wraps but the Young Folks do this because they're not being instructed otherwise you can go to some jobs and go on the end of building before they're turning the corner and look at every row of brick and every one of them will be welded right to the house wrap so how do you get air to move now every time it rains the water is wicked right through the mortar joints immediately and where's it going right back to your house wrap material I mean we're seeing a lot of problems with that and what I see in the trend up in Fox Valley where I pretty much hang out you can just about drive through every subdivision under construction until just which homes are going to have masonry product on because they'll all have tar paper back on them now wherever the material brick brick or cultured Stone's going to go they're all going back to the tar paper material the house wraps will not release from the mortar if you throw mortar up against any of the popular house wraps it will not release when the water dries out of the mortar you got to tear the stuff right off but if you throw it against our paper it will release when the mortar dries so there's a thin film of air there just enough to give a physical disconnect so lots of folks are going back on their own because of the challenges we're seeing right now yes they do that um well what I want to make sure is that I wanted to give you guys a little bit of heads up that there's something coming up you can go on the Uniform Dwelling Code the Commerce safety and building website right now and actually print off the language that will be enforceable and I I really don't want to give you misinformation but I know it does require specific material now behind the brick to compensate for this misapplication so I think the safest to do would be go on on Commerce website but I just wanted to give you heads up because the neat thing about this there was no way that they were going to take all the brick off this building right if it was actually stuck to the tar paper it would have tored all the shreds there wasn't one rip on that entire building and I got about 100 pictures the mortar never stuck to the building paper yes is it the same with Stone like the the what do they call it Licking Stick yeah and there'll be the same challenges there that's why a lot of the manufacturers now with that cultured stone type of product where you put it on the diamond mesh even a lot of their application or installation requirements now specifically require some sort of drainage plane I'm seeing lots of folks using maybe like DuPont's uh stuckle wrap uh the Raindrop type material so they'll put that on the building to give it some little drainage grooves put their building felt over the top then put the diamond mesh on so that the mesh is still giving it the structural adhesion but we've got those little bit of vertical fins of air in there to allow that water to get down and dry out yeah that's what we're seeing but just like I've always mentioned to folks and it does call it out right in the Uniform Dwelling Code all products have to be shall be installed per manufacturer's recommendations because the couple of brick homes that I'm involved on that are really locked up with some nasty people uh with the problems with moisture the first thing everybody wants to know is were the products supplied properly so the safest thing that we can do in the building Community is make sure if we're buying a product check and see if it actually has installation uh instructions or requirements for that unique product because in the event of a failure they're not going to warranty it anyway if you don't have it installed correctly but you got to thin the the uh thin brick or the thin veneer that's got to have the same concept now what's interesting of course this is more like what we see today all around the state of Wisconsin today's homes Are Better Built and draft free I don't think there's a consumer out there that's going to say please build me a building that's not comfortable so what it gives us now is better control because if you think about it if you really want to control the operating costs say in this room or in that home or if I want to control the indoor environment indoor air quality or moisture in particular I have to have control first and in order to have control you have to have containment that's why the concept of building homes that leak or that have to breathe based on the weatherman's that that's just not very practical if we really want to tell people we're going to give them an environment of which they can control their operating cost their comfort their moisture issues we have to have containment first in order to make that an accurate statement and the homes that have the better containment have the better control because now we can manipulate at what goes on inside without a large impact from the weather conditions outside now the second major thing that happened the first item we had was we changed sheet Goods so sheet Goods change the way buildings work big time and then all of a sudden somebody started to be uncomfortable in the mid 70s they started looking at operating cost the oil got a little expensive and then they started adding insulation and you've probably heard this a thousand times but this is the killer the minute we add insulation to something we just changed everything because adding insulation in our climate in a wall assembly or an attic just through out the OSB sheeting or plywood sheeting it just put it outside now right if we had an uninsulated cavity the energy loss would be tremendous but the energy would get to the wood sheeting and keep it warm enough that we probably wouldn't have a moisture event but the minute we put thermal insulation in front of wall sheeting and in an boom we just threw all the building products on the other side out by the weatherman so now if I have cold surfaces and I really want to protect the building I don't know how to spin this any other way than if you insulate a building you got a air seal and that includes in a lower level on a basement in front of a concrete wall or whether it's above grade or the ceiling if you add insulation you just removed all the heat the drying energy from the wood materials whether it's in the Attic the wall or the basement adding thermal value immediately requires air sealing in our climate there's no way around it there is no magic bullet to that unless you're willing to throw all the thermal value on the outside of the building like they do on some commercial buildings right they'll put all the insulation on the outside of the roof deck yeah now that inside that we're staring at is going to be room temperature so how could I possibly have a condensation event when it's at room temperature but when we put insulation on the inside like is 99% of the time done on residential buildings the roof sheeting is now at outside air temperature the wall sheeting is now at whatever the outside air temperature is Boom how do you control that there's no way of controlling that so insulation changed everything in terms of durability and a lot of folks still don't understand how that is we're going to go through some actual real case studies here in a little while to show you how nasty this can get but also to show us that we do as a building Community have a way of of ensuring the Integrity of our buildings for a long period of time we can do that reliably a lot of you folks have already been doing it but this changed the whole animal a and what's the issue with that well for 99% of our buildings we're still making them out of wood so even if you did say a concrete an ICF above grade wall you're still putting a wood roof on it right nobody's doing too much on concrete lids and the issue with moisture is the fact that we got wood products wood does not like to get wet and stay wet for a long period of time when I look at a tree I often think of the verse that they say at the funeral parlor dust to dust ashes to ashes right trees come up mother nature that takes care of all that and I think Mother Nature is trying to get this stuff right back into ground as soon as possible it's our job to take that wood product and make it last as long as possible and good a good useful life out of it and the way to do that is to keep our Wood Products Dry or build them with an acceptable level of performance where it can dry but in our heavily insulated wall assemblies and roof assemblies in Wisconsin for the most part our materials are sitting outside now if we don't want them to have moisture events then we have to keep this warm moist there in the winter time away from those cold surfaces and the way we do that is by air sailing the inside of the building it's not any difficult any more difficult than that again if you want to dry wood you got to move a lot of air so if you're one of the folks that believes building should breathe and all of this free movement of air and moisture then I have to ask you where does all your drying come from I still see folks that like to Slit The Vapor retarder on the ceiling to sheet of plastic well sure that takes care of some of the moisture problem in the home it just makes the building leakier but now you got to flip a coin as as to whether that warm moist air ever makes it actually out of the roof venting or whether now it just deposits itself on the roof sheeting in the Attic but the issue is we're still basic basically building most of our shells out of wood now the third thing that happened here now we had sheet Goods change the tightness insulation reduced the drying potential but the mechanical systems I still remember my grandma's house right next door to my house in kakana and she had one of these old octopus furnac is in there on the left hand side this one the picture showing an oil converter but initially when we hung around over there it was coal so we used to have to fill it for coal we'd always have a fist fight in a coal bin to see who actually