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Building Science Insights
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Building Science Insights are short, informal discussions that highlight one or more building science principles. Like all BSC publications, they are grounded by solid research and experience. Unlike most BSC publications, however, they may also feature anecdotes, opinions, and even a joke or two (or three…).
Lively and engaging, Insights provide a fresh perspective on important industry issues. Enjoy them with your morning coffee or any time you need to wake up your building science brain.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. It’s pretty easy to deal with new basements. If you want a challenge try dealing with century old houses sitting on top of rubble foundations. These houses are not going away and sooner or later we are going to have to fix them and insulate them.
A concise history of the improvements to traditional buildings through design and materials.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. I do not have a problem with dense packing walls. In fact, dense packing walls typically results in remarkable performance. It is the dense packing of unvented cathedral ceilings or unvented flat roofs that is the problem.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a mistake, especially when the mistake does not seem to be a big deal.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. “When you insulate your basement on the inside, the rubble foundation will freeze apart, and you will get swelling from the freezing soil collapsing the wall, and adfreezing will lift the wall so high you will need a ladder to get down from the sump pit.”
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Ice dams happen when the outside temperature is below freezing, the roof deck temperature is above freezing, and there is snow on the roof. The warm roof deck causes the snow on top of the roof deck to melt, and the melt water runs down to the edge of the roof where the water freezes leading to a buildup of ice and a backup of water, hence the term “dam."
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. One of the more difficult questions regarding enclosures is can we insulate the interior of a mass wall in a cold climate without causing damage from freeze/thaw cycles? The answer is usually yes, we can insulate. But, and there is almost always a “but,” it depends.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Spray polyurethane foam (SPF), the high-density stuff, is the only product (so far) that can perform all of the functions of the principal control layers of the “Perfect Wall.” The functions are water control, air control, vapor control, and thermal control.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Imagine a three-dimensional molecular billiard game with billiard balls that are sometimes sticky, and where the rules depend on where you are on the table. Then assume that there are many different types of tables and pockets of different sizes.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Historically, so many problems have occurred with parapets that we have a name for it: “parapetitus.” They have a long history—which of course is not always clear—that allows me to embellish without threat of peer review reversal. Their major function today, aside from confus¬ing architects, is to protect the edge of roof assemblies from wind uplift forces. Not so in the old days where they were useful in fire protection.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Decks are disarmingly simple. The ones we are going to deal with have conditioned space under them. They are nothing more than roofs that you walk on. But we tend to mess them up royally.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. This green roof stuff is getting out of hand. It is dumb to do a green roof to save energy. If dirt were energy efficient, we would call it insulation and put it in walls.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Folks are building houses and retrofitting existing houses with increased airtightness, and this is great. They use a blower door to help measure leakage, and this is also great. But then they think that a blower door actually is a precise measuring tool for how air will leak across the building during service. Wrong.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. As my friend Mac Pierce likes to point out: you could get a blindfolded drunk epileptic to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire without a net, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. There are some wall assemblies that are like that.
(1) An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. One of the most difficult buildings to build is a building with a swimming pool because–wait for it–there is a swimming pool inside.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. It was the ants that finally did it. It wasn’t the shingles that needed to be replaced. It wasn’t the three-dimensional airflow network in the roof assembly. It wasn’t the lack of racking resistance. It wasn’t the lack of thermal resistance. It was the ants. Carpenter ants. There were just too many ants in my renovated barn.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Engineers are pretty funny people. Engineers say that 1 inch of water exerts a force of – wait for it – 1 inch. Yup, 1 inch of water weighs 1 inch of water. It’s a gift we engineers have. Let me help you all out a little bit here, go suck on a straw and draw 1 inch of water up into the straw.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. The Parthenon was constructed around 450 B.C. as a temple to the Goddess Athena. More recently a temple overlooking Vancouver was constructed by the contractor Gauvin the Younger to honor the God of Building Science Hutcheon. For the past five years the Devout have been sprinkling water on the temple Icons carefully watching the results.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. How hard can it be to insulate a flat sheet of concrete? I mean you only have three choices – on the top, on the bottom, or on the edge. OK, you might have some combination of the three as well.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal. Sometimes in order to do the right thing you have to do “a workaround.” I love the “I-Codes.” But they can drive you crazy. I love them because most of the time they are right. In fact almost always they are right. But, every now and then . . .
