This House has some CRAZY Insulation Details

hey guys the build shows on the road today I'm outside Boston Massachusetts where I've been visiting for a couple days to attend a building science conference and while I was up here I linked up with my architect friend Steve basic now if you don't know Steve he's been around the high-performance building world for years and I've for years read his articles and find home building and journal like construction but it's so fun to actually meet Steve on a jobsite and see one of his jobs Steve how are you this morning snow buddy good morning it's so good to see you so what are we looking at Steve what is this chocolaty beautiful exterior in this house so the outside skin of this house is a thermally modified poplar that basically gets baked and treated so that into perform well as an exterior siding and become weather resistant insect resistant and then and then these black guy 1 by twos are some rain screen going on talking about the rain screen so the whenever you put a clouding on a house the couple things that you want to happen one you want to get rid of water as fast as you possibly can so providing that channel allows me to drain that water down and out as Joe would say yeah and then secondly it provides a nice air channel in there that promotes drying yeah I'm not a wall system so if things do get wet they can dry faster than you get wet and so this block tar paper is that your main weather barrier for house your air barrier for the house so underneath that is a zip R 9 panel that we used but because we're doing an open joint rain screen meaning that there's little spaces in between all the boards that we wanted to provide some UV protection to the surface of the zip wall so that we put up the black building paper and that allows us to provide a skirt under each one of our windows so that we can fully integrate that rain screen system to our window installation and this exterior is beautiful talk to me about this this finished casing around these these windows so I have the privilege to work with some really talented gentlemen and we took some of the thermally modified poplar and they made pre-manufactured a bunch of the window casings either side so we have our nice sloped sill and I don't know if you can zoom in and catch it but there's actually about our 4 degrees down I'm a head else oh yeah so sloping out its that down and out and I know a lot of guys when they talk about water management that they understand the down-and-out but what they don't understand is it applies to everything yeah so it's not about just getting water off the roof or getting wall off the wall it's about getting it off the windowsill getting it off the window head and getting that water down and out and getting it out of here beautiful let's go inside you got some really interesting the first thing I noticed immediately is you've got some closed cell on the walls in your frame a little unconventionally we've got 2 by 6 no pardon me 2 by 8 walls all right yes these are 2 by 8 walls they're on a 24 inch advanced frame so that we basically spread it out so that you're framing factor and the wall goes from maybe about 16 or 17 percent down to about 12% so that that swing in five or six percent changes the opacity of the wall system meaning the cavity space it increases it so gets me more insulation okay so we got two by eights on 24 inch centers outdoor that is that zip our sheathing in fact we looked at that outside where you can see that what is that inch and a half and that's continuous on the whole outside and then tell me about this detail we're seeing between the wall and as you get to the ceiling lid this is something that you don't see very often and I think you're kind of a pioneer yeah so it might be better Jakub we do swing over here as you can see it on that on the bottom ceiling it's a little harder to see but on the flat ceiling there we basically the question is is how do you connect the exterior air barrier which is the are nine zip panel to my drywall air barrier on the inside somehow I have to turn that corner yeah so how do I do it I put a three quarter inch piece of Advantech that we rip and I basically create an air sealing flange up there okay that I can take to the outside of the wall okay so your zip R is coming up that's all fully taped and we're an air tight episode and then this sits on top of that double top plate so that you can flap a piece of air sealing tape over top of that we take all the joints so basically that piece of Advantech is nothing more than a folded extension of my exterior like the way you say that and then that folded extension brings comes in a couple inches so I can run a parallel bead of acoustical sealant and then seal my drywall to it and then I run across the house and drop it down the other side and then your lid is totally airtight and I noticed there's no recessed cans or anything in the ceiling that will all get cut in and will seal that in later okay gotcha and now tell me what's going on with the phone cuz this foam is going up several feet and then stops and then it looks like you've got a black baffle up so we got the black baffle so anytime you put in a vented roof system and you put in any type any amount of insulation in an attic one of the things you have to be conscious of is wind washing and what window washing is is air coming in through the vent the vented soffit in arbitrarily degrading by insulation by cooling it right so I only want that here to go up into the vent and as Joe would say airs like a drunken sailor on leave right it just it down wherever they won't yeah well it goes forever so so by putting in the closed cell foam and sealing those vents trips to the soffit the air channel only has one way to go it goes in my soffit it goes up the back and it gets dedicated to the ridge vent and vents my roof system and you've got a raised heel trust so we can get raised up Trustin inches around the perimeter of this house so we get above the top plate we have adequate insulation up there so that insulation it's at the very top there or as it's coming up that's closed cell that is it's really not necessarily for insulation purposes as much as air sealing and containing everything air sealing containing everything and it also keeps you know sometimes I have seen I haven't seen out my job but sometimes the guys will reverse slap the vent chute and then they blow on cellulose and they actually blow it into the chute and seal them shut so the closed cell kind of takes away all of those problems and then I think you're just a nice sealed cavity to spray down into yeah and I don't see strapped ceilings a lot what's the purpose of the is won by what are they one way through one way through bezel on 12 inch on centers yeah so that's a New England norm we we can't get away from it it generally wanted to and the benefit of it is when you're doing a high performance ceiling to the tune of say our 60 80 or in fact in Royse also we're up at around our 110 Wow so we really packed it in there you got 30 inches of