T air leakage in your home is making your home dirty. For many years a house that could “breath” or leak air through the walls was important to allow for drying of the wall. Then we started adding insulation and mechanical air conditioning and heating to our homes. This limited air flow through a wall so it reduced drying potential. The air leaking through walls, crawl space, and attic brings with it dirt particles or dust.
Air leakage through a wall is not required for drying the wall system once we started using mechanical systems for heating and cooling. The cooling system will dehumidify and the air movement, if designed right, will dry the air in the home. The exact humidity level in your home can be monitored and controlled using your mechanical system. This will improve comfort as well and provide for a healthier and cleaner home.
The “dirty” air is caused through poor installation or missing insulation as air moves through your thermal envelope. As air moves through the crawl space, attic, and walls into your home it picks up dust particles and brings them inside the home. It can also carry insects into the home as some travel on the breeze that comes into your conditioned space. If you find dust in your home, that dust is the dirt moving through our thermal envelope into your living space. It also represents money wasted on trying to keep your home comfortable.
Using spray foam insulation or caulk in key locations can stop this air movement. This strategy will improve the air quality inside your home and reduce the amount of “dirty” air infiltrating your thermal envelope. Of course, building science is not a simple formula. If you stop the air leakage you will reduce your energy used to heat and cool your home, however you will need to have systems to control humidity year round. These are systems you should have anyway instead of depending on a wall leaking uncontrollably. No question for me that air leakage in your home is making your home dirty – understanding building science will fix this and many other issues faced in modern construction.
It is always exciting to see dirt moving on a project job site. Our latest ground breaking is for the new Harmony Square Dairy Queen. This project is sweet!
If you have been to the existing Dairy Queen you will certainly look forward to the added space this new project will provide. It will also expand the outside seating area, features solar panels, skylights, a high-efficiency heating and cooling system, and an advanced insulation package. In other words, the upcoming Dairy Queen is sustainably designed! Can you say blizzards made by the power of the sun?
Cellulose Insulation is a low-thermal-conductivity material use to reduce heat loss and gain from a building. It is also a great noise transmission reduction materials as it is made of cellular materials.
There are four major types of cellulose insulation. They have the general characteristics of being dry, spray applied, stabilized, and low dust cellulose.
Dry Cellulose is used in renovation work where you are spraying in material through holes in a wall. This type of insulation will settle over time as gravity pulls it down. To avoid this settling problem a method called dense-pack is used which requires more than just small holes for installation.
Spray-applied Cellulose is a wet installation that mixes in adhesives during installation. This approach will reduce air movement through the insulation. It does force a drying period for the wall after installation to allow the mixture to dry out. Drywall should not be installed until the material has dried per manufacturers recommendations.
Stabilized cellulose is often found in flat installations such as attics. It uses water and adhesive in order to reduce settlement and to reduce air movement through the material.
Low-dust Cellulose is the type of insulation used in homes where the occupants may be sensitive to dusts.
Cellulose insulation has a lower thermal performance rating than does spray foams and it is not as air tight. It does provide a higher level of sound insulation than spray foam so could be used in homes where sound isolation is a priority. Cellulose typically contains between 75-85% recycled paper – often newspaper. It has the lowest embodied energy of any insulation type on the market. The most compelling advantage for this insulation type is that it has thermal storage properties – so it acts similar to a mass wall in storing heat during the day and allowing it out at night.
Wastewater from bathtubs, shower drains, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers is considered grey water. Grey water can be recycled for irrigation, toilet flushing, and exterior washing uses. This conserves potable water resources. Incