Uncovering the Secrets of an Old House
I've been in a lot of old houses and seen a lot of interesting things. One of the things I love about that is trying to figure out the mysteries I find. Lately, the mysteries I've been encountering are in…
I've been in a lot of old houses and seen a lot of interesting things. One of the things I love about that is trying to figure out the mysteries I find. Lately, the mysteries I've been encountering are in…
My house exhibits an interesting phenomenon on occasion. A lot of people who understand building science sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion when they see it. Hey, I did the same thing myself at first, too. The puzzle lies in…
Here in the South, we love our humidity. It makes us glisten in the summer. But we also love our air conditioning and low humidity inside our homes. To save on air conditioning costs, more and more homes have attics…
Ten years ago, Georgia led the United States in adopting a new energy code. Perhaps the biggest advance was that it required all new homes to meet a threshold for airtightness (7 ACH50). Now most states require blower door tests…
The number one thing you need to do to protect a building is control water. As the Canadian building scientist Gus Handegord said, "The three biggest problems in buildings are water, water, and water." So, with the 1961 house I…
An attic that's brought inside the building enclosure is a beautiful thing. This is most often done with spray polyurethane foam (SPF) insulation, either open-cell or closed-cell. Here in the southeastern US, open-cell is most often the spray foam of…
The I-joists in the photo above run across the top of the wall between the dining room and the garage. In the old days, before anyone worried at all about air moving through those joist cavities, the builder didn't do…
My website host (Hubspot) had a problem when I published my last article, High Humidity in a Spray Foam Attic, Part 2. If you wanted to comment and were not allowed, that problem has been fixed. I apologize for the…
Three weeks ago, I wrote about an attic with spray foam insulation and the interesting humidity pattern we observed in it. We placed data loggers near the ridge and floor of the attic as well as in the living space…
Spray foam insulation can solve problems that other insulation materials can't. One of those problems is moving the building enclosure from the drywall ceiling of a home to the roofline. By doing so, you bring the attic inside the building…