The one product I'd recommend for EVERY House!

oh man i got a fun episode for you guys in this box right here this is the future of construction in america we're talking air sealing today at my house today's video is sponsored by error barrier let's get going [Music] all right guys welcome back to my house under construction we got a really fun day today i met arrow barrier at the international builder show about three years ago and have used it on one other house prior to this but this is a technology that i think is a total game changer for a well-built house now i showed you this earlier this is a box a kind of an all-in-one box that's going to mist out a caulking system into my air that's going to end up doing all kinds of air sealing and all those micro places where my envelope leaks now let me back up a little bit and kind of break this down for you we want a really airtight house because when air leaks into our houses let's say this hose bib over here if that air were leaking through that hose bib through that hole in my envelope in my house air leaking in especially in the south would probably bring with it humidity and it would certainly bring with it pollen and other nastiness that might be outside and when it leaks in it might find a cold condensing surface like let's say the back of my sheetrock and that's where i find a lot of mold growth on remodel houses that are a decade or two old is air that leaked in and hit the back of the sheetrock and mold formed on the back of that sheetrock so by having a more airtight house we're going to be able to control our envelope so that we can have better indoor air quality better comfort and of course better efficiency now i get a lot of people that say houses are too tight but i would refute that and say no we want really good control of our envelope and then we'll bring fresh air in on our terms and we can filter it and we can distribute it check out my other videos on this house where i put a zender fresh air system in but on this video we're going to be talking about error barrier now this is kind of their 2.0 version this is a whole new system from them they're calling this error barrier connect i would call it error bearer 2.0 and basically inside this pelican case right here is a battery and a pump and a jar of sealant and what's going to happen is this system right here is going to aerosolize some basically a latex like product they're partnered with trimco and this product is going to get sprayed into the air it's uh it's kind of a latex uh aerosolized for like for lack of a better term and then while that's happening we're actually going to pressurize the house we're going to blow into the house and if you can think of a balloon getting blown up what happens if there's a couple pinholes in that balloon that balloon is going to lose air from all those pin holes now if that balloon happened to be your bike tires or your car tire how would you fix that you'd use fix-a-flat or you'd use slime maybe like i use in my in my kids tires and that slime rolls around the tube and seals all those leaks and that's basically what this arrow barrier system is doing we're going to pressurize the house the house is going to lose air from all those random small leaks throughout my whole house and this aerosolized is going to want to pressurize to the outside because we're pushing air through the walls and as those micro particles of arrow barrier sealants are forced through the wall they're going to start globbing onto each other they're going to start touching and sealing each other and what will happen you'll actually notice we drilled some holes in my door over here these holes throughout the whole envelope whether they're small or big will start to seal up we're going to throw a gopro on this when we do it so you can see it but check this out we've got a little small 3 16 drill bit a 3 8 a half inch and then a giant hole that we put a little bug screen on it that could simulate the miles of cracks that i've got on my house and we're going to show you how the aero bear system is going to actually seal over those very very cool system so that being said let's get started on the process and we'll explain a little bit more all right guys we're in process here's the fan this is the air bearer connect fan and this fan is so powerful they can do a 20 30 50 000 square foot building so my little uh 2800 square foot house no big deal this is pressurizing the house and now we can't be in there you can kind of see a big fog it looks like a san francisco bay morning in there that atomized uh caulking is basically in the air and it's finding all those leak points now a couple of things this is a big part of their system this is the brain right here and they've got air from a compressor going outside to the inside this is also providing power and then this little computer right here is basically the brain that's telling each one of those systems through a wi-fi mesh network what to do and then back here wirelessly this is kind of the control panel so earlier when we first started the fan we were able to look at the ach number on here and i did a pre-bloater test and got my house to up around one ach 50 they calculated at 1.1 so we were pretty close but now that we've been running for i don't know 30 or so minutes if you look down on the screen here my envelope leakage is already down to 0.38 that's crazy below 0.4 so it's twice as it's twice as uh leaky or half