Electricians & Cable Contractors – The Great Swiss Cheese Makers

So have you ever hired an electrician to install a recessed can light or bathroom vent fan? Or what about a cable contractor that installed additional cable hook ups in the house that required working in the attic to run the new cable? Have you ever gone up into the attic after they finished their work? I mean why would you? It’s not like they installed a new tile back splash, there is nothing really worth looking at. Or is there? Well it is my experience that very few home owners even go up into their attic, let alone after a contractor has been up there. Therefore most homeowners don’t know that the electrician or cable contractor made swiss cheese of their attic.

I have inspected hundreds of homes that have clear paths of travel through the insulation to work area. Then you get to the area where they did the work and the insulation is pushed out of the way or compressed. Not to mention the hole created to run the cables. These holes and the displaced insulation is a large energy penalty on the home costing you more monthly to heat and cool your home. I have seen holes drilled into the ceiling for a single wire as large as two inches. As stated in my post on attic air sealing, these holes allow the air that you paid to condition to easily escape, costing you money. Even the compressed or displaced insulation is affecting your utility bills. As another in the home performance industry, Energy Vanguard wrote about uneven insulation in their blog titled “Flat or Lumpy – How Would You Like Your Insulation?” Now of course how much it really costs you depends on the amount of holes and actual displaced insulation. But sometimes it can be severe, actually cause comfort and durability issues. So what may have been a rather efficient home is now full of holes in the ceiling and insulation increasing your monthly cost to operate the home.

As a result I would grab a can of foam and a rake to seal these holes and even that insulation out so your home can perform at least as well as it did before the contractors tracked through attic.

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.

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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Attention to detail – Sill Sealer

Foam Sill Sealer/Capillary Break

A buildings durability and energy efficiency believe it or not can be greatly affected by some of the smallest and least expensive products out there, and sill sealer is one of these products. As pointed out by James over at Greener Structures, approximately 90% of buildings today do not install a sill sealer or also known as a capillary break.

For a little over $5.00 you can buy a 50′ roll at most hardware stores and even online shops (here). So you may be asking what the big deal is over a sill sealer. Well the product was designed to reduce air infiltration between the top of your foundation wall and sill plate by filling in any gaps or cracks. This product can also be used for slab on grade applications as well where there will be some imperfections in the slab.

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