Stuff We Like - Dryers

Here are two products related to dryer venting.

1. We've installed a couple of dryer boxes. The dryer box saves you from having your dryer duct turn into a kinked up nightmare.

2. The Heartland dryer vent closure is wicked ugly. But it does an excellent job of sealing against air leaks, not to mention gross critters. The good news is that you can paint it. The bad news is that even if you paint it, it's still fairly ugly.

Some Guy Goes Green

This one's a rant.

Unfortunately for environmentally conscious builders, the rising publicity surrounding 'green' building has coincided with the collapse in building construction across the planet. Usually I don't think that personal experience can really indicate a trend. Nevertheless, it's hard to ignore the fact that 2 years ago, 'Some-Guy Construction' was throwing up (almost literally) speculative pseudo-home junk with break-neck speed. Now 'Some-Guy Construction' has re-branded himself as 'Some-Guy Green Construction', and is installing edible paint. Or some guy just got laid off his old job, and started a new company, 'Some-Guy-Could-Use-A-Job Green Building'.

I'm not impressed.

I'm pleased that the public appears to be demanding more environmentally responsible construction. However, most consumers have an unsophisticated understanding of building systems. Consequently, I've seen a tremendous hoopla over eliminating Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) from paints, and not much else. In my opinion, low VOC paints are desirable, and are now widely used. But there's bound to be a diminishing return in going from low VOC to no VOC.

Indoor Air Quality is made comparatively worse by low VOC paints (albeit briefly) than with non VOC paints. But put this in the context of most homes in NJ, where open-cavity returns duct-work is the norm - continously sucking soil-gases from the crawlspace or insulation from the attic. What about water in basements and crawlspaces? Most landscaping is graded improperly, and gutters concentrate bulk water in bad spots allowing bulk water to enter basements. The majority of homes have improperly sealed attics, which commonly leads to condensation (and mold or rot) on the roof sheathing. None of these problems are rare. In fact, these are problems that Tay River Homesmiths, Inc. fixes everyday. (All right, I spelled the whole company name because when you google our company name you get a lighting store, and I don't know how to make it stop, but am hoping that this might help.)

But isn't this a red herring? Ok, maybe a little. But if we're concerned with health, shouldn't we place non VOC paints in an appropriate broader context?

And if we're concerned about environmental impact, the overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that our number 1 priority should be reducing energy consumption. Sure we shouldn't use toxic stuff in homes. But perhaps we should be willing to use a small amount of bad stuff, if the net reduction in energy, or improvement in durability can be justified.

Air-flow Diagnostics for Cavemen

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation does some pretty fun stuff. Here's an interesting test to measure airflow at registers and exhaust vents. Seems so obvious once you know the 'secret'.

For those who find the myriad of government-funded energy subsidies confusing, here's a link to a state-by-state breakdown of the programs.

Well what about unicorns?

I'll just give it to you straight. Dry rot is a myth. Excessive dryness doesn't cause it's own special kind of rot. While this might seem intuitive for the layperson, it's a pervasive misconception among those working in the building industry.

From Paul Fisette's article on wood myths, " Wood needs 4 things to decay: water, oxygen, food (wood) and favorable temperature".

Dry is good for buildings. Water is bad for buildings.

Building Codes Made Free and Easy

Last September the San Francisco Chronicle published this brief but fascinating article about Carl Malamud. Apparently Malamud had been putting building codes on his website, and allowing anyone to download them, entirely free of charge. At the time it seemed like an interesting story. However, I felt pretty certain of two things. First, that Malamud was probably some sort of crackpot. Second, that his website would most likely be shut down shortly after the article's publication.

Looks like I was wrong on both counts. Here's a link to Malamud's wikipedia entry, which describes him as a "technologist, author, and public domain advocate" who was a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory". Furthermore, his website appears to be going strong, with dozens of building codes posted, including New Jersey's.

Energy Efficiency and Taxes

With the federal stimulus package there's been a lot of talk about government money being used for energy improvements. A lot of builders (including Tay River) have been focused on energy efficiency for a long time. As a teenager, my first construction job was for an insulation contractor in eastern Ontario. We'd occasionally work on R-2000 homes, which were part of a high efficiency program for new construction at the time. It was a really interesting era – dare I say revolutionary. But the advances in knowledge spawned by the R-2000 program (and similar programs that popped up in other northern climates around the world) were probably bitter lessons for folks who had their homes messed up by them. Our current advanced understanding of building science partly stems from flaws in these early programs. To borrow from the language of politicians - mistakes were made.