had to shovel it into coal shovel it in the actual unit but remember those things they were just heating the ambient air in the building with just a big blowtorch basically there was no fan involved remember the air would just migrate around the building by natural convection on twostory buildings right you'd see a floor register on the second floor floor you'd see an open register right down to the first floor just to allow air to naturally circulate by convection so there was no blower motor involved just a natural convection then when we started to squeeze the units of fuel a little bit to be more efficient we started using units with a smaller chimney and we also started using units with an air handler fan but these animals here had a flu on them about a foot and a half Square so there was that much air going out the building all the time that much air had to come in the building so as an inefficient combustion device we were ventilating the building non-stop every time that heating equipment ran with a pretty good size hole now the equipment on the right hand side was the mid 70% efficient stuff you could see now that someone was able to reduce the size of the flu pipe up here from the old 10 or 12 in now down to a 6 in but it was still using house air for combustion and draft so we were ventilating the house when we ran that equipment but what happened was we added a blower motor now so we could actually Force distribute the air people didn't like the fact of allowing the air to naturally circulate you had a door door closed on a room it stopped some of that natural movement air conditioning became popular now we needed a blower to actually push this heavier air and now we get into the new high efficiency closed combustion heating systems they're not using any house there anymore for combustion and draft so if you look at the buildings that old house that had the big octopus probably had a chimney a foot and a half Square so it was basically a foot and a half square hole in the building leaking air through the stack effect that's what we call the rise and natural air rising in a building so we had a foot and a half hole then we got down to that 70% heating equipment we reduced the size of that hole in the roof now in here we have no hole in the roof anymore at all so every time we improve the efficiency of combustion equipment we make the building Tighter by default this is why you'll see heating contractors get beat up in the wintertime they get a call from some older folks or maybe some younger couple that bought an older home would say a 75% furnace in it with a 6in B vent going up the chimney they say man the fuel costs are terrible let's put in one of these nice high condensing units and really smash that fuel right well now when they do this they block off the 6in FW in the chimney now they just lost all the accidental ventilation that home was having all the time with nobody actually having to hit a switch now the background moisture starts to build up their fuel costs go down and now they go back and beat the heating guy up because they had window condensation now that they never ever had before we see it all the time happens all the time people even with old single pane windows never had any condensation but they had an old nasty furnace ventilating the building they couldn't hardly hold a lot of Mo moisture plug the chimney off now put a better furnace in don't do anything about ventilation the background moisture just goes right up pretty soon they got window condensation problems I feel bad for the heating contractors because they're really out trying to help these folks but they wind up changing the way the building functions people may have an old clothes dryer the old ones like 20 years ago used to use about 100 cubic feet of air per minute finally takes a dump somebody goes to the store oh yeah you got to buy one of them trick energy energy star jobs well maybe they buy a mayag Neptune well we're measuring some of those at 250 cubic feet a minute 250 compared to a 100 on the old ones and we're going out on somebody these homes now where people say gez I got this soot problem well what are you talking about I got this soot gets in my laundry and everything it's all sticking all over the place soot well what did you do at the building nothing did you remodel did you do some air sealing no no no no what' you do something changed you didn't have have soot yesterday you got soot now what's going on well we run over to at home usually go into the laundry room find out they got one of these new clothes dryers and they may have a natural draft water heater in the basement a b vent or an open wood burning fireplace well the old 100 CFM unit didn't quite have enough exhaust to depressurize the chimney but now at 250 or 200 boom now we're getting to make up air down the chimney or down the fireplace bang they got so all over the place we see this all the time I feel terrible for the older folks all they wanted to do is fix the dryer but this is the fact every time we change something the building changes in function now we got to add to the lifestyles right I mean I I like to run around and find these old outside bathrooms as we call them uh what's kind of cool about them there's a lot of those buggers Still Standing but the main point I want to make here's lifestyle change right back then when people had to do this they probably didn't have a shower in the house either so there was very little moisture being thrown all over the building so when you look inside of those there's a threeh hleer I got pictures of a two-holer and a four hleer I got one five hleer picture but it didn't scan real good but I often wonder a family that does their stuff together stays together I'm not sure if they all go out there three at a time I don't know but think about it they weren't even in the house to take a dump so there wasn't even odors being left in the building unless somebody just passed one in accident but there was hardly any showers going on they didn't know what a shower was they probably took a wash rag and just wiped themselves down for a shower or a bath maybe they went down to the river but the buildings were leaky in the cob didn't have much for moisture being generated in those buildings and they were uninsulated so you couldn't hardly trash one of those buildings the components weren't there necessary to trash a building but now look what we do I mean now we got starter homes right where it might be a nice three-bedroom Ranch starter home as someone would call it well now we even want a separate bathroom for all of the children I mean shoot I'm 55 years old I used to have to wait in line to take a bath at my house in kakon because we only had one bathtub never had a shower head on the darn thing till I was about 17 years old me dad just says Ah we don't need a shower head just take a bath well anyway and we all know how people get around the moisture loads now right we have limitations for gallons per minute to flow per shower head well if they don't like it then they just put 10 shower heads in so you know how to get around that say and then you may have multiple bathrooms in a home where maybe two people are taking a shower at one time you got a Better Built home it's draft free because your consumers demand that you've got wood material all over the place higher efficiency mechanical equipment you got tighter buildings and you got people living in these homes and when they live they're going to do whatever they want whenever they want and as much as they want that's why we live in good old Yankee Doodle Dand land here so when they got all this moisture activity going on we better make sure that they've got the equipment functioning so that they can remove the excess on demand at their will otherwise we're going to be back there later on dealing with it but everything has changed about the buildings now so why not or why now what change sheet goods were introduced that was the first thing that happened that was a major change insulation was added ruined all of our drying capability heating systems got more efficient so we lost a lot of our accidental ventilation and now we got furnace fans fans actually moving air and now we can pressurize this room when the air handler comes on so the furnace fans are a big deal think about it for a minute picture yourself in the bathroom at your home I'm not going to think about it but you picture yourself in your bathroom at home you're in there taking a shower none of us look that hot anymore so we probably got the door closed to the outside now we turn the shower head on we get her nice and steaming we're just after a nice cold day out in the work we're shoping up and now all of a sudden the thermostat in the main part of the house says hey it's too cold in the house I'm going to turn the heating system on so the furnace comes on you're in the bathroom and the door in the bathroom is closed to the rest of the house now I know you're going to have a supply register in the bathroom because that's good practice right but the code in good building practice won't allow us to put a return air in there return air Grill because we don't want to be dragging that stuff out of the bathroom and spreading it around for everybody to enjoy after somebody took a good dump so there's no return in that room but you're in there steaming her up maybe you turn the fan on maybe you don't maybe the fan doesn't even work but it's making some noise now what happens to that room that entire bathroom goes positive in pressure we can measure that on any building you got let's go right out I got the equipment in the van take any building you got close the bathroom door go turn the air handler on just turn the furnace fan on and unless you got some door undercuts that big or another door is open connecting that bathroom to the rest of the house that bathroom usually goes positive in pressure so this air handler thing is a big deal because now if we