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This has nothing to do with a pony or Nebraska1.In general there are two main types of fire issues: fires emanating from the interior of a building and fires emanating from the exterior of a building… Read More
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Don’t get hit by a wave1….Don’t get too wet…and…Make sure you dry…The best way to design for floods is to build in places where you don’t get floods. Yeah, right. We have gotten pretty good at… Read More
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Five Integrated Pest Management Strategies to Consider Pests include insects and animals that have a harmful effect on humans, food or living conditions. Pests include insects, termites, ants,… Read More
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Dirty Harry Does Insulation[1] “A good insulation always knows its limitations….” After all these decades thermal performance should be pretty non-controversial. How complicated can it be to… Read More
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One of the most common foundation approaches to residential construction are concrete basements. They can be insulated on the inside or the outside. The basis of all basement foundations is as… Read More
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Where Does The Vapor Barrier Go?You have a concrete parking garage under a building. You have to insulate the underside of the structural slab between the building and the parking garage. The… Read More
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Liquid Flow Due to Capillary SuctionOne moisture transport mechanism that is often overlooked in building construction is capillarity or capillary suction. Capillary suction acts primarily to move… Read More
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Sometimes obvious things are not so obvious. And when you miss them, they can be expensive….and embarrassing. And often the embarrassing is worse than the expense….”that was dumb”…”.that hurts”…and… Read More
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We have hurricanes, we have floods, we have wildfires….It is hard enough to deal with these as it is…but when we also want high levels of thermal performance…We are going to look at roofs…not because… Read More
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Wall assembly design and construction needs to consider rain, temperature, humidity as defined by the hygro-thermal regions, annual rainfall and the interior climate classes as environmental loads… Read More
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Yes, we have done unvented conditioned attics before….but mostly with spray foam and rigid foam insulations. But we do not have to use spray foam and rigid foam insulations. You can use almost… Read More
Very Cold, Cold, Mixed-Humid, Marine, Hot-Humid, Hot-Dry/Mixed-Dry
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Concrete slab-on-grade foundations should be easy to insulate…but they are proving not to be easy to insulate. We were here more than a half decade ago (BSI-059: Slab Happy, April 2012) and again a… Read More
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To state the obvious…controlling rainwater entry is the single most important factor in the design and construction of durable buildings. Let me repeat….controlling rainwater entry is the single… Read More
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We looked at exterior spray foam previously (BSI-048: “Exterior Spray Foam”, April 2011). Exterior spray foam typically is used in commercial applications. Most residential applications use interior… Read More
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Crawlspaces continue to be a mess ever since we decided to insulate them and put air conditioned buildings on top of them1. We were here before (BSI-009: “New Light in Crawlspaces”, May, 2010)…but… Read More
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So what do candles and joints (aka “doobies”) have in common with baseboard electric resistance heating and heat pumps? Read on Macduff[1]…Over the years I have been in countless buildings that… Read More
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An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal.By Joseph W. Lstiburek, Ph.D., P.Eng., Fellow ASHRAE The issues with stucco are pretty well understood and we have discussed… Read More
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Ten years ago (“BSI-024: Vocabulary”, October 2009) I issued a challenge regarding water control layers asking folks for ideas regarding a performance metric for water control layers. I suggested… Read More
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So does the air control layer go on the outside or the inside? How about both sides? How about one in the middle? Do I want one water control layer? How about two or three? Yes, yes, I know…if… Read More
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It is pretty weird to dig a big hole and drop a building into it. A one story house with a basement is really a two story house that you dropped into the ground burying one story. Think about it…… Read More
Very Cold, Cold, Mixed-Humid
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Remember the good old days when we had filters right at the single central return that we could easily change (Photograph 1). We didn’t have to go to the furnace or the air conditioner. The filter… Read More
Mixed-Humid, Marine, Hot-Humid
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Everyone is running around sealing the outside of buildings and the term “air barrier” has gone from obscurity to buzz word in less than a decade. But if you look at the physics we are sealing the… Read More
Very Cold, Cold, Mixed-Humid, Marine, Hot-Humid, Hot-Dry/Mixed-Dry
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First there were the Etruscans. Then there were the Romans. Then there were the Goths. Then there were the Medici. Then Leonardo1and Michelangelo. Tuscany survived the barbarians and the Black… Read More
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Weed[2]…..we call it “weed” because it pretty much grows anywhere “in the wild”…outside. Did I mention “outside” in pretty much uncontrolled conditions. Wow, have things changed. Folks are moving… Read More
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A building is an environmental separator. In fundamental terms its function is to “keep the outside out” and the “inside in”. The outside provides “environmental loads” as does the inside. When… Read More