as leaky i should say as it was before and then that's the cfm flow rate through the fan now one thing that's interesting is going around the house and trying to see where some of the leaks are let's walk over the garage and i'll show you that so my garage to house connection i knew was gonna be a particularly leaky spot you know i've got these joists running from the inside the garage to the inside this wall separates my garage from my kitchen laundry room area and upstairs is my boy's bedroom so i used basically a froth pack of foam up there to spray foam that and when i did that i took my house from around a 1.5 or six ach 50 down to one but then when these guys came uh it's a little hard to see on the on the video it's going to be hard to see but see that piece of tape right there that's flapping in the breeze that's leakage right there that's leakage through that joist area so even though i spray foamed it there's tons of leakage through this area and all that really fine atomized latex caulk is globbing on to all those areas and all those miles of tiny cracks is sealing those up now they actually have a a little diagram with the bidding that shows if we were to add up all those holes i forget the exact number but it'd be like 40 square inches of leakage on the house and we're gonna tighten that down to a much much smaller area all right guys one more thing on this wall check this out if i shine my flashlight up here you can see all the particulate matter in the air this wall earlier when i ran my hand on it i could feel the air coming down from above and if i shine my flashlight on the zip right there see that white stuff that's actually the sealant the air barrier sealant that's not spray foam we did cut the spray foam so it'd be flush with the drywall coming out but that's an air barrier that's accumulating on that wall i think that there's actually leakage on the back side of that joist right there and that's where it's kind of streaming in and hitting the wall but you can look if you just look at that point of that flashlight there is absolutely uh sealant in the air out here that's accumulating so we're going to keep going here on the ceiling and keep getting the house a little tighter point one zero ach 50. oh my gosh paul we just tightened this house up 10x tighter than where we started today yeah in about an hour dang let's take the bloater off we'll go inside and show these guys a couple things paula and then i want to ask you some real specific questions we want to get into price we want to get into what to expect what kind of houses we should do we got a bunch of questions for paul we'll meet y'all inside all right the house has been opened up for a few minutes now probably 10 15 minutes right paul we're trying to get all that mist out of the air right yep yeah so it's been open for a little while it's safe to come back in and we can see what happened and i know for sure we did a bunch of sealing between the house right here in the garage where those joists came through but let's first look at this tester that we did uh this is just a sheet of plywood that we drilled some holes where i have some glazing not in yet and man look at that paul all three of those drilled holes up to a half inch look amazing and this big hole which was what inch and an eighth is what andrew wrote down here let's see what this thing looked like look at that that is wild that bug screen is thoroughly coated that's really neat and it feels like a uh kind of a latex caulking right yeah so it's a it's a water-based acrylic so it'll act just like a caulk and once it's dry it'll be just like you cocked it that's really cool can you can you show me or do you think you could see any of the other areas that got sealed over here as we were sealing we felt some air in the garage and if you oh yeah look if you look across near that top plate there you can see the white bead of caulk across the top there and i bet if we got on a ladder we'd see more of that on top on top yeah yeah oh yeah if you look up in this corner oh look at that there's a little light right there isn't it yeah there's two two seals there in between those pieces of wood creates a nice clean seal where was leakage originally that's interesting then yeah if you look at this pipe here in the bottom there's a pretty good size there was a big hole there at some point that was leaking pretty significantly and now it's completely sealed wow that's amazing so yeah you don't have to know where the seal or where the leakage is going to happen but arrow barrier is going to find it and seal it for you i'd be willing to bet there's a couple places that i drilled and missed let's walk around and see if we can find those places all right all right what do you see over here paul oh yeah look right here okay looks like there's a wire that was drilled that may not have been caulked or sealed oh you know what that's being drilled into my garage below and i totally missed that i didn't think that's out of the conditioned envelope yeah so if you look back in the corner there there's some pretty significant leakage in the corner but there is yeah like i said earlier these holes here oh there's a hole that got drilled and never put a wire in it yeah looks like he drilled it and then uh put the wire in a different hole after all dang again the beauty of aeroberry you don't know the leaks there but arrow barrier is going to find it and seal it for you that's wild and