got got small holes in the building around a canl light around a wall outlet on the side of an exterior wall and we got moisture but now we take the moisture and pressurize it and blow it into the building assembly around the bath fan housing in the ceiling right we route that big gap around there don't worry about it cover it with the grill right the bathrooms always go positive in pressure so we've got a lot of things going on in buildings just because buildings aren't built the way we used to we don't even have to think about inducing any of these issues they happen automatically so this is the deal buildings are not the same we have to understand what's going on so the impact of of these basic changes are buildings got tighter we now retain more moisture inside insulation was added we now have reduced drying potential so do you really want to get stuff wet I don't think so and the HVAC fans can cause pressure and I'm going to show you some building failures after a while from furnace F pressures and you can take a building apart in 5 years if you want to and these HVAC fan pressures can increase the moisture transport so there holes that might have looked Mighty insignificant by themselves under pressure for long periods of time can be brutal that's why when you remodel a home that's maybe only 5 years old and you take off the wall board on the drywall on the bathrooms yeah it isn't because the bathroom is there that isn't why why the OSB sheeting or the roof sheeting is all porked up it's because the bathroom is there under pressure that's the deal now why are all these issues important Well everybody's involved here energy homeowners expect reasonable operating cost they also expect Comfort they expect their homes to be comfortable they expect their buildings to last which means they have to be durable ventilation is important because they expect reasonable indoor air quality and they expect that they can manage their indoor environment but somebody's got to give them the tools to do so and combustion safety homeowners expect combustion appliances to function properly they won't just because we put them in there somebody has to be looking at all of these items your benefit if we reduce one call back or improve your profits or improve your referrals isn't that good for business I think so so if you want to throw green around throw all this carbon footprint stuff around just keep doing what you're doing but keep thinking about what we can do better look at the items that might have been on your hot list last year that might have got you in trouble or got some customers calling back we need to reduce our call backs because in this residential Cutthroat brutal environment that we're in we don't have the luxury and the big dollar margins to go back and fix stuff let's see if we can nail her the first time around now let let's take a look at insulation systems and we got choices choices choices and everybody's saying well what to do what am I going to do what's the best let's just take a look and spin this around and see what's available now if we just look at basic wall insulation systems for stick frame construction we're going to have our fiberglass friction fit bats which is still very popular we got foam and bat applications in spread Parts uh we see that occasionally around the market we see the fiberglass blown in or the blown in blanket system bibs as they call it and we also see cellulose blown in either open uh cavity they call it wall spray or they dense pack that as well with a net we'll take a look at all of these applications the only thing that I really see and it's the major challenge is that when we get done framing a building I mean we need structural support so we can't take all the lumber out no matter how much you want to do Advanced Framing and then we still have to get all the other amenities in we got wiring plumbing and my take on this thing is that that's the last time I'm going to see that wall cavity right I mean I'm I'm not going to get the homeowner call me 10 years from now hey Bob why don't you come back over let's tear all the sheetrock off and do a better job of insulating the walls d drop 50 Grand on Windows right and it won't change the energy cost much but no one's ever going to take the wall apart very unlikely unless there's a failure so the real challenge with wall assemblies is can we do the best at today's technology when we got them apart and to ask someone go over with fiberglass bats of which I don't have a problem with fiberglass I don't have a problem with any insulation it's just that the challenge is these young folks now have to be pattern makers right they got to cut this stuff to all those different patterns that we gave them they've got to try and fit it around the wires around the pipes it's just very difficult and if we go scan one of them with an infrared camera yeah it lights up a little bit it's not the end of the world but if we really want to do the best without necessarily building a real thick wall or adding all kinds of unusual components I think if we spend a little more time thinking about the one crack we got at walls that it may help our choices of material now the only thing that we see with fiberglass bats that's really an issue is the installation quality right because we have to remember fibrous insulation whether it's fiberglass or cellulose work on a function of two factors the dead air trapped within the fibers provides insulation value and they also scatter radiant energy so if we had the drywall on there with no insulation the drywall would get warm from the air in the room and because there's nothing behind the radiant energy from the back of that sheetrock would radiate right straight across to the outside sheeting so fibrous insulation holds the air within the insulation from moving so it has a thermal value the fiberglass and cellulose have no insulating value at all it is their trapping of dead air that provides the thermal value that's why when you take a bat on the job site and it's all smashed down in a bag and you cut it and it blows up you're adding the insulation on the job site that's why we always talk about insulation needing to be in a six-sided closed container because it's the lack of air movement that actually provides the value little thought on that next year coming up into code enforceable in April if you got any knee walls in the Attic even if they're This Tall or 8 ft tall they now must be enclosed on all six sides with a permanent air barrier no longer are we are they going to allow fiberglass bats in a knee wall so if we went in the attic and looked at the back of the knee wall we were seeing fiberglass none of that's applicable anymore in April you must have a permanent weather resistant material on the outside of that material that's so that the air in there stays there and provides the value but getting back to the point I want to make here people often say well geez Joe what's the big deal that's only a little bit of compression up there and don't get me wrong I'm not the least one of the folks running around saying buildings have to be perfect I'm out there crawling around yesterday I spent five and a half hours in an attic in Appleton with the local spray forer helping him pull the hoses and stuff so he could get our wall spray done or our attic SP spray done the point here is that when we have that compression in the upper leftand corner here now we basically exposed the large percentage of the side of that wall stud right so now there's no radiant insulation protection there so when the drywall goes across the face right here instead of the normal 1 and2 in of pure conductive energy going through the stud like we always see and accept now we have radiant energy scattering shooting on the side of that stud short circuiting the insulation itself see that's why insulation in a wall cavity it needs to be as full as possible so that it minimizes the target area here that the drywall will have to radiate energy so that's why we get after the folks in a in a polite manner that hey take something before you put the Poly on just go along and scarf them edges up try and get them as flush as possible so that the only defect we have is the framing Lumber itself but if you take an average building and if it's got 100 spots that look typically Innocent by themselves and add them up it's a pretty good chunk so that's the real challenge with these basic bat materials is getting them installed well and also for energy star for federal tax credit we actually have to go out and grade the insulation on any home a builder wants the federal tax credit for we actually physically have to go out and put a number one number two or number three grade on the quality of the install also so in the 2009 code stuff in in Denver we just had a workshop on the 2009 code stuff wow they got stuff in there for enforcement should Wisconsin ever adopt the 09 IC there's going to be all kinds of stuff BigTime stuff related to all of this coming up yes with the wall cavity wantan to have it as full as possible if you're doing if you're doing a spray foam clell spray foam sure and you're normally putting in three three and a half inch of insulation would it be preferable to be using it 2x4 then instead of a 2x6 because of the Gap well see that's part of the deal and the question was you know if I'm going to if I'm going to do spray foam in a wall cavity with nothing else and I want to do 2x6 framing but if I only put three and a half inches of foam in there which is a great nominal r value what are you doing about the radiant heat loss on the face of the stud it does nothing there see remember the the foam is a great insulator there's no doubt it's great on air protection air sealing and and Vapor protection but you can't forget that there's three types of of heat conduction right conduction touching something convection air moving picking up heat and radiant energy so as long as there's something warmer than