Tips for High Performance Home Floorplan: Designing Out Condensation, Odors, Discomfort, and Hassle

welcome to the home performance classroom again my little corner over here where I've got my layout of an imaginary house which is based on real houses but I want to talk about um locations and design and how you can start to think about using the layout to help your performance so one of the things that I like to point out to people when we just do a quick plan review is that the closets in your home become very important because they are an extra layer of insulation and I know this because we lived in a tiny house on wheels for five years and everything in a tiny home is built into the walls and therefore tiny homes have a much bigger incidence of condensation and mold growth because you've got all this extra insulation that air is able to get behind so you've got hot moist air getting behind things that are insulating that wall surface and now we've got cold surface condensation so in this case we can see uh we come in the front door here on the entry and we've got a storage room right here there's two ways to lay out the storage room we could put the storage shelves here along this wall and this wall or we could walk in here and we could put the storage along this wall and this wall that is an exterior wall and you want to try not to pile a bunch of boxes and a bunch of clothes and coats up against exterior walls likewise in this bedroom if we were to put the closets in this bedroom here instead of over here now I'm going to layer a bunch of clothes right up against that exterior wall and that is the most dangerous place in this house especially because it's on an outside corner which is going to be even more of an insulation issue the super nerds Among Us call that thermal bridging and I want to just tell everybody like I tell my clients thermal bridging is often way over thought we talk about it way too much because in real life it just does not matter um feel free to comment below if you're one of the super nerds and you want to pick a fight with me about that um I have lived in several houses that have thermal bridging and it's just not it's not important because it's a big pillow it's a giant marshmallow Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that you're fighting against it's like not there's no sharp edges on this in real life so closets here inside the conditioned envelope completely are great um that is going to be no mold condensation issue at all and so when you walk into this closet it will never smell musty and I've had that complaint from people who move into a brand new house the closet smells musty after a few years and it's because of that issue it's not just uh about old homes now also bathrooms this bathroom right here follows our rule for uh ventilation we've got the door here we have the toilet in between the door and the shower we'd want our exhaust vent to be right here that way when it turns on air comes in under the door and goes past the toilet on its way to the exhaust vent which is where it's making a path for and it's grabbing as much stuff as possible as it goes across the room however it breaks another one of the rules which is don't put bathtubs on exterior walls it's just risky it's gonna cool off the bathtub faster so you won't be able to take what my wife and I tend to do sometimes when it's like the kids are asleep and we take an hour-long bath together just hanging out like it's a hot tub that's a cool thing to be able to do but you have to be able to have the thing hang on to its heat to do that so again this one on an exterior wall you don't really want that when you start separating toilets or what we call a powder from the shower now we have to have an exhaust fan in both places so thinking about that and by the way when I'm specking ervs I'm generally talking about 25 CFM in a shower 15 CFM in a toilet also having a central area like this is great we can use a central return for this and having a Chase Way knowing where you're going to have your mechanical system if it's going to be in the storage closet if it's going to be in the laundry if it's going to be in the Attic over top or in the crawl space underneath um and how exactly that's all going to be connected to your duct system which I'm linking on screen now about how important duct systems are for high performance homes but all of these layout uh considerations are things that you'll want to interface with your architect The Architects are great at thinking about flow and lifestyle and like usefulness of spaces I am not an expert in all that that's why we consult with Architects like we did on our home that I'm talking to you from right now before we built it because like we don't know about that stuff so once you get that straightened out and you get this performance design kind of into the space avoiding things like a giant great room with a vaulted ceiling that's going to separate two wings of the house without any way of getting duct work across it then the happier you'll be with the performance of the actual systems that you get installed in there because of course you want to limit the amount of equipment you want to limit the amount of Maintenance that you have to do on that equipment and how difficult that maintenance gets um you want to limit the number of filters you have to change that's one of the things in my house I have a Lessons Learned video coming soon but I've got 15 filters in this house that I am in charge of and if I get hit by a bus it's gonna it's not gonna be pretty uh somebody has to do it so um I'm still writing the manual for my house and that is a message for all of you who are designing high performance homes it's it takes some work so use your brain to think through the planning use your brain to make sure that the inspections and the testing happens during construction so you don't have accidents that happen after the facts and you're like whoa this is a lot more expensive to deconstruct the house and fix all this stuff now because some problems are designed into homes and that is the saddest story for people who are like me who test tones for a living so please do comment below uh or a question if you have anything to uh to add I will address those personally like And subscribe tune in next time [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Home Performance

Views: 33,166

Keywords: home performance, building performance, high performance, hers rater, bpi, proof is possible, home diagnosis, building science, corbett, lunsford

Id: rhDIc0dXOR4

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023