blown in it's a blown insulation that could accumulate to about four or five thousand pounds yeah on the roof system so how do I attach that to the roof truss system well by putting the strapping in I could take my 24 inch on centers and reduce that Center to here we're doing 12 inches but you could go to eight inches or six inches you do whatever you want that's at that point to enhance the strength of that attachment of the drywall hey Steve next I want to talk to you about the windows in this house these look like some beefy impressive not normal windows what are we looking at here so I like to call these the Ferrari of the windows the window market right these are really great to look at they come in a wide variety of sizes they're basically built to order so they can accommodate almost anything I want to do as you can see we have a window here that measures almost 11 feet by 6 feet and it's a triple glazed fixed unit that comes in with a u value of 0.12 so that's roughly in our six our seven window at that size so just double the r-value of most windows oven users as a reference right and it's not about energy efficiency when when it's we need to understand that that although I get energy efficiency as a by-product from my high performance homes it's about delivering a home to my clients that meets their expectation at write the client that is buying this house is everything he purchases is a value question yeah right so for example when they're sitting here and they're having Thanksgiving dinner they don't want to have their backs to a window and feel cold drafts yeah they want to have that comfort level knowing that the surface temperature of that glass is adequate enough that I'm not losing my body heat to warm it yeah and that's what this is about it's about comforts not about energy efficiency I tell people that if I can sell good health comfort and durability I get energy efficiency as a byproduct of all of those decisions so I don't need to sell energy efficiency and the guys that are out there trying to sell it don't nobody buys energy efficient sorry they buy value and durability they buy value in health they buy value in comfort nobody buys a BMW or Mercedes because the gas mileage Steve tell me about this European tilt turn windows we looked at one over here a minute ago tell me what the action is of those what's the benefit of that tilt turn so the beauty of the European tilt turn windows is one you get a really good air ceiling performance in these windows they're basically a reverse casement because they're tight they're tight there's a triple gasket seal yeah there's a big jasmine and they're pushing into you that push into it and for those of you that are familiar with air tightness when you do an air tightness test typically on a house you just do it you know a positive or negative test well when you do a passive house project or one of my projects we do a positive and a negative touch thing now the reasons of that positive blower door right because a positive blower door test is going to push all my windows against the weatherstrip and so it's going to seal them but what happens when the wind is blowing on the outside and tries to push the window open how does it perform that yeah well doing a negative pressure test on the air blower allows me to identify any of those problems so knowing that I get a positive blood or in a negative blower door test that are virtually the same I have complete understanding and confidence in these windows that's amazing Steve let's wrap this up tell me as we finish up I'm curious with the final insulation values of these walls and these ceilings are just because it's it's something that every builder in the nation knows typically what they're our values are what's this wall on this in this room ceiling assembly so in the wall assembly we have our nine on the outside we duplicate it with about an hour thirteen two inches of closed cell and then an additional five and a quarter inches of rock wall which is our 20 23 yeah that's 23 36 45 r45 in the walls Rockwell closed cell which is a flashing bat which I've done and then zip our sheathing inch and a half on the outside that is incredible and the things again while it is super energy efficiency in the wall system understand that because of the r9 on the outside and the closed cell we limit our wrists on the durability sali defense by creating a really warm wall to the outside there's no condensation in the wall issues and frankly there's no vapor barrier issues right because we've got that closed cell we have she's go stop vapor from flowing through this we don't have to use plastic on the inside or some expensive membrane or whatever and we have the rain screen on the other side so if anything comes in on the other side its drying from both sides of the wall the reason for the rock wall is not only do I get a slightly higher r-value per inch but it doesn't sustain mold growth yeah that's right right it's inorganic it's a fireproof insulation beer foam so I get the best of all worlds using that and then how about our sealing lid here but this strapping you're gonna come in later and blow this in with a blow crew how much are we talking about it will come and blow that in and typically for my roof systems I say vent until you can't vent and typically we would start at our 60 which is about where this one's going to be and there's no ductwork up there and there's really very few penetrations through that ceiling there's no recessed cans and one or two pancake boxes that you might air seal but that's it well have a few things going through there but they'll all get sealed on the backside and we'll be I mean it's expected that this house is sub 1.0 man that's beautiful Steve you rock man I'll tell you what I was gonna do both videos but this is a great video on its own let's go to the other house and make a second video that will publish next week so if you want to get ahold of Steve if you're interested in seeing more of his work there'll be a link in the description below this guy is an incredible architect who works all over the nation even though he's based here in Boston so link to Steve's website below I'm also going to link to a jail C article or two of Steve's which is how I first got to know him so you can see some of the details he and my builder friend Jake wrote a great article together in jail see I'm gonna link to that as well so you can see some of these details Steve's done an incredible job on this house and big thanks to Jim that shoreline builders for letting us walk this job and shut down the compressors for 20 minutes while we filmed guys follow me on Twitter Instagram hit that subscribe button we've got new content every Tuesday and every Friday otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 1,272,185

Keywords: insulation, passive house, architecture, rvalue, boston build, closed cell, open cell, rockwool, zip system, zip r sheathing, matt risinger, the build show, jordan smith, air sealing

Id: N7BqObGA6ss

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018