something cooler that warmer surface will be radiating to that now you're going to have a slight cooler surface on the side of that stud there where my fingers are so as long as that's one degree cooler or even a tenth of a degree cooler the energy from the back of the drywall will be radiating right to where my fingers are so I'm often asking the guys okay the spray foam is a great option but I'm thinking you may want to go back and reduce some of the framing now well just thought my own house now that you say this because I an addition I put in my house where my office is and it was a 12 pitch Roof 2 X12 construction I spray foamed it um you know non-insulated attic spray foam right to the back roof deck well now when there's light snowall frost mhm I have reverse ghosting on the outside of my roof so now I have snow melting or Frost melting at my framing and it's and it sticks where there's insulation whereas typically on a regular truss house you'd see the opposite of the light frost is sticks at your trusses but it melts at the and this is why we like to discuss these things just throw them out in a non-threatening environment right we can't forget that there's three types of heat transfer conduction convection from Air moving and radiation and that's why when we have cooler basements because we don't think they're important shoot the upstairs floor is radiating directly down to that lower level all during the heating season so how can you possibly get floors to be real comfortable because the radiant energy from the floor is radiated straight down in the middle of the night no lights on nothing it's just radiating so we have to be careful that if we do one thing that we don't miss something else or actually increase the heat loss on another function that's why this is good to discuss all of these items now what's interesting is we see a couple of folks a couple of our Builders really like to do fiberglass bats I don't have a problem with any insulation I like it all as long as it's in a six-sided air tighted box now some of the guys do a real nice job of coordinating things this electrician knows that this Builder likes to use fiberglass bats so when they drill those holes for the wiring boy those buggers got to be right on the kaber they don't want them running all over the place because the insulator working for this Builder Cuts all the bats ahead of time off the set of drawings in the shop they do it right in the shop so they're in the shop in the middle of the day when it's nice and warm they'll actually cut the bats cut the back half off so they can tuck the back half behind the wire so they're split properly like the code requires so that they don't have a big air pocket behind there then the next guy comes in and they put the front half on like he's doing on the left side here we got lots of builders that like fiberglass baths how can you argue with the economics of the stuff there's nothing wrong with a fiberglass bat contrary to what everybody says if it's enclosed in a six-sided box so there's not air movement through it and if there's not air movement within the cavity moving that air and if it's filled pretty good boom he you can't hardly beat the economics of this stuff but we just have to look at how we get them installed Larry on the right hand side in the bottom this guy's divorced and he's bitter big time he's got one tooth he uses it for a can opener great guy and all he wants to do is get up in the morning grab his lunch pail his ginso knife and get in that truck with a th bats in the back he lives to do fiberglass bats and he don't want anybody going anywhere near him I mean the guy is nuts but he does a spectacular job because we have several builders that realize how brutal and Cutthroat residential is they can't get folks always to upgrade to this nice blown in materials so when so and so Builders calls that in insul ation company and it's time for insulating bang Larry goes out there because the Builder that wants the bats wants Larry's craftsmanship he pays the same whether he gets the other guys that don't care this guy goes to where the builders are that care and they don't pay more for it because Larry is still ticked off and ready to go does a beautiful job now also what's interesting about fiberglass bats is that you'll see them they a bar code on them from the manufacturer the code does require that that bar code and I'm not here to talk about code but I want to mention it the barcode has to be facing the inside of the building or the building inspector can get after you because they're there to verify the thermal performance of the insulation that you put down on your building permit and I often ask folks this is a trick one you guys will know it but what is that actually made for what is that r19 bat physically made four 6 and a/4 inch wall right or if it's the other color 6 and A2 now in the 2009 code language in the 2009 not the one coming up here the 09 code language they are no longer going to allow us to use r19 in our math calculations they're going that fine-tuning on the national level they're going to require you to actually put the insulation value for that 5 1/2 in cavity the r19 bat is still a leftover from addicts and knee walls it was never physically made manufacturing wise for a five and a half inch cavity when I did this about two years ago up at the valley homebuilders one of the guys got right out just ran out of the class I thought he was soiling himself or something comes back a little later on he said man that guy's going to take a beaten and I said what's up he said I just called my insulator and all these years I've been getting hoses because they were telling me it was r19 and I just got done showing them the bag but there has never been an r19 bat anywhere in the world made for a 5 and 1 half inch cavity all right never and there never will be if you look at the bag look right on any bag it doesn't matter whose brand it is look what it says right 6 and A4 Ines so if you actually want that bat as purchased to have a value of r19 it has to be physically expanded and the reason that that's a big deal is when they manufacture the batch they Orient the fiber at a particular angle so that they create these definite size air pockets and when you start smashing them now you change the geometry of those air pockets that's why if you take an r19 bat and smash it down into a 4 and a half inch cavity you only got about a 13 left over it those bats and the fibers are absolutely manufactured for a particular orientation the only bat that's ever been made for a 5 1/2 in wall cavity is the r21 high density bat it's manufactured so when it's expanded to 5 A2 it yields a 21 so my point with that is if we really want to make buildings that are more efficient then where do we look we couldn't even get an r19 numerical value even if it was installed Flawless right it's not 6 and a quarter so if we have all them Corners tucked over it's not split around wires not fit good around pipes and we got air movement and we smashed it to 5 a half what is the real value right we always debate that just R2 yeah the r21 bat yes is physically manufactured so if it's expanded to five a half it'll yield 21 minus the installed flaws yeah but that's the deal I mean and I ask people that all the time and there are some building inspectors in Wisconsin that will not accept the number r19 if you put in that you got 2x6 framing they're even going that fine on their own anyway there it is right there look at the bag says r19 installed in a 2x6 wall 5 A2 will yield 18 if it's one color and 17 if it's another color and that's still under the assumption that it's flawlessly installed and no air movement through the cavity but they're just making a point that even if you look at the bag but they want you to stare at the big number see so you don't look at the fine print that's why I got to keep my reading glasses on all right now the other issue that we see is that most Builders still prefer to use polyethylene as their Vapor retarder material and some people after they hear Joe Ste talk they think the world is going to fall in right or the sky caving in he runs through town every once in a while and just throws stuff out see if it sticks right good friend of ours the deal is the code and the national model codes only require that the buildings have a vapor retarder material having a per rating of 1.0 or less covering all insulation and framing there is never been a word in any code document in the state of Wisconsin in forceable language stating the word plastic or polyethylene it has never been in there that's why when Joel runs Su toown with all due respect he's a great friend of ours he runs Su Town talking about moisture coming the other way and then the guys want to get rid of the plastic well you don't need a code change for that just stop using it there's there is no code requirement for the use of polyethylene it never has been it will never be because it never stated you had to select polyethylene as your choice as long as the material you put covering the framing and insulation has a perm rating of 1.0 or less it satisfies The Vapor retarder requirements that's why I keep asking all these guys say geez we got to change the code for what you don't need to change the code it doesn't require plas right now little heads up again on the upcoming April code changes in Wisconsin below grade we Curr well we in Wisconsin currently do not require a vapor retarder on a stick frame wall below grade we don't they don't require one in April they will prohibit the use of one because of the moisture problems we want the water and Vapor that's coming off of the concrete wall to be able to get through the drywall and make it into the building and be absorbed and taken out so now they just don't require one below grade in April they will prohibit the use of one cuz there's still some older farts hanging around that want to do plastic right on the concrete wall