The Truth: Metal Buildings And Moisture

hey what's up everybody welcome back to the channel today we're going over the truth about condensation and moisture inside a metal sided building so as many of you guys know that are watching this metal sided buildings are quite notorious for having condensation and moisture or a lot of people refer to it as the building sweating and the reason for this is the same reason as when you take a cold glass of water outside in the hot summer time it condensates it's that warm hitting that cold so what we have here is essentially the opposite we have the warm air hitting the cold metal and it's doing the same thing guys it's form forming condensation inside the tie deck and now the way to stop this everyone's going to say is to put up a vape barrier well that's all hunky-dory but you don't want to put up a vapor barrier when you have moisture inside your wall because you're essentially going to be trapping that moisture inside there that wall because we have a vapor barrier on the outside now if we put one up on the inside and there's moisture in there it's trapped in there and it's not coming out so that's what we've been fighting guys a reason that we had so much moisture in this building was the time frame we closed the building in heading into winter it was cold we were trying to heat it without insulation and we're using a propane torpedo heater and come to find out that for every gallon of propane that you burn out of one of those heaters that is not exhausted outside you're putting a gallon of moisture into the air guys so we didn't know that none of this was insulated so we're already getting moistures on the metal from condensation and now we're just pumping moisture into the air so we had a ton of moisture in this building guys so what we did once we realized that we had a problem is we went to the box store and we bought a dehumidifier right away so we've been running the dehumidifier non-stop for about three months now and i bet we have pulled almost 50 gallons of water more like 30 gallons just out of the air inside this building guys it's unreal another thing that we did is we finally got this wood stove installed that you see behind me and now wood stove is a great source of a really dry heat wood stoves dry out a building really really well and the reason for that is they're drawing air into the unit itself so this wood stove is now drafting into it so it's pulling all this moisture in and it's also putting out a really dry heat that's why a lot of the times you see people with a kettle on top their wood stoves to put moisture back into the air well we didn't exactly want to do that we're trying to dry it out so we got this thing going and we finally have got these walls dry guys and the reason we know that the wall is dry is because we've constantly been pulling down these bats of insulation checking checking for mold checking for moisture checking to see if it's drying checking to see how wet it is checking everything you know you can pull down this insulation and get the whole wall dry inside and then put it back up and check it four days later well it condensate it all back up again so it's kind of just like a cycle and you have to get everything done at once so what we did is we pulled down all this insulation and got this wood stove as hot as we could get it guys and we dried out this wall right here in the living quarters and now like i said we had this as hot as we could get it the walls dried out with all the insulation down we put all the insulation back up and we put this moisture barrier back up on the outside all in one fluid movement guys this was an all day project and now what that did is that gave science zero time to form any moisture on that wall we put up this insulation and we put up a piece of plastic right away to stop any moisture that's going to be going through there i think the two main factors that contributed to our moisture problem the number one factor to start with was when we enclosed this building we enclosed this building going into winter guys so literally we had this whole thing shelled in with no tie back on it just stick framed and it poured out guys it rained for probably three days so then we saw a break in the weather and we thought hey we better get this thing dried in so we wrapped the whole building in tyvek well that was great then it started raining again so now we've just trapped the rain that was from a week before inside the building well you know it's raining and it's dripping a little in here but it's fine because it's mostly dry at least from the the overhead element well and then we got another break in the weather and we thought hey we better put a roof on this thing so we got climbed up there and put a metal roof on it another layer of containment and then it started to rain again so it's still really wet and we only have tyvek on this thing no garage door lots of ways for moisture to naturally enter the building well we got another break in the weather and we figured we better put some siding on it so what we did is we rained and then closed the roof in and then it rained a lot more and then we closed the side in and then it rained again and we put all the doors and windows in so we trapped a lot of moisture in this building guys in hindsight it probably wasn't the best thing to do but that's the way the cookie crumbled with our time frame we weren't about to wait any longer to not move into our building so that was a lot of the reason that we had moisture another big factor is we didn't put up this moisture barrier right away guys if we were to put this moisture berry up as soon as the insulation was installed i don't think we would have been fighting this the whole time i think the problem that we ran into was that these little gaps that are going to be in between the insulation in the wall and we're talking you know a half inch where it's not quite sealed that is letting that moisture go from this side of the insulation and pass through to where it stops so we need something to slow the spread of moisture that type is going to release moisture but we need to stop that moisture at a faster rate than that tyvek is releasing it and that's what we did we went around and put up this two millimeter thick plastic staple it all up everywhere it's nice cheap plastic and the reason for the nice cheap plastic guys is if we have to tear all this off because we still have moisture issues it's not a huge break to the bank i have been going around and checking everything and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to where the moisture forms to where it doesn't some spots you think it probably shouldn't be here and it is there in other spots you think oh it's going to be wet right here and it's bone dry so i can't figure out how it works but these metal buildings are gonna have moisture issues if you don't properly address them the one surefire way that i've kind of established after going through all this to prevent the moisture would have been a spray foam insulation now the spray foam was never in the cards for us just because of how much it costs but if you can afford to do a spray foam insulation it is an excellent alternative or in addition to normal fiberglass bat insulation the spray foam insulation is professionally installed it adheres to the wall it expands it prevents moisture it prevents mold and it prevents sweating it's a great option but like i said we just didn't have the funds to go for it at the time i'm going to try to keep you guys updated on if we have any further moisture issues after putting up this vapor barrier but for the most part i think this is going to totally wrap it up once summer comes through this building should dry out significantly we have not had any hot weather since we have enclosed this whole building in short of running this wood stove so once summertime comes around it should be fine we just didn't close it in at the best time the timing was not ideal but you know it is what it is we're living in a camper so we wanted to get out of the camper and move into the building that we built another thing we did is we also vented our attic space when we initially sealed it in it was not vented so we did cut a couple vents up there and that seemed to help out as well but to be honest i would have never guessed that it would have been this bad guys it really amazed me that there was this much moisture just lingering in the air so i really hope this video has given you a little bit more insight into the moisture issues that metal sided buildings seem to have in some ways that hopefully you can prevent them on your build in your project if you haven't already please like and subscribe down below and we'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Laid Back Living

Views: 85,324

Rating: 4.8528638 out of 5

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Id: R72wDM8eeKg

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021