you know i was so cautious with my trades everybody that came on site i said look before you drill anything i need to know where you're going to drill we need to make sure that andrew's around so he can seal it with either tape or you know some kind of fluid applied and yet i missed some of those and all those numbers added up to a pretty significant number which meant i wasn't going to get my certification without you guys coming to help me with that yeah they said it you don't have to know where the leakage is we're going to use physics and we're going to find it and like we saw here whether you whether you know it's there or not aeroberry is going to seal it yeah for sure all right paul a couple common questions that i think people watching this may be asking first off why are the walls uh not sticky or tacky yeah so that's one of the beauties of arrow barrier only collects where there's leakage in the envelope so if you think about this house we put positive pressure on this house a pretty good amount of positive pressure and if you think of physics positive or high pressure is always going to try to move to low pressure so when we pressurize this house the air was trying to get out of the high pressure environment to the low pressure outside so it was self-identifying the leaks essentially as we were going so when we inject the sealant or atomize the sealant it stays suspended in the air and the air becomes our method of transport wherever the air is going and leaking out of the structure the sealant particles will go there and stick so the one thing that has to occur is if you think about the leak in the structure when the air is going to that leak as it gets close to the leak it's going to accelerate and change direction as it speeds through the leak when that happens it causes the sealant particles to crash into each other and start to collect on that leak now when you think about the drywall or the exterior sheathing here because it's part of the new the positive pressure plane there's no pressure differential so the sealant particles are not just going to stick to it because it hit it there has to be that change in direction and change in speed where the particles can collide and collect on that seal and you know the one thing about air barrier that's nice it's an inert sealant so there's no chemical reaction occurring there's no off-gassing that's occurring as the seal is occurring or seal sealant is collecting but it only collects where the seal or where the leak is going through the structure it's microscopic elves with latex guns basically going through the entire house and sealing it yeah so whether we do this at rough end or drywall you could come in and you could run the windows you could rub the drywall any vertical surface you're never going to know we were here because it's not going to create a film or a mess over everything and you saw in the prep work we covered any finished horizontals it's not because it's going to seal those horizontals but when we turn off the blower door it is going to settle a little bit and you can you can feel a little bit of tackiness a little tackiness under our feet but that's just because once we turn off the blower door any sealant particles that were left in the air fell down and a lot of they took effect a lot of them streamed out of the building too when we opened all the windows and doors yep yep all right paul talk to me about cost i know that's a hard one you've got 90 dealers around the north american market each one of those dealers owns your proprietary equipment and is setting pricing giving bids but can you give us any cost range on this sure so like you said all of our installers typically set their own price we don't set the price for our installers so it does vary based on markets and labor rates in those markets but typically there's two things that we look at when we start to price how leaky is the house when we start and obviously the higher the leakage that could obviously negatively impact pricing and obviously the tighter you want to go it's going to use a little bit more to material and take a little bit more time so it may change the price a little bit but on a standard application you're going to be looking anywhere from a buck to a buck 50 a square foot a finished floor area depending on your target and depending on the state of the structure when we show up that's not bad if you don't mind me extrapolating those numbers a little bit paul i'm just shy of 3 000 square feet so uh sean harris my local airberry dealer may have given me a bid of you know let's say three to five thousand bucks uh it helps that we didn't cover the floors we didn't have a ton of prep we just prepped the windows uh had this been a you know a more finished house you would add a lot more prep work and more money but for that kind of money a couple thousand bucks what a savings for me as a builder because now i don't have a guy going through the house and trying to tighten all this up for a day or two days and i still don't make my blower door test yeah and i don't get my certification and i would say for you know a lot of people watching my videos i get a lot of questions about hey do you know a builder in the middle of virginia or the middle of iowa that does your methods matt well you know with your service i can say well you know one option is find a good craftsman find a good high integrity builder who's good at their water management details