A Cold Climate Construction and Energy Blog
I often hear during energy audits, complaints about windows. Many homeowners feel the windows are cheaply made and replacement will result in substantial energy savings and an increase in comfort for the home. Sometimes the windows are a major cause of comfort problems, more often, the window installation is the issue. This blog post is about three different ways we air seal windows today.
Sliding patio doors are very popular in my market. Thier large glass panels allow us to view the outside. They open and close without needing floor space and are simple to operate. But they have a dark side…
Continue reading “Shorts-Sliding Patio Doors in a Cold Climate”
This year seems to be a good (or bad depending on how you look at it) year for ice dam problems in my area, the intensity of ice dams seems to change year to year. I was recently on an ice dam diagnostic with an insulating contractor and a general contractor, the home was built in the early 1990’s and there is evidence there have been issues from the beginning. We spent a couple hours testing this home, I’ll get into what we found in a bit.
This three-part series first appeared on the Green Building Advisor website and has been condensed into one post.
An unconditioned and uninsulated crawlspace, an unsealed and uninsulated forced air heating system, and an uncovered dirt floor, which by the way has a sewage leak. If this were your home and you wanted to make improvements, where would you start? Continue reading “Building Science-Existing Construction Improvements”
When I purchased my old home, the 1952 Cape in late 2018, the basement area looked good. Someone took the time to paint all the concrete walls and floor and cleaned everything up to look nice. Shortly after we moved in, the cat caught a mouse and then the following summer, the basement became a bug gathering place. Ants, spiders and other bugs apparently wintered in another area and returned to my house in the spring.
I have talked many times about blower door testing, air sealing and air leaks in this blog, on the Green Building Advisor’s website, and more recently, in the pages of Fine Homebuilding Magazine. Most of what I’ve written deals with testing a home or techniques used in air sealing a home. This time I’m going to discuss the mechanisms that cause air to leak, there are only three of them, but first a little science. Continue reading “Building Science-Three Way Buildings Leak Air”
Air leaking into a home (infiltration) or out of a home (exfiltration) happens naturally in every home, new or old. No matter how much air sealing is performed, we just can’t make them completely air tight. I’ve tested some new homes that were very tight, .33 ACH50, (anything under 1 ACH50 is very good) and I’ve also tested many older ones that aren’t so tight, we can use my 1952 Cape as an example, 9.71 ACH50. In this post, I’m going to discuss how to manually calculate the cost of the air leakage and examine what we can do with that number. Continue reading “Energy Audit-Calculating the Cost of a Home’s Air Leaks”
A blower door is an expensive tool. A full kit including frame, panel, fan and manometer will cost more than $3500. Add in the other tools for finding air leaks and you could easily drop over $5000. And then you still need to have some training to understand how to operate and interpret the results. Continue reading “Energy Audit-Homemade Blower Door”
I’ve talked about blower door testing several times on Green Building Advisor and on this blog. This discussion will dive deeper into blower door testing, when it should be completed, the different tests done with the blower door, and interpreting the information. Continue reading “Energy Audit-Blower Door Testing-A Deep Dive”
Most of us by now know what a blower door is. A tool to measure the air tightness of a house. I’ve owned my Minneapolis Blower Door since 2009. Many states have adopted mandatory tightness testing on all new construction. In my area, the minimum is three air changes per hour at 50 Pascals (3 ACH50), Continue reading “Energy Audit-Advanced Blower Door Testing-Zonal Pressures”