Foam Free House - Is this Silly, or should we ALL BE BUILDING LIKE THIS?

the builds here today we are visiting my buddy Luke messieurs job say where he's got a house he's building for someone who's got some chemical sensitivities and we're gonna see how this house is being built foam free it's something I hear more and more these days there is hey Luke what's up Dave good to see you so if you don't know Luke Mezger homes been a friend for many years great builder here in Austin Texas and Luke is building this house for someone as I mentioned earlier that has some chemical sensitivities why are we meeting on the outside if we're talking about a foam free house great question Matt so it all starts on the outside if we want a foam free house on the inside that means we have to do all of our air sealing on the outside so something I've been doing for years and uh yeah it not only can you put whatever type of insulation you want to on the inside but yeah it frees you up for many options so there so our mutual friend Doug Cameron was the first to market on this concept he calls it caulk and block I don't like to point out like going to the zip-t point out it sounds a little more official sorry Doug does but it makes total sense this is a this is a commercial detail that they've been doing for years and it's finally going in going into the residential market you know so this is zip sheathing if you're not familiar it's a OSB structural sheathing that has this green facer that's waterproof already and then what is this gray fluid yes so since our field is taken care of we have to detail the scenes and so zips liquid flash liquid flash right so you can either tape it but there's some downsides to the tape you have to really and rely on the installers to do it right now you got a person you got to pressure it right you got a roll well clean dry immediately roll it no just no wet no what no dogging on it but this this is more foolproof yeah it can go on wet and it's a little more expensive than tape right correct but it can go on wet which is going wet you can go on dusty it's great white is perfect correct correct and then I'm seeing that you're doing that on your on your sheeting nail holes yeah you know the other competitor has some fun videos of the nail heads leaking so it only takes a little bit of time to just cover cover your bases in that room you don't have to do that no but it's a good idea now what is this black stuff tape that I'm seeing down there yeah this is one of my favorite details so you can also use the zip liquid flash to connect your sheathing to your foundation but I have found that your slabs are always perfect right it's gonna be waving in and out it's going to be dipping up and down and so you can find yourself using a whole tube of caulk that's quite expensive and only go three linear feet so starts adding up really quick so I discovered this tape it's the siga finnstrom F tape okay it's a fleecy surface and that's important I'll mission that later but it's it sticks to concrete and they they their instructions say it does not need primer interesting this you you are not getting that off and we did not use primer that's stuck man that's impressive yeah and now why the fleece what do you like about the fleece so this place in our in our market we do a lot of what's called underpinning will come in at near the end of the project kind of would like a seat a cheap stucco it should smear coat of mortar just to cover the fountain cover this and this fleecy backing grips it so if you were to use a slick tape here oh man your underpinning might flake off of that but this is gonna kind of bonk it's gonna bond to that fleece tape so you get this comes in four six eight twelve inch links you can get it as long as you want so if that fleece came way down here not a problem I've also seen these guys make it with dots in it so that your concrete would come through and you could also bond to your concrete but to mention the reason we do this this is a very leaky detail right yeah yeah you can this is just nice and airtight super airtight but right down here you don't know it but there's tons of air that gets leaked through here so if we can get that air barrier all the way down to the foundation I found out the hard way on that one on a call back ten years ago I thought for sure my my foam underneath there what are they called still sealer right right was gonna do it and and I had an air leakage call back on a house that was really embarrassing for me it was really hard to fix and very expensive to fix so by doing this so in other words you're doing this air sealing on the outside right so that we're not as reliant on foam on the inside yeah and that's kind of a common fallacy people think a lot is that you know I'm gonna airtight I'm gonna spray foam my house to be airtight like we've both seen photos of where that foam separates especially going in between stud Bay's I'm not gonna you're not gonna get a lot of air sealing in stud Bay foam insulation and speaking of air sealing now we're in the garage this is a attached garage we've got a house beyond us and attached garages are not great for indoor air quality because we've got cars and we've got paint and gasoline and engines in here and carbon monoxide but what Luke is done is number one I don't see any I don't see an equipment in here right there's no there's no furnace in here right there's nothing that's gonna connect air from the garage but check this detail up at Luke's done he's run his zip system sheeting on this common wall between the house and the garage and then he's also running all the way to the ceiling line now what's above us here Luke is their house above us here this is a second floor a patio deck so we have two sloped the ceiling so if you see those sister 2 by 12s once for the flat ceiling for the garage the other ones a sloped floor for the patio it's a flat roof basically with a deck above and then how did you get your framer to that detail that looks good man a lot of tacos yeah no I would have liked it run a ledger I run the zip first and then run a ledger and then hangar these in here but the engineer didn't like it so we had to really cut and caulk all those little bitty pieces in there to get that air seal as good as we could yeah you're not quite perfect because you've got sister joist right there could be a little leakage in there but