and then put the stick frame up some of them want to put the stick frame up and they still want to use plastic it is absolutely guaranteed going to prohibit the use of one below grade in April but anyway I just wanted to throw in the code thing and you always have to remember that the codes are always going to be several years behind the building performance curve but what I what I heard heard at the meeting in Denver last week was that in the 09 they had that big uh Power meeting up in St Paul on this 30% better code thing about 75% of the recommendations did get adopted for enforcement in the 2009 code language they're going to have an air ceiling checklist about a mile long I mean on air ceiling right now the code says a couple of things you know particular spots that thing will be a mile long a whole bunch of stuff coming up on building performance but anyway just to throw it out on the vapor retarders whatever you use to cover the framing and insulation as long as it's got a perm rating of 1.0 or less you're good to go yes sir excellent okay yeah it was it was interesting great let me let me catch up on that because thank you for reminding me on that because there were several foam manufacturers went to the public hearings this last year in Wisconsin and if it's uh well they didn't even make a distinction between open cell and closed cell foam but if your wall cavity is going to be insulated with spray foam only with nothing in front of the spray foam they are not going to require a vapor retarder they made the case about air transported moisture and we're going to talk about that big time but yes if it's spray foam in a wall assembly or an attic and if there if it has no other insulating material in front of it like a flashing bat then you will not be required to do a vapor retarder what they don't say is you still would want to do a good job job of air sealing but I mean it isn't quite as diffic you know is quite as detrimental with the spray foam having that sealed face right there to keep the moisture and stuff from being transported so yeah that's coming up now this moisture issue and the and the polyethylene scared a lot of builders in the rural area I do a lot of work with some Builders up in the Shao area where they like to insulate themselves the buggers went back to craft faced bats they got so scared on this whole polyethylene thing they weren't having any problem but when some of these National guys run through Wisconsin and throw these Bombs all over these guys attend these Workshop get kind of scared so some of them went back to craft face bats because to craft paper right it'll change permeability that was one of the benefits of it before that's why certained came out with that smart membrane Vapor retarder a couple years ago it actually changes its its Vapor permeability with relative humidity but now I just can't see how good the bats are installed you know I can't see them and now the drywall guys don't like it either because now they can't see where the studs are as easy does that meet code what's that yeah it meets code it does probability one or less yeah yeah yeah it's just that years ago you guys made the decision I didn't have nothing to do with it when somebody stopped using craft face bats somebody realized hey now wait a minute now we just lost our Vapor retarder so what can we do and somebody must have grabbed the sheet of plastic and it became almost this Ben almost an automatic code thing but it has never ever been a requirement by the building code someone selected plastic for its ease of coverage large area and way they went now the other type of insulation I see once in a while is a spray foam they call it up in our area flash and bat uh I don't have a problem with it other than that knowing the limitations some folks will put an inch of spray foam in and then put a fiberglass bat over the top but I don't quite understand that whole picture and when I ask the folks why you're doing that I like to know what what's in the decision- making process for folks so if we have a reasonable conversation I know where they're coming from and I'll often ask them hey why do you why are you doing this well I'm air sealing fair enough but if I'm going to air seal something isn't there an overwhelming assumption that there's got to be a hole there first I mean I can go out and put 10 Tire patches on my car tire it won't be any tighter than it is right now but I just spent 10 Tire patches I mean I'm thinking about it I'm I want to learn too so if you guys know something I don't know please tell me because that's why I came here today but I keep asking people if you I want to know let's work together so that we don't just make homes more expensive we actually make them better by maneuvering products where they're applicable and right for each location so if this is what you're doing for air sealing I'm often asking well how much did you gain from that nobody usually noce because they don't do any pre- and post testing on existing building but anyway the challenge here now is that when they put the fiberglass in front of it now what did it just do to the foam it made the foam cold because we put thermal material in front of the foam the foam is all right just like that because the radiant energy coming off at the back of the sheetrock is going to radiate right to that surface but because they usually only use an inch of foam it's not enough thermally right so they got to add some more thermal value but now you make the Foam cold and on top of that then we butcher the fire glass bat so we got the best material on the wrong side and we got a cob job on the front I'm just wondering because now there's where we're going to have that r19 bat smashed to 4 and A2 4 and a half is maximum yield of 13 or 14 so seven for the foam and 13 is 20 or 7 and 14 is 21 so the maximum you're legally ever going to get with that assembly is 21 and I'm always wondering about the air sealing and you have to remember when it comes to air sealing the trick question is the one you got to know yes holes are important but where are the holes that are the most important the ones with pressure on them in the middle of the winter when you're sitting at home at midnight and it's 20 below zero and there's not a breeze outside the sun is down there's nothing happening where's all the pressure on the building all you got to do is bend your face straight back it's all up there it's all up there and on the rim joist there's nothing going on in the walls there's nothing going on you could have a hole right through the middle of the wall no pressure no air flow you have the stack effect pushing on these buildings all the time and homes are just a hot air balloon too heavy to lift off the ground and there's constant pressure nonstop and you can measure it all the way up on the top of the building there's not much going on on the side of the building and and then on the bottom of your building we got all the blocks of atmosphere stacked up from the top down remember from school that's the only thing I remember 14.7 pounds per square inch keeping us from exploding well that's what we got roughly at the Box sill and less in the middle of the wall and a lot less on top that's why chimneys work better right when they're taller there's less atmospheric pressure on the hole because we stack from the top down so if I got air leakage out the top I they got air coming in the bottom so you got to seal the top and the bottom the middles aren't there much going on there you always have to do the top you must do the top you must absolutely do the top what doesn't go out the top doesn't need replacement air coming in the bottom but that's why I often ask people they spend all of their budget for air sealing on the walls and unless you're buying sheets of OSB with holes in it tell me how much air sealing you're really getting just a thought and here's a shot where I had a guy that bought into the concept that if he did an inch of spray foam in the wall assembly that he'd never have condensation well what's on my hand there water I mean they didn't even get the building done it was dripping wet in there already now it wasn't a fair case because at that point the building was not done so the poly wasn't pinched on the edges with the drywall like it would be when the building's done but this guy was really hot because he was told absolutely Point Blank by the salesman that if they did an inch of spray foam in the wall that it would be impossible not improbable impossible to have moisture problems in the wall assembly well I got this happened to be the Aloma building inspector so I went to his building under construction and when we took the poly and the fiberglass out the foam was just absolutely soak and wet you have to remember if I put insulation in front of anything I just took all the energy away so if I got the foam sitting there and put a fiberglass bat in front I just pushed that foam outside it ain't as far as the OSB outside but it's outside because you got the thermal value in front so you got to be careful on all this stuff that's why no matter how we spin this when we're all done the answer is always going to be air sealing because if I do a reasonable job of air sealing the building shell on the wall surface and the ceiling surface I don't really care what happens outside I've got no control of that anyway as a building Community we have 100% control 100% control of how how tight we get the face of the building I can't do anything about the weather conditions I can't do anything about the amount of moisture the homeowner carries they're going to do whatever they want it's our job to make sure the building shell stays durable and the only answer for that is air sealing air seiling air ceiling and when we get into advanced insulation we see the folks doing blown in fiberglass or the bibs simply put the mesh up punch through the net they blow it up and they blow it down pretty much to get about 3 and 12 l