The problem is compounded by a history of 'energy efficient' products and programs possessing the faintest hint of charlatanism – see my earlier entry on replacement windows, or check out Henry Gifford's analysis of the (absence of) energy efficiency in the heavily marketed LEED certified buildings.

Many top builders are apprehensive about tax money being thrown at a problem as complex as energy efficiency. Using one example, adding insulation to the walls of homes will generally diminish the wall's drying potential, which can cause rot or mold. This is not to say that you shouldn't add insulation to older homes. But, as with many things, competent planning and oversight are important.

Here's a link to the Energy Star's explanation of the new tax credits for energy efficiency. The good news is that the standards themselves look like a step in the right direction. Frankly, they probably wouldn't have caught my attention had it not been for a sales rep at a local lumberyard grumbling to me about how the high standards mean that most windows no longer qualify. (You mean you can't offer tax rebates by selling leaky crap and telling people that it's energy efficient? Waaah!). So if the program is enough of a nudge for homeowners, we could see some pretty positive changes.

Thanks for reading,
Jesse

Heat-loss Diagnostics for Cavemen

Despite my letter to the Journal of Light Construction last year, I think energy audits are tremendously valuable. We've recently started using blower door tests and thermal imaging on some of our work, and so far, the results are excellent. Heat loss in buildings is weirdly unpredictable, so if you have access to a company with these tools, I recommend using them. Fine Homebuilding recently ran a great article on audits, so I won't elaborate too much on this.

Nevertheless, there are a few crude tricks you can use to tell if you're pumping heat into the outdoors. One of the easiest involves donning winter attire and craning your neck skyward.

In principle, your roof shingles should be approximately the same temperature as the outside air. Why? Because your shingles are on the outside of the house, specifically outside of the insulation. In winter, if the shingles are significantly warmer than the outside air, your home is losing heat. So what diagnostic tool can we use to determine if we have heat loss? Do you really have to carry a thermometer around your icy roof in January? There has to be an easier way!

After a snow-fall, most shallow-pitch roofs should be covered with an even layer of snow. In below freezing temperatures there should be very little snow melting. Pockets of thawed snow are generally indicative of heat loss.

What about roofs where snow doesn't uniformly accumulate such as those with steep pitches, or metal? In this case, you can check your eaves and gutters for large icicles. See wiki's ice-damming article here.

To complicate matters a bit, keep in mind that roof ventilation is designed to lower roof shingle temperature. So while hot patches and ice-damming almost certainly indicate heat loss, the reverse is not always true. A well ventilated roof may mask heat loss problems.

Earlier this week, with the temperatures hovering around freezing, we took a few photos of local roofs. Keep in mind that all of the photos below were taken in the same hour.
In this one you can see a ton of heat loss through the eaves. It's tough to air-seal and insulate above exterior walls, so this is a common leakage point. Notice the garage (which is unconditioned) has fairly uniform snow coverage except directly adjacent the house.

Who knows what the heck is going on here? This is roof should have a lot of snow coverage – it has a really shallow pitch.

This is a commercial building, with a slightly steeper pitch. Here you see how roof penetrations can cause heat loss.

__________________________________________________________________________________

We've had a chilly winter, and partly as a result, our clients are requesting a lot of insulation improvements. Proper insulation upgrades require two strategies. The first is air-sealing. The second is the addition of insulation.

You knew it was going to get self-serving at some point. Here's a place we air-sealed a few weeks ago, and photographed in the same hour as the other homes above. The house is within a few blocks of the *bad* examples. This was only a couple of hours after we added insulation to the attic – strategy 2 for those paying close attention. In other words, these results are largely from the air-sealing part of the job, not the addition of insulation.

Another view from the front of the house.

Rear of the same house. Chimneys are often a major source of heat loss, so this is kind of cool.

So could our results be from proper attic ventilation instead of proper insulation? In my opinion, probably not. I wouldn't say that the house is particularly well ventilated, there are 3 small gable end vents, one of which is pictured above. That's probably less than the attic square footage:vent area ratio of the 'bad' houses pictured above.

Every job is different – different size, different scope, caveat, caveat, caveat! Nevertheless, on this job, the total cost for air-sealing and adding R20 cellulose – essentially doubling the existing R value - was less than $5000.00 for over 1600 square feet of attic space.

Thanks for reading,
Jesse