it's way better than what we normally if I had to do it again with this detail I would run a bead of caulk along one of those before I sandwiched it to the other one in that same plane as the wall smart so Matt this this is your exterior wall yeah a lot of people don't think that but yeah the exterior wall was on the other side of that guy that's right I need to treat this coming to ride on through because this is outside and then it's got a bunch of bad stuff you mentioned in that air yeah we don't want that air in let's go inside I'll meet you in there oh wait Matt what oh well forget him he's off one more thing I wanted to point it out about the garage is that you know we're gonna park a hot car in here that's off gassing all the nasty stuff out of the exhaust we've got gas cans we've got lawn mower equipment we got paint cans we don't want any of that stuff in our home so not only are we gonna air seal but extra measure we do is install this motion sensored exhaust fan so on motion either when the garage door opens up or you walk out here it's okay if it goes more than what you want it to but we can program it to go on for like say 10 minutes at 60 CFM you know every time we trip it on motion so one extra step we want to get all that nasty stuff out of here it's gonna help with the indoor air quality let me catch you back up with that Oh Luke I like seeing those two by twelves all the way up where your handrails are gonna go thanks man yeah my trim carpenters aren't gonna have to guess where those are yeah he likes coming to your job I bet now what's up with the painted framing in here it looks like someone came in and a whitewash bomb exploded in this house pretty much so you mentioned earlier my client had some chemical sensitivity concerns so she hired an outside consultant and one of those recommendations that came from him was essentially putting a kaolin clay coating over all the framing a kale and clay coat kale like the salad not like the salad kale and it's a type of clay correct and it comes in a fine powder and you mix it with water to get the right viscosity and then you mix it with a binding agent and in this case we used Roma bio paint which is a mineral base paint zero vo C and so that's what allows it to stick onto the wall so what's the benefit of doing that at this framing stage yeah so again we want to we wanted to coat all the framing in case there was any existing mold spores which obviously there are multiples everywhere everywhere and the clay acts as a natural mold inhibitor and fungicide so it's kind of a natural antimicrobial right instead of spraying some of the other stuff that's maybe has some chemicals in it to prevent that in the future this one is gonna be a more natural base correct any other benefits the clay you got beyond that to use your core the high grit buffer capacity there we go now got him interested the clay is gonna act kind of as an absorbent so in case that wall cavity does get a little wet in with a future water leak or whatever it's gonna help absorb that moisture and hold it and then release it over amount of time gotta very cool now I'm seeing metal cables and some black paint I don't normally see that in a row this was the first one for me so the client also had a couple of RMF concerns okay and so she talked with a consultant and this is what they recommend it so we electromagnetic fields right they're worried about those from the wires in the house in order to mitigate that the consultant recommended this armoured shielded romex it's very common in commercial industries but essentially it's a metal coating coil that all the romex goes through and then on top of that you'll see the black paint that's a paint combined with graphite and cobalt and that also does some things to help shield the magnetic frequencies coming out of our 110 power in our homes okay interesting now on the theme of foam free your stud Bay's are empty now but I am noticing that you've got zip our sheathing in the wall yeah I love that thermal bridge gap there so if we can wrap our homes in a sweater instead of stuffing that in our ribs we're always off to a good start right Steve require right so essentially we doubled or we increased by 50% the r-value of this section of the wall so I'm an r5 - an r8 8.3 yep so new T studs on this house right right okay so then you've got zip our sheathing but what did the consultants say about this because this is obviously foam this is Paulie ISO file right so we tried to eliminate all plywood all glue from this house as we could I kind of wanted a like guys this this thermal bridging is a big deal it's gonna pay off for the life of the home and you only get one chance to do it so because we're ventilating our stucco the consultant was okay using this and because it's mixed in a factory with a lot safer controls because he was comfortable with the fact that this is already off gas it's okay to put it in home okay so then on that same point though we do have a little bit of canned foam in here right this orange fire foam what was the consultants call on on that yeah so we've could have used fire caulk in these locations but we had to meet code right we can't we can't get a co in this home unless we make the inspectors happy so there's some some given pool given take push and pull with that but because this was a canned foam a one part foam he was okay with the fact that it's gonna cure and it's not gonna you know some guys not gonna mix it wrong in a trailer and it's gonna off gas for the next two decades yeah in effect the spray-foam guys end up being semi chemists because they're mixing Part A Part B conditions needed to be correct a 50/50 mix needs to be right all those things so he said let's eliminate all those variables knowing zip bars made in a factory that's single component okay so you've got empty wall bays but I'm seeing insulation on your ceiling already right gets me excited about your well this was a staging issue we had so we had a we have a low sloped roof and we wanted to spray all the framing with that kaolin clay and so we're like gosh how are we gonna stage this so we framed it we painted it and then to help out our insulators we got them in here first usually they're in here last but we got them in here first so that they can't they don't have to nobody cannibals and we can't they're ducks I didn't want them ripping on all of our duct