Tag: Building Science

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Do You Know About the Four Different Airs Inside Our Homes?

If you’ve been studying the concepts of building science, you’ve probably heard of the four control layers, water, air, vapor, and thermal.  Thinking about each of these building envelope control layers individually, and how they interact together helps in the planning and execution of building a better home.

This concept of separating a home’s assemblies can also be applied to a different topic, the air inside a home.  Most of us probably take air for granted, we breathe it, it’s always around us, but with regards to inside our homes, airflow needs to be managed.    I recently caught a presentation by Pat Huelman, a respected building science educator and researcher from the University of Minnesota.  Part of his discussion focused on the need for projects to include an “air manager”, someone paying attention to how air interacts with the built environment and mechanical equipment.  He discussed the importance of four different types of air in our homes and how each contributes to the quality of the indoor environment, energy conservation, and durability:

  1. Combustion Air
  2. Make-Up Air
  3. Ventilation Air
  4. Circulation Air

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Using S.W.O.T. to Help Develop a Scope of Work

Back in the early 1990’s, before I joined the construction industry, I was in college taking business classes.  I remember learning how to assess a business by using something called SWOT.  The SWOT acronym stands for strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  I’ve been developing this idea for assessing existing homes that are looking to undergo renovations.  I’ve found that working through a construction project using this theory can help in the development of the plan, the process includes pre-construction data gathering and developing and accessing a scope of work.  As far as I know, this is the first discussion of SWOT being used for analysis in the construction industry.

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What Happens to Your Home in Extreme Cold?

As I’m writing this blog post, a very cold air mass typically found at the North Pole has begun to move southward, into more temperate climates.  This latest polar vortex is forecast to affect much of the continental US with below average temperatures.

Here’s a question, what effect does that very cold air have on our homes?  Well, it depends!

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What to Know About Construction Sequencing in High Performance Projects

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor website.

I was a builder for more than 10 years before I attempted my first above code building project.  There was an order in the way I built early in my career that usually kept my projects moving smoothly.  That schedule went out the window with my first attempt at constructing a higher performing home.

Integrating high levels of air tightness, greater R-values, along with other elements to improve performance can result in assemblies and installation details going out of order from traditional construction practices.  The easiest and most logical construction schedules often need adjustments.

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Blower Door Testing for Contractors, Should You Own One?

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor Website.

I had the opportunity to interview Gary Nelson, one of the founders of The Energy Conservatory and Minneapolis Blower Door a few years ago.  An Interview with Gary Nelson-NorthernBuilt.  During the interview, he made the comment that his hope for the blower door when it first started appearing in the market was that every contractor would own one and that testing both existing and new homes would become a common practice.  That was 40 years ago.

We haven’t got there yet, but there are more and more contractors purchasing the tool and there are many online videos and webinars showing how a blower door is set up and used.  In this blog, I’ll discuss how to perform basic diagnostics on a home using a blower door.  Methods used to find air leaks, a short discussion on zonal pressure testing, and different tasks that the manometer can perform, all topics I think a contractor that owns (or wants to own) a blower door should be familiar with.

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The Effects of Poorly Installed (or Missing) Insulation

I was taught many years ago by an older fiberglass insulation contractor the importance of a quality insulation job.  His biggest piece of advice, FLUFF, DON’T STUFF!  Poorly installed insulation can have a big impact on the overall performance of a home.  In this blog, I’m going to show you mathematically how a small insulation deficiency can have a big effect in how a home performs.

This thermal image is a good example.  This was a brand-new home where I was performing a code required blower door test.  I ran around the home with my thermal imaging camera before starting the test and thought I might be able to use this image to show thermal bridging, which it does a good job at, but if you study the pic a little closer, we see several areas where the fiberglass insulation was poorly installed.  Compressing (not fluffing) the product creates areas of cooler temperatures in the insulation batts.  The dark area (at the ceiling on the right side of the photo) shows an area of missing insulation.  What effect does this poorly installed insulation have on the overall (effective) R-value?  We can show the results mathematically.

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Concrete Free Slab on Grade House – Five Years Later

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor website.

In June of 2019, we began a project we called “The Concreteless Slab on Grade Home”.  Kiley Jacques, (now the editor of Green Building Advisor), covered the project in an article she wrote back in early 2020.   Another Take on a Concrete-Free Slab – GreenBuildingAdvisor   I wrote a piece on the project for this blog, Construction Design-Concrete-less Slab on Grade – Northern Built.  This year is the Five-year anniversary of the start of that project.  I thought it would be a good time to revisit, discuss what worked, what I would change, and talk about a very unexpected series of events that could have been a major problem.

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What’s the Difference Between R-Value and U-Factor?

This post first appeared on the Andersen Windows and Door Website.

We were taught in junior high that hot air rises, the key to that phrase is air.  Heat itself moves from someplace warm to someplace cool.  A good example of this happens often in cold climates.  When standing in front of an old window on a cold night, you feel a chill.  This chill is the result of heat leaving your body and moving towards the colder surface of the window glass, heat moving from hot to cold.  To slow this movement of heat, we use insulation, by putting on another layer of clothes, we reduce or resist the movement of heat, we have added R-value.

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Building Codes and Building Science are Beginning to Better Align

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor website.

I’ve heard Mike Guertin mention that every home built is a building science experiment.  It can take some time for problems in buildings to be known.  For instance, a bad detail on a window installation, like shown in this photo, could take more than 20 years to present as a problem.  If the problem is being repeated, building science might identify the issue and propose a change.  Eventually, the change may end up in the building codes, but this whole process is slow.

That being said, there are many building science principles that we have figured out, with several already added to the codes.  Some have been known about for decades but are still slow to be adopted.  Let’s discuss a few of each.

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How Well Do You Know Building Science?

This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor Website.

The International Builders Show took place from February 27th through the 29th, 2024 in Las Vegas, NV.  The past couple years, Huber Engineered Wood has held a building science trivia game in their booth.  The game is played using an app on a cell phone, questions are answered by contestants and their score is based both on how quickly the question is answered and whether the question was answered correctly.  The game is just for fun, though there are some bragging rights if you are able to beat the on-stage contestants.  This year, the on-stage players were Jake Bruton, Steven Baczek, Peter Yost, and Ben Bogie with Tate Hudson from Huber asking the questions.  (Jake has this year’s bragging rights.)

I thought it might be fun to have a version of building science trivia here on the Northern Built Blog.  Some of the questions being asked are from the game played in the Huber booth, others are questions that were asked during another building science trivia game played a recent BS and Beer-Northern Minnesota meeting.  The game is just for fun, you keep track of how many you get right.  The answers (along with a little more in-depth information about the answer) will follow the quiz.  Here we go.

  1. The climate zone map located in Chapter 11 (Energy Efficiency) of the 2021 International Residential Code Book contains how many different climate zones?
    1. 8
    2. 9
    3. 14
    4. 19

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