How Good is It? Zip R-Sheathing plus spray foam insulation

hey guys welcome back to another episode of building a better south I'm Zach woods project manager for artisan signature homes we're back at the fine home building house today in Norton Commons we've just got all the our sheathing put up and the isodyne spray foam installed and today we're gonna be doing a blower door test on the house to check for the leakage and make sure that the house is up to energy standards and far surpasses those I'm joined here today by Erik George with building performance group Erik tell us a little bit about what we're going to be doing today sure so today what we're gonna do is an air leakage test on the house and we're going to use a blower door system which basically depressurize as the house and we're gonna suck air into the house with the blower door and then use infrared cameras to go around and see wherever those air leakage points may be so that we can have them sealed up a little bit better so awesome well let's get set up and get started all right let's do it [Applause] [Music] all right guys we have the blower door system set up in the front door fans set up pressure gauges linked we've done our baseline pressure measurement and what we're gonna do is basically turn the blower door on and get the pressure difference in the house to negative 50 Pascal's of pressure and what that basically means is we're gonna simulate 20 mile an hour winds hitting the house from every angle at the same time so this is a building science standard test that we do to test air leakage in houses when we get this the pressure difference up it's going to give us an air leakage rate in the house and an average air leakage rate is usually about 1/2 CFM of air leakage per square foot of total house so for example this house is about 3,800 square feet so an average number would be something like you know 17900 M but a completely spray foam towel should have a leakage rate of about half that so I'm gonna go ahead and turn the blower door on and see what kind of numbers we get here so on the pressure gauge the number on the left is the pressure difference in the house the number on the right is the amount of air leakage in the house at a pressure difference of 50 Pascal's so again this house is around 3,800 square feet or so including the basement and we're getting a leakage rate somewhere in the mid 600's it looks like right now so I'm gonna let this average out it's going to be around 632 640 it is a little windy outside so it's gonna affect the numbers slightly but mid 600's for a sized house this this big is a really really good number so now what we're gonna do is let this run for about 10 minutes get a good pull on the house it'll pull in some cold air from the outside and wherever there's leaks throughout the enclosure of the house we're going to use an infrared camera to go around and see where those leaks are [Applause] [Music] here's a couple of places I'm talking about you've got a support structural beam here that's penetrating the exterior wall and at the bottom of that beam it's been foamed but there's a little bit of a gap here this air is coming through same thing at the top right there and then on the i' joist where this electrical line goes up into the into the eye joist there's air coming out at the top there as well as over at this hole here at the top so the foam contractor is just going to try to get some more foam in there to seal that back up and take care of it and then obviously the top of the door here needs to be foamed as well we use minimal expansion foam so it doesn't bow the door and cause problems with it opening and closing [Applause] [Music] alright so we just wrapped up doing the thermal imaging on the house we found a few areas of air leakage in the house pretty minor stuff that just needed to be cocked or foam touched up and we've got the blower door running again to see what the difference was and we started out around 650 to 670 CFM we've got it down to about 566 570 right now so we've chopped off about another 100 CFM in the house so the house is really tight and it goes to you know all everything that they put into this house the the our sheathing zip wall system liquid flashing the good caulk and seal package Louisville spray foam did the la polla icing in spray foam that's in the walls it all adds up and it makes this house a really tight efficient and comfortable home I want to thank Eric George again at building performance group for coming out here and doing this test for us today I think you're really far surpassed all of our expectations just wanted to recap again real quick what we've done here on this house that helped achieve some of those results we've used the hueber are cheating from zip system and also the liquid flashing from huber wood products the zip system has a half inch foam backer board on the plywood which gives you a continuous envelope around the home and then you've got the liquid flask which is applied from a caulking tube and smeared and pressed into the seams between the plywood and overall the nail heads gives you a really nice tight seal and once dry it's a little bit of a rubberized texture really expands and contracts with the weather all that we also use the zip flashing tape from time to time same idea you peel it off roll it on air seals the house but this product is what gave us the far superior performance along with the Aisin ela pola product that we use as our insulation alright guys one last thing I want to show you I've got Ben Mon smih from Louisville spray foam insulation then tell us a little bit more about the product we used in this house so we use and have been used in pretty exclusively ice Aniela polas open-cell spray foams the big reason why we choose them is they make the safest foam on the market at 3 and 1/2 inches it's an airtight barrier so that allows us to really build a high performance house and not have any problems that you would with fiberglass or cellulose Thank You Ben we really appreciate you all did a great jump all right guys thank you for watching we will see you next week until then you can follow us on Instagram and Arneson signature homes [Music]

Channel: Building a Better South

Views: 37,652

Keywords: norton commons, fine homebuilding, blower door, tight house, Artisan Signature Homes, icynene, insulation, pre drywall inspection, lapolla, open cell, spray foam, huber, zip wall, liquid flash, r sheating, new construction, louisville custom builder

Id: UR1y968xQMI

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2019