This section contains documents of particular interest to homeowners. Many of these articles describe case studies from BSC’s work with Building America, a research program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to design and construct quality homes that use less energy without costing more to build. More information is available from the U.S. Department of Energy's website.
For assistance with some of the technical terms you may encounter, please see the BSC Glossary. Our Information Sheets are also a great resource for building technical knowledge.
Ice dams are a common roof performance problem in buildings that experience snowfall and at least a month of below freezing temperatures. The combination of sufficient roof pitch, adequate insulation just above the exterior wall, and air sealing at the wall-roof assemblies transition are all essential to prevent ice dams. But ice dams can occur even in properly detailed roof assemblies from differential solar snow melt. This digest outlines both the causes and solutions to ice dam problems.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal.
Think of the good old days—the Civil War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII—crawlspaces were uninsulated. They were ventilated and they didn’t have ground covers—and they didn’t have problems. Why?
