Energy Hog – Attic Air Sealing

The first of our home improvements projects to cut the energy usage in the home was air sealing in the attic.  Now I have to admit that when I started doing the work in 2005, I did not fully understand the importance.  Now that I inspect homes or follow up on insulation contractors’ work, I see firsthand how important air sealing work really is.

A simple explanation of what air sealing is, it is the work performed on the home to reduce the amount of air infiltration into the home by sealing small and sometimes large gaps and crevices.  I utilized the DO–IT–YOURSELF Guide to Sealing & Insulating with ENERGY STAR to perform the air sealing in the attic before installing insulation.  These holes in the home can waste approximately 25% of the typical homes heating and cooling cost and is almost always the most cost effective improvement that can be done to most homes to reduce the utility bills and increase the indoor air quality (IAQ).

Air sealing not only helps reduce your heating and cooling costs, but sometimes more importantly, air sealing helps to improve the indoor air quality and durability of the home.  Tighter homes typically have less dust because not as much gets pulled in through these cracks; they are typically more durable because excessive air and moisture does not enter the walls or attic that could cause mold and rot.

The goal of air sealing your attic is to make the ceiling as air tight as possible to stop any air movement.  Now most home owners don’t think of their attic being full of holes.  However it is full of them, plumbing stack penetrations, wires, can lights and other ceiling fixtures.  If you hold your hand over these holes, you can feel the hot or cold air from inside your home making its way into the attic, costing you money.  Because as this conditioned air leaves your home, unconditioned air is being pulled into your home through other gaps or crevices in your home, typically in the basement (more on sealing the basement in a future post).  When your home has low levels of insulation, it is easy to find these holes.  However if you have good levels of insulation, you can find these holes by looking for discolored insulation, as most insulation types are air filters and the discoloration is a sign of air movement.  So review the air sealing guide, buy a few tubes of caulk and cans of Great Stuff and seal up those holes and start saving.

Here is a video series on the Fine Homebuilding magazine website on air sealing your attic that is worth watching, or check out other attic air sealing videos on YouTube.

Why I Hate My Job

Well not much really.  But let’s be honest, would you have even had interest in reading if the title was “Why I Love My Job”?  So this is basically my year in review of working for Conservation Services Group performing home energy audits and to share a little more about my job that I did not get to share during the panel discussion at the AIA Ohio Valley Region convention in Dayton, OH last week.

So let’s stick with the title and what I do not enjoy about my job.  First, 90+ degree days, it makes for very uncomfortable working conditions as the attic is 100+ degrees.  However that is a condition of the job and is only an issue of comfort.  The hardest, as well as worst part of the job is delivering news to customers as I was reminded of today.  First is the customer that already has decent levels of insulation and based upon calculated paybacks and program goals do not qualify for very attractive incentives for energy efficiency improvements through the utility rebate program that we do work for.  I get a lot of eye rolling, but that is easy to handle, just lots of additional table talk which can add a lot of time to an appointment that only allows 4 hours to inspect, test, generate a report and present it to the customer.  However the absolute hardest part about my job is telling a customer, especially an assisted customer that is getting free work done that cannot have any air sealing or insulation work done until combustion safety issues have been resolved such as back drafting water heaters, or high CO levels.  This can really tug on the heart strings when you are in a home that has little to no insulation and you can see they would greatly benefit from lower utility bills and truly cannot afford to make some of the repairs necessary, yet their income level is not low enough to qualify for weatherization assistance that would actually make these repairs.

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Building Science Sunday: Ice Dams

Extreme cold weather in our area and recent blog posts from experts such as Energy Vanguard out of Georgia about snow melt patterns on roofs (Snow on the Roof – The Poor Man’s Infrared Camera) reminds me of pictures I took last year of homes that had different snow melt patterns and ice forming on walls and over windows.  It even reminds me of a story from a friend who is a regional representative for one of the largest spray foam insulation manufacturers about a customer that was pretty upset that he had icicles on his gutter, even though they insulated the underside of the roof deck with the spray foam product.

Therefore it is time to resurrect the building science posts and go to my favorite resource for up to date building science research at Building Science Corporation.  So enjoy some advanced research on ice dams.

BSI-046: Dam Ice Dam

By Joseph Lstiburek

Ice dams are big problems because they often lead to water leakage into building assemblies, and more seriously, to falling ice that can be fatal (not kidding here) and to the weight of ice leading to structural collapse of roof overhangs and the shearing of deck assemblies when large masses of ice fall on them.

The strategy to control ice dams is fundamentally straightforward: keep the roof deck below freezing when the outside temperature is below freezing. Pretty easy you say? Not necessarily, as we shall see.

Historically, we have tried pretty much everything except the right thing to control ice dams. In New England where I live, older buildings use metal “slip” surfaces to get the snow to slide off the roof, preventing the ice dam from occurring at the roof edge.

Continue reading the article at buildingscience.com

View some of our own ice dam photos on our facebook page.

Basement Finishing

A recent article in my local newspaper titled “Building a better basement” explains the difference of using traditional stick framing and drywall with panel systems for basement remodeling projects.  So, naturally red flags went up for me when I saw the title.  Primarily because what we have done in the past that we thought were the right things to do, are really not and are causing lots of problems today.  Especially the four letter word “mold”.  I think back to when my father finished our home when I was younger putting up the sheet of plastic (vapor barrier) before applying the paneling to the insulated stick framing, not to mention the rotten wood I found when tearing down finished basement walls in my own home.  If you are wondering what I may be afraid of, check out a couple of studies on insulating existing basements I posted last year.  (Building Science Sunday: Basement Insulation)

I want to take a little time and explain some of these systems mentioned in the article a little further and make a couple of suggestions.  Now the good thing is that all the companies mentioned in the article all agree that the basement has to address any moisture issues if any first.  Because if you have water problems in your basement, it doesn’t matter how mold resistant a product says it is.  If the material does not get a chance to dry and is not exposed to sunlight, mold can grow on almost any surface.  So lets talk about some of these systems.

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Gathering of Building Science Minds

This week is the annual Building Science Summer Camp hosted by Joe Lstiburek and his company Building Science Corporation.  Now if you think you can buy tickets for this event like the USGBC Greenbuild or the AIA convention, think again.  This is an invitation only event, with some of the industry’s leading building scientists handpicked by Joe himself.

Now I would definitely not expect to be invited (not this year anyways) to such a note worthy week of learning on the latest thoughts in the world of building science and elbow rubbing of the industry leaders.  But I would have to say that for someone who is moving into the industry, this would be a great confirmation of one’s work and contribution to be invited.  So for the time being I will have to be satisfied with the fact I was able to attend one of Joe’s great lectures and pick his brain at breakfast, as well as work with his partner Betsy Pettit on Ohio’s only LEED Platinum home.

Like Allison Bailes from Energy Vanguard, we will have to sit in our office glued to the computer screen watching as the tweets (#bscamp) come in from its attendants about some of this week’s topics such as spray and foam board insulation, IAQ etc.  So if you’re interested to know more about the Building Science Summer Camp, check out the Energy Vanguard blog post (I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Building Science Summer Camp!), as Allison pleads his case for an invitation to next year’s event.  Or do as we do and check out some of the thousands of papers that Building Science Corporation has published and posted to their site, free of charge.  It is a great resource for some of the industry leading research for building performance.

-Josh