work and our wiring so they were in here first they've got it netted good enough to where they're gonna come back in here in a few weeks finish the whole house do the touch-ups on the ceiling where it's falling down or where we had to run a plumbing pipe up through the vent well patch those get the netting back nice and tight so now you've got a conditioned attic all of your ducts are inside the thermal envelope and what's your insulation up there so this is now an AR gosh what is that our 4300 there's two bats rococo up there those are two by twelves we have yeah so Rockwell is a great choice for indoor air quality we've got no off-gassing it's made from rocks which is a natural material so you're in good shape because we're doing our air sealing on the outside so that same zip 2.0 detail I did with the the roof decking as well gotcha so let's talk decking then this decking on the floor does not look like anything I've ever seen before what are we seeing here look yeah this is actually called my magnesium oxide board or MgO for short and this is the first time for me to use it but this was also along the same thread of indoor air quality so so that's what this is extreme green creme green so this is a how thick as though this is a 3/4 inch material here's a sample of it and how did they get strength out of that it looks like glorified drywall to me yeah so if you can look in here with it through the muddy boot prints and whatnot you to see a grid pattern and what that is is a webbing of fiberglass mesh so in a net a fiberglass mesh on both sides and then one is actually in the middle of this that's how they get their structural rating for it gotcha so and then how did you attach it I'm seeing looks like a nail pattern on here is there glue attached as well there is you know I always prefer to use Advantech subflooring with their phone glue yeah that's a great choice but this was client driven and and they were really concerned about the glues and whatnot so we try to eliminate as much plywood out of this home as possible it feels pretty solid the two spots that I might have noticed a little bit more it is I always use an inch and 1/8 Advantech this feels more like a 3/4 inch plywood subfloor yeah or back in our production builder days we used correct 3/4 oh is 5/8 OS man you'd have a real spongy floor that was brewed we're we're drilling a wood floor to this so it's gonna give it a little more rigidity that's good and then we also used a 0 vo C glue to glue this down to the trusses now I notice that you varied though on your on your stairs right I didn't I didn't budge on that one I'm like stairs are important to me we're doing lvl stringers we're doing advanced AG you just can't get the call back on that is way too too prone otherwise now what's above us for roof deck then so we use 3/4 inch in GA on the subfloor and we use the 5/8 NGO from extreme grain on the roof deck interesting and then how did you air seal that I don't talk about the zip 2.0 so we use a zip liquid flash and trowel din all the joints gotcha and then a traditional tar paper or some other type of roof under yeah a nice and watered peel and stick for the metal roof we're putting on top of this gotcha man this is cool very interesting and then the walls are getting what for insulation so we're doing 100% rock wall okay yeah so cat house saw a rock wall in a whole house rock wall so sound walls outside walls roof deck we're putting a little bit in the in the truss space for sound dampening reasons down stairs interesting build man I'm impressed very very cool you guys are doing a great job over here any last comments on indoor air quality or any other tips or tricks for someone doing this would you do some of these methods again are you a believer afternoon this you obviously don't do this on every day not on ever this is my first home to go so extreme so you want to get your homes tight so that you're not bringing in outdoor dust or outdoor pollen outdoor humidity so we're gonna control it and ventilate it on our terms and not let the passive winds control our ventilation yes and then once we got that nailed we're going to make sure that we have a good filter in the HVAC systems so in this one we're actually upgraded that a little bit to a carbon a carbon impregnated media filter okay so we've got great filtration filtration and then there's probably some fresh air system that's right we have it right above you right over here we have our ultra air ventilated dehumidifier that is something I do on every one of my homes yes you've got a little 98 H there that's going to bring in fresh air with a timer system drop the pollen out nice big filter drop the humidity out so we can keep the humidity low man this is an impressive build they're very good stuff a lot to learn from this job guys if you don't know Luc follow him on the Instagram and stay tuned in our channel because Luke and I are shooting another video later today about his stucco install and some best practices you can learn from what he's doing over here Luke thanks for touring me man impressive building guys do a great job Fossum Twitter Instagram hit that subscribe button if you're not a current subscriber we've got new content every Tuesday and every Friday otherwise I'll see you next time on the build show [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 383,129

Keywords: emf mitigation, zip 2.0, matt risinger, the build show, construction, sheathing, mgo, subfloor, build

Id: KiZ1COo27NQ

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PseudoSecuritay]

Should have gone with much larger metal conduit, that stuff kinks up and is an absolute pain in the ass. Choose conduit that does not coil together, and make sure there is plenty of room for additoinal cables for future proofing since you are avoiding wireless altogether. Run power in a separate shielded conduit from data and other utilities. The RF paint would really only be for looks, and absorbing a miniscule amount of RF at that thickness. It is better against plane waves on larger surfaces to provide absorption vs reflection. Coating the wood with clay paint is an interesting idea considering the chromated copper arsenate in the treated wood. The exterior envelope of the building should have used thick aluminum foil-backed weather barrier to make a much better RF shielded environment inside. Does not seem structurally sound.