Stucco Problems

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 it.  Everyone used it…and everyone uses it.  But it sure has changed and what we put it over sure has changed.  We used to put the stucco over brick and stone.  If things got wet so what?  Nothing to rot.  And the walls were not insulated.  Lots of energy flow.  Lots of energy available for drying.  Lots of drying.  Life was good.  Then we started to put stucco over wood.  Wood rots.  But it does not rot unless you get it real wet for a long time.  We didn’t get the wood real wet for a long time.  And more importantly it was real wood.  And we didn’t insulate the walls.  Lots of drying available even if the real wood got real wet.  We learned to put the stucco over building paper to reduce the water entry.  Life was still good.  Then we did three things.  We stopped using real wood.  We insulated…a lot.  And we stopped putting the stucco over building paper. Big trouble...