because bulk water gets in forget it we got problems but if you can manage water in the house then airberry can come in and help an average builder manage air did i say that properly yeah and i mean the big thing to know is arrow barrier is not a fix for poor craftsmanship that's right we do not see a holes we seal leaks right so you know think about what the work you did or andrew did and managing all the holes in the house taping them or sealing them what if you didn't have that stress right what if you didn't have to micromanage it to that extent we still want you to build a really good house again this is not a fix for poor craftsmanship but you can take some of that stress off and you can seal the house really really well without all the expensive details or tapes or caulks or anything like that that's good stuff paul what have i missed man what what did we not talk about on this video that you want to get across the people watching us yeah i mean the biggest thing is any builder can use arrow barrier we will work with you and and build it into your build process as appropriate here in matt's climb zone and here in this house it's a conditioned attic space so we can seal it rough in as long as it's a conditioned attic we can steal it at this stage if you're using spray foam will come right after spray foam if it's before or if you're using fibrous insulation will come before that insulation is in the wall in more northern climates you're getting into more vented attics where we typically will apply after first coat of drywall mud and all the drywalls in place because typically that's where your primary air barrier is and then obviously in multi-family we want to compartmentalize those units from each other so we'll do it at first go to mud in those applications too the one thing to remember is bring us in and let us consult with you because ideally we're applying at your primary air bear here right contrary to the name aero barrier is not a primary air barrier we're an accessory or an enhancement to your primary air barrier so we want to apply at the primary air bearing here in matt's house it's obviously at the exterior sheathing so this was the ideal time to apply but in other applications that may differ so just work with us you know you don't have to be you don't have to be perfect at everything but consult arrow barrier and let us come help you get a little bit tighter higher performance home yeah that's a great point paul uh let me just break down quickly what you said which basically was in my house the zip sheeting's the air barrier or is my air barrier yep so air barrier sheathing is sealing to that outside sheathing so that's why we're in the stud phase in minnesota where they may be using drywall as the air barrier they're going to have their drywall and certainly their lid drywall in and then they're going to come in and do air bearings so that's going to change a little bit last question man when i first met you guys a couple three years ago i thought what a game changer for existing homes yeah if someone's watching this and has an existing home could you do this in a house that you already own or live in yeah so we there's a distinction that needs to be made obviously finished versus occupied is a very different setup but we're actually working with the department of energy right now through a building america grant and doing completely finished houses either apartments at tenant turnover or we're doing houses that someone just bought or sold in between people taking occupancy of the house and we're taking houses from seven ach to 2.6 ach and adding some balanced ventilation into it and bringing the current housing stock up to current code wow that is exciting paul and i would say that's that's probably the future of the next 10 years for your company yeah is uh you know existing homes at resale time the house is empty it's void of furniture cover all these horizontal services error bury the house and you could take a not very well built 20 or in this case 1970s house but this was before i was here yeah and bring it into really modern standards yep really really cool man i really appreciate you guys sponsoring this video taking the time to come out a new air barrier in my house guys this is an impressive product highly recommend it and they've got a network of folks around the country like my local dealership that i can call and get a bid price for my house so highly recommend is it yep aerobarrier.net you can find all of our installers across the country you can get more information about a project that you're building or if you're interested in doing arrow barrier in your marketplace you can also get signed up to be an installer build type ventilate right that's all it's what it's all about guys watch my other videos talking about tightness and ventilation guys if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button we've got new content here every tuesday and every friday follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 350,147

Rating: 4.9006238 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build, aerobarrier, building science, blower door, spray caulk, air seal, air tight, seal a house

Id: JYugiSwWoPk

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/muddy700s]

I use that stuff to seal around my bibs for maximum aero

[u/ZettTheArcWarden]

I use that shit in my ears to drown out all the haters and freds who cannot afford a 7 figure bike.