pounds per cubic foot yes yeah I guess the whole thing what do you do if you have form sheathing on you outside of the wall and and you put in a bad insulation same procedure that excellent well yeah excellent no I didn't I didn't never met you before right no all right we got we got a slide coming up though no we got to yeah no the uh the question was what happens when I put sheet foam on the outside great question right and it's a great solution to a lot of thermal bridging you know going through the studs but we're going to look exactly at that situation coming up here I got some nice real detailed computer generated temperatures I've had insulation salesman tell me the same thing in the Flash and bat but what's the difference between Flash and bat versus foam sheathing and bats well was there was there rationale oh yeah yeah well see that there's going to be a slight advantage to to both right I mean the sheet form on the outside helps insul helps provide a higher thermal value on the framing and it does keep the C the cavity a little warmer at that surface the spray foam in the middle obviously can't do anything about the thermal bridging of the stud framing but it does provide a warmer surface in that wall assembly at that point and that's what I want to show you is that at at how much do you need to have no problem possibility and it's just impossible unless you don't put anything in the rest of the building but we'll take a look at that coming up so on the bibs you see all different meshes some of them use different type but the concept is the same they'll put a net on now the pipes in the wall the heating ducts and everything wires Outlets are just buried I mean buried and even though the nhb claims that we can't get any air sealing benefit from dense back wall insulation I'll tell you what we've told them a 100 times at least we find it in Wisconsin big honk in time I mean when a builder goes from typical construction practices where they don't have the shell really dialed in yet but stop using bats and do a couple buildings with any of the blown in material we usually see a reasonable reduction in their tightness or Improvement in the tightness of the building yet the nhb says that that's not true well I don't really care what they say we're talking about Wisconsin building Because by the time you pack that stuff in I mean if you've ever had to tear a building apart holy cow it looks like somebody was jamming a snow cone in the front side we've taken lots of buildings apart on the outside that had either the blown in fiberglass or blown in cellulose I mean and it's packed right honk and tight to the corners I mean right there she's full again the Fuller the better and uh that's what it looks like now those pipes we saw before look it they're gone I mean they're just gone I mean they're physically gone other than the little bit on the face right you always hold them to the front side but if they do that with fiberglass bats they'll tell you the code won't allow them to tuck the bat around to cover the pipe that's not true all you got to do is pay them $800 more and then they'll make them go away they're just telling you they don't want to cut the bat like a pipe a plumbing stack in an outside wall right in a bathroom well why would we want to have that big air movement around that plumbing stack pipe in the wall where we're going to have a lot of moisture in that room that's that's not a good thing and you ask them all the time hey can you cut that and split that no the code won't allow me well if you pay them $800 for the upgrade it'll all go away then you ask them they just keep blowing it's just a Time Time issue I like all the insulation because on lots of jobs that I do construction management on I still do a lot of that I'm going to use all kinds of material I got bats up in some addicts there that we couldn't get at we got the dense blown cell fiberglass in the wall we got some spray foam going on in here for air sealing where we needed its unique air sealing characteristics I like a little bit of everything here we got the dense spack cellulose in a wall where they put the mesh on the wall and then they punch through it and simply pack it under a certain density you got to be careful on all the wall blown in insulations though that if you jump from your fiberglass bats to any of these blown materials you got to make sure that your installer of the blown material whichever type you choose that they understand the challenges here on the face of the stud when they put a bat in there usually it's tucked slightly behind the surface but when they start blowing this in they got to get the right density either for the cellulose or the fiberglass and then it wants to creep over the face of the studs now the drywall guy starts beating you big time now the wallboard looks like that so they got to be good at this so that's why if we change things we got to understand all the implications there's a nice job on the on the rim on this one with spray foam now here's a guy that got beat up so bad about the creep on the face of the studs he's a wall spray a wall insulator that does a lot of dense pack insulation well he didn't want to use a million Staples on each stud right just Gatling gun the the net down so he realized if he just put a couple of studs this is a real close-up uh digital picture if he just used a couple of Staples to put the net on pulled it nice and tight and then he'd take a gun with the cheapest construction adhesive he could buy Liquid Nails PE 200 whatever's on sale that week he puts a nice E8 inch bead of that adhesive right through the face of the net right on the center of the stud center of the lower top plate then almost like a ballet takes a putty knife out and just flattens her right out and by the time he gets all the way around the building that stuff will be set up enough on the front end he can start blowing right away drywallers love them because now when that stuff is blown in there it can't creep over the face of the stud so everything stays nice and flush works good I asked the guy what's the deal he said well geez I was using a million Staples and then you wouldn't get half them in all the way then the drywall guys trying to slide your wallboard up so you got to be careful on all this but there's a lot of good benefits here's the wall spray cellulose where they're doing it open spray where they add just a little bit of moisture the manufacturers all know now that we don't want wet buildings consumers just don't think that's a good idea so about 5 years ago when the mold guys were running around scaring everybody the cellulose manufacturers now realize they had to help their installers by getting rid of some of the moisture content so they just simply add corn starch now so in that big cement mixer when they're tumbling in the chopped up newspaper adding the fire retardant and the fungicide that gives it the gray color they actually add regular household corn starch just like you buy at the grocery store so now they can actually back off substantially on the moisture content because the cornstarch little flakes get stickier in a cob when you get them damp and all you got to do is have the stuff stick enough until you get the wall on it ain't going anywhere so now when we go to the wall spray cellulose jobs they're very dry but look at how nice that is when they get done I mean even Ray Charles could see how full that cavity is I mean he could feel that wherever he is but the deal is again walls we got to get full we only got one crack at them so I'm often up getting asking consumers if they got money to allocate let's make sure we don't go go cornball here let's just do what we got and do a better job job of it if you downside to this type of insulation or not uh the downside is just the personal opinion debate that goes on in the building Community I mean there's folks that absolutely are convinced that this will never dry when you put polyethylene on it I'm out all the time looking for all these buildings people are talking about that are supposed to be imploding I can't even find them and I'm looking for them because what's interesting right on the moisture side but look at how flat this is because they open blow that stuff right in an open cavity no net anything covered of studs and everything it's just buried they let it sit for a couple minutes and they go over it with a stud scrubber looks like a lawnmower handle with a with a motor on it and it's got a rotating brush so they just push it up against two matching stud cavity two studs push it right up pull the trigger and run it up and down and it just ples all the excess cellulose right off the face that's how they can get it so flush but look at these little areas here I mean it's just honk and Flawless up there it works good but it's just another one of them deals Ford and Chevy oldmobile Cadillac whatever just kind of personal opinion we got builders that all got opinions like we all do but my take on it is when we have all those unusual cavities how do we possibly ever get those completely full and if we took a little bit there 1% 3% 1% half a percent of building flaw pretty soon we don't need to build a thicker wall I think sometimes we just got to stop and do a better job of what we currently got we also see people using the walls spray cellulose in the rim joist here what they do though is they usually make sure Nobody's around because now they'll blow it up in there but because they're blowing it up they can't get the compaction like they get when they're doing a wall that's why they always spray it like this so it's looks like they're building Concrete in a swimming pool but when they're doing it like that they can't get the compaction so they'll pack it by hand a little bit spray a little more over the face then they look to make sure Nobody's around and then they open a water valve and they just soaked the face of that Bugger I mean and it'll get a skin on it just like