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A little bit of history…back in the day the United States was known for its manufacturing prowess[1]. In high speed and high volume production “punching[2]” was and is the least expensive method of… Read More
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…articulaciones* y esquinas y penetraciones...much more stylish…much more interesting than English. The battle to control water entry is won at building joints and corners[1] not so much at… Read More
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How can you take a system with thousands of years of history and screw it up? Easy. Keep improving it until it does not work. Babylonians used it. Egyptians used it. Greeks used it. Romans used… Read More
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The problem with flood damaged buildings is that the damage is done by dirty water. Everything imaginable and unimaginable is in flood water. We call it “black water” or Category 3 water. It… Read More
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“Code world” is an interesting place where seemingly convoluted language is used to express simple concepts in clearly complicated ways. The reasons for this are based on “legal” principles and the… Read More
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It is just shocking, just shocking that some molecules have a positive electrical charge and a negative electrical charge. Water is a molecule with one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms held together… Read More
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In 1666 London burned – the city, not a building. It was called the “Great Fire of London”. In 2017 a building burned, not the city. It is being called the “Great Fire of London”. Lots of… Read More
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The best strategy is not to have an ice-dam in the first place. We covered this way back when (BSI-046: Dam Ice Dam, February 2011). It is pretty straightforward on how to avoid them with a clean… Read More
Very Cold, Cold
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Some folks hate foam insulation. The rigid board stuff, the spray stuff, the flexible stuff. They don't like the blowing agents, they don't like the fire retardants, they don't like the chemical… Read More
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Buildings and cities age – as do humans. Sometimes we get better and sometime we do not. Some of us eat healthier and get more exercise. Some of us do not. Some of us look better as we get older.… Read More
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We continue to insist on putting ductwork in attics. It is a dumb idea from an energy perspective – a couple of HERS penalty points at a minimum - and we continue to see condensation on the ductwork… Read More
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"If you want to save cash . . . flash" "Don't be a dope . . . slope" We are adding balconies to everything and people are forgetting that balconies are more than decoration but also have to… Read More
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Huh? Blasphemy. Yeah, well, in some assemblies, it is actually a pretty good idea. The most famous "double vapor barrier" of them all is a classic compact flat roof. Check out Figure 1. The roof… Read More
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A wall is supposed to keep the outside out and the inside in. That is the way things are supposed to work. Check out the “perfect wall” (Figure 1). We have our water control layer, our air control… Read More
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With the “perfect wall” we were here way back when (BSI-001: The Perfect Wall). The perfect wall has four control layers outside of the structure:a water control layeran air control layera vapor… Read More
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Maybe not. For years I have said that dog won’t hunt1. I have come around. The engineer in me likes tools. I can’t help it – it is a genetic defect we engineers are born with. With therapy we… Read More
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Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious. And sometimes the not so obvious becomes obvious. For example installing leaky ductwork1 in a vented attic is a pretty dumb idea (Figure 1). It leads to… Read More
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We have long wrapped our framed buildings with a “layer”. What we called it and what we make it out of has changed over time. And now the vapor permeance of it needs to be re-thought. How low can you… Read More
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Vitruvius had it right 2,000 years ago: “…if a wall is in a state of dampness all over, construct a second thin wall a little way from it…at a distance suited to the circumstances…with vents to the… Read More
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Sometimes we make easy things hard. And sometimes we make hard things easy. With continuous insulation and punched openings both things are true.The physics is easy. A wall has to control water, air… Read More
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Things have evolved considerably since the Eisenhower and Diefenbaker years. Hutcheon2 taught us about air flow that decade but it took more than a half century to get it right. We needed air control… Read More
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For all that we know about roofs–which is a great deal–sometimes things can get confusing. I am more than partly to blame for that. I wrote a lot of the code language dealing with both vented and… Read More
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Personally, I think the most beautiful floors in the world are wood. I like the look. I like the feel. Even Greenies like wood floors because apparently wood grows on trees.1Wood floors have been… Read More
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So what does “net zero” mean anyway? And what is the difference from a “zero energy house”? A zero energy house is “off grid” and makes all the energy it needs on site using renewables. This is not… Read More
Cold
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"linings and warmth . . . "1How do you insulate uninsulated masonry buildings on the inside? Carefully. There I go again with the obvious. It is trickier to do it on the inside. But it is often less… Read More
Pagination
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