a sheet of cardboard next day when you come back you'll be boom bo oh that works good but then we'll say well gez that's newspaper people say the water vapor is going to go right through there and the boxill will rot out that's absolutely never going to be an accurate statement because I'm out poking them all the time here's one the guy did the water to the point it was running on the floor but I'm back there like less than three weeks later and the timber strand Rim joist is down to 9% and also people will say well geez you know if you put that wet cellulose in the wall and then you put a vapor retarder on top of it and you got OSB on the outside how's it dry don't you have two Vapor retarders not really that's why people got to stop once while and think about this right but every time we see a chart showing moisture transport right don't the arrows the guys draw always go exactly horizontal left and right when they draw it on a piece of paper but moisture just explodes it goes everywhere there's nothing stopping it so if we're doing 2x6 walls let's just play Make Believe for a minute and let's just actually make believe that the stud Framing and the top plates are actually a full 6 in so if I got a 6-in top plate and a 6inch bottom plate every running foot of wall I have exactly one square foot of wood material with no Vapor on at all the water vapor just says oh you got a vapor retarder here I'll just blow out the top plate into the nice vented sofh a or I'll blow through the deck and go into the basement that's why we very seldom ever see these buildings having any problems yet people say oh you got that plastic on there so what the arrows don't go straight the moisture goes every direction just trying to blow its way out it's why we very seldom see a problem in back and knee walls what they'll do with the cellulose is that they'll actually staple The netting on the back of that uh knee wall in an attic and then go back from the front side and blow it with their open spray on the front that stuff goes through them fibers of that net and when you get done with that it's just clunk clunk we're trying to see if we can get help to some of these folks get to get an exemption because that would be absolutely a shame to make that builder in April go up there now and have to sheet the back of that there is zero airf flow on that zero zero zero but it wasn't one of those things that they split hairs on because none of these guys showed up at the code hearings but it would be a shame to make someone go up there and spend one dime or one minute more time time and again when you look at all the pipes anything you anytime you can spray or blow a wall solid you're going to do the best for your customer that's capable at this time here's a nice contrast between a corner with the wall spray or it could be blown fiberglass and then the typical install of a bat where somebody just kind of Pops it in there I mean it's like night and day and the only thing with the cellulose is if they do wall spray cellulos most of the guys know now that it's not a good idea even with the reduced amount of moisture to cover it up right away so most of them put in a big barn fan they got to chain them to the house now apparently the kids are using them for something but if you look at the stuff there's last week's Milwaukee Sentinel paper right up there and it's just chopped up newspaper I'm I'm out in the wintertime all the time on homes with no heat whatsoever not even a salamander or a space heater they just get done doing the wall spray cellulose it might be zero out we come back in 2 days pull it right out of the wall and the OSB ain't even damp because it just dries water vapor goes everywhere there's less of it so when we poke those things the OSB sheeting is just fine most of the cellulose guys that are reputable and are really concerned and most of them are they're going to leave the poly off for at least a day or so and give it some dry time so if a builder decides to go that route you got to schedule some dry time into your schedule you can't have the wall board there as fast as you would with bats if we look at spray Foams there's two basic Styles closed cell and open cell the closed cell I like personally especially when we use it in a rim joist area or in a band joist because of its inherent nature if we got 3 in of that material we're going to have a class one vapor retarder at 1.0 or less at 3 inches and it looks and it makes a nice job again when we look at it we're we're pretty fortunate in Wisconsin that our Commerce Department gave us an exemption for that right they don't require us to do the 15-minute thermal barrier over the top because they know you're doing the best thing you can for your housing stock by using the foam we get the nice air sealing and we get the moisture protection for our wood building materials so that's why Wisconsin code does not require a vapor retarder in the boxill area and they don't require the thermal protection on the spray foam when it's in the rim joist above the bottom of the floor joist so I'm often after the guys don't be dragging it too far down on the wall here because the code language actually States the exemption is for the spray foam material above the bottom of the floor system so I always try to get them to spray the seill plate right because a seill sealer is never airtight so we want to bring that down and lap it on to the front of the seill sealer to get the best use of that material but we don't want them to go crazy and have it all over so the guy says hey wait a minute that's above the floor anyway it's great use there uh in lower basements we're seeing people stick framing walls knowing lots of these lower levels and they're using spray foam there now and that works pretty good and then they're coming in putting the fireplace whatever they got to do but we got a lot of guys now there what's happening because you don't want a vapor below grade you don't want to do full three inches down there with urethane because now you're going to have a class one vapor retarder in both directions and normally below grade if you're typically doing 1 in outside you really you know you really don't need that much inside unless somebody really want wants to dial the building in but you got to be careful if you select spray foam but for low grade don't violate the vapor retarder issue is it that much of a problem even though it's bonded tight to the well uh it could be because the the concept and the reason that there's such a big discussion about the polyethylene is that we know that through bad Landscaping people not you know refilling in the soil that settles around the excavation we're going to get some water eventually behind the sheet foam potentially and we want it to be able to dry into the building so if you lock it on the face it may start to aggravate or go after the adhesion part of it now I haven't seen any of that happen yet because I'm watching this real careful because in Appleton a lot of guys are blasting the spray foam on the basement walls we're out even poking right through the foam with the moisture meters not even picking up anything but remember 90% of the basement problems are usually a drainage problem in the first place so if we remember gravity and get the water away from the building we probably won't have have a problem now the only issue that I have with spray foam again this is above grade Chuck and I are always out just shooting oursel in the head over some of this here we got a nice case where they did the uh the flashing bat if you will they were going to attempt some air sealing up on top here they didn't quite get it that's supposed to be done after the ceiling sheetrock is on it has limited value here they should have done the spray foam up here after the lid was on then we would be able to weld the drywall at this point and provide some real good air seiling now we see a lot of folks in Appleton doing 2x4 framing now with urethane foam this is a some engineered studs the guy was even doing 24 in on Center did urethane foam complete 3 in we got the closed cell and the open cell it's nice if you can get the vent shoots in and get a nice uh bat up in there and then spray foam over the face of the bat to give you a nice permanent wind baffle in the Attic where I really like spray formam is into bonus rooms right all these folks doing bonus room homes I'm up in the in the garage ceiling now looking at the back of the knee wall there for the bonus room and normally if we just fiberglass bat that or even if we sheeted the back the bottom is usually open here right so even if we got loose fill in that bonus room or in the garage ceiling we got vented sofit right there on one end of the garage truss and we got vented sopit on that end and the weatherman blows through that sfet right underneath our loose fill or fiberglass bat under the floor system in that bonus room and right out the other s you have to remember a bonus room that starts out as a floor truss goes all the way to the outside top plate you really need that blocked off down there to simulate a box sill you wouldn't put fiberglass on a box sill and then just hang vinyl siding over the top of it when we have vented sofits and vented attics in the garage it doesn't matter how much loose fill material you pile up against the back of that knee wall the air blows right through there we're fixing them all the time this is a fix on a project where the guy did fiberglass bats they had a little house wrap stapled on it made some attempt but the bottom here was wide open with fiberglass bats I like spray foam we do a lot of inground swimming pools hot tubs I like to insulate my duck work below grade with that here's some of your lightweight one pound density foam like the iine where they got to overspray it they let it expand way past the face of the studs then they got to cut it off that has about the same thermal value as a fiberglass bat but great air sealing characteristics you got to be careful spray foam is an excellent product but it's not an end all this is a a real difficult picture to get a handle on but here's a chimney in the middle here a masonry chimney going up through a vaulted ceiling and the guy thought if he just spray foamed about a foot of this open cell foam on these parallel cord trusses that he would have Perfect protection against moisture damage in the Attic holy cow when you're doing that lightweight one PB density foam that stuff expands so fast you really have to be careful because anything that gets by the face of your tongue and groove or your drywall without anything up here as an actual air barrier it's going to be in the attic and we got a lot of those that fail because the guys think if they wave some foam that everything is good foam is an excellent product but if you're doing lightweight where it expands so fast and they don't want to get too much down here where they got to cut it all off and throw it out you really got to be careful on vented addicts that's that's brutal when you look at the closeup on the open cells that they got to cut off it looks a little chopped up but it's really not as bad as it seems they blow it it expands past they got a Ginsu knife they got to slice it off a lot of them actually have the old uh board files like we use in Body Shop business they just buy a Ginsu knife here and attach it to the end and they got their air compressor and it just saws back and forth but the deal is we often beat these guys up about wanting to take a lot of green credit you know but they'll have 50 bags of that chopped material that they haul the landfill so I'm wondering how green is the thing but now last week for the first time ever I was over in near lacrosse and I found all of that up in the attic of a guy's house they actually threw all this up in the attic there was like a 5 foot honken Pile in the corner of the attic neatest thing I've ever seen now also in basic sealing insulation we got fiberglass loose fill cellulose loose fill and then we got the whole Radiant Barrier stuff too that's bouncing around most of the time I'm going to see loose fill fiberglass in an attic I don't have a problem with it the issue with fiberglass is just like it is with a wall it provides the protection by keeping air still from moving that's why what I think is more important is how we baffle around our perimeter of an attic if we just simply put a fiberglass bat over there and then put it underneath a vent choot and then blow our loose fill shoot those fiberglass bats pop right out we see it all the time slides the loose fill about three or four feet on a slippery poly for energy star and federal tax credit anywhere in the United States if you don't have a permanent wind baffle in every truss cavity to the outside something rigid we have to degrade the EIC Insulation at least all the way around the perim so when people often come to me and they say Hey Joe should I buy a big raised heel truss I man my answer is well maybe I see people buying a twoot etic raised heel truss right so now they got a a a truss that deep that they can get two foot of insulation over the top plate but then they just stuff the overhang with a fiberglass bat so the weatherman blows right through the vento right through the fiberglass material and then right into the loose fill I'd rather see him have a 412 pit pitch roof with a cardboard vent shoot or something to prevent the air from blowing through the loose fill remember if you disturb the air in loose fill the value goes down it ain't how much you got necessarily is what is it doing so often times people miss the boat they think the energy heal truss is the cats meow it's excellent but for what some of these people want to pay and then just to stick a fiberglass bat in there now you're giving a weatherman a bigger Target to blow through more of the loose fill that's not always the good answer now also remember that we want to have the markers up there right so that anybody goes up there they can see how much is in there well we had an accident over in third Stevens Point a while back that box of those attic rulers fell out of the back of a guy's truck and they landed right on the pavement and then they all got bent cuz when we were doing a little when we were doing a little quality assurance I got my measuring stick I got my tape ruler in there and it says 20 Ines here and I'm only like 14 over here so I pulled it back and this is the box that fell out of the truck and when they hit the pavement they just all kind of compressed a little bit now the guy took a big time beating I mean oh this guy took a beating he probably had 50 or 60 houses in the Stevens Point Area I thought okay residential construction is brutal but hosen people is one thing all right I mean that's just simply a class of hosen people they just simply compressed the ruler so when people went up there they thought they had what they paid for now here I again think that this is more critical because this is the the only thing I see wrong with addicts is that we usually just stuff a bat in there right well the weatherman just blows them right out we're out in Lake Wago fixing them things all the time out and hunt in the country where the wind is blowing non-stop it'll pop them out it'll pop them C them plastic vent shoots right out throw the stuff three or four feet right in the Attic that's got to be permanently in place there here's the one out in Lake Winnebago I just fixed a couple weeks ago look at the bats here the vent shoots came right out the little plastic vent shoot they popped out look at the fiberglass bats here been in there for about two years and the loose fill it'll just slide it'll Mound right up looks like a pile of snow right in the attic and the only reason we were there is because the customer couldn't air condition the house in the summer but when I'm in the house with the infrared camera in the middle of the summer the ceiling on the whole side of the lake side of the house was just glowing red honk and hot well I said I'll bet you 100 bucks without even crawling up there all the loose still slid back well when we shot with an infrared thermometer on the ceiling it was almost 92° on the sheetrock so it was just radiating in Non-Stop the air conditioner almost ran to midnight every night so we can't expect this material to do its job if it's got air moving through it Loose fill material has to be kept in a rigid position so that the air doesn't move that's why vent shoot should always be full width never this girly man stuff here full width vent shoots so that the ventil air goes up over the loose fill it's not supposed to go through the loose fill it's supposed to go over the top and that way we keep the roof sheeting uniform in winter time so we don't get those patterns on the frost look at that this stuff was all over I mean the whole side of that building all of them bats were all blown out now what can you do with that you don't have to go nuts here and you don't have to go Bonkers just think about it every insulator that I've ever run into has got this bendable C board baffle here so it's made to bend to fit regular 24 in on Center truss spanning so you can fold the sides down staple them and you stick it out over the complete top plate and then fasten it to the top now when the weatherman blows all that ventilation air is going to go up over my loose fill I'd rather have that on a 4in heel than two foot blowing right through we got to remember it's the dead air that provides the value and the minute the air is moving down goes the value so there's all of these little things that we can do to make things work here's a builder that happens to have every customer burning candles so now wherever he's got the three inches of top plate right it's cooler up there so the candle soot always sticks up there in the corners so I went out and helped them fix this house but this is what he does on his new construction now what this guy actually does is uses 2 in of sheet foam as a baffle here does his is full width vent shots as you can obviously see but to provide a permanent wind baffle here he's got a template at the shop and they cut all these blocks ahead of time and they're fast these guys are fast you don't ever want to be framing a regular house next door because you will look mercilessly foolish they'll have all this cracker stuff done and you'll still be putting a sheeting on anyway they just drag that 2inch foam down past the top plate above your F channel line what he's trying to do is warm the top plates here and provide a permanent wind baffle and look at how anal they get here I mean they're sealing all of this stuff up but that's why no matter what his designs are if it's a 6-in standard heel they're never going to spend a dollar on a raised heel trust because the benefit is not there this provides massively more benefit than this much of a heel you look on the outside the guy doesn't use sheet foam on the whole building they just do that for the wind baffle and for thermal imp Improvement on the top plate that helps too if you got to put the truss Clips on the inside right they should always be on the outside the truss Clips right the the code only requires them to keep your property tax down because the deal is heaven forbid the roof flies off they wanted all the land in one pile so it's easier to clean up but we put them on the inside now we got this big metal radiator sticking right out into a vented soft panel ladies call all the time hey I got that ghosting that's about every couple of feet boom now we're up in the attic fixing that stuff

Channel: theMBAonline

Views: 42,504

Keywords: building, Science, home building, remodeling, home improvement, waukesha, milwaukee, wisconsin, building science, subcontractor, hvac, energy, efficiency, dwelling contractor, building codes

Id: 2zgs0zmUte0

Length: 102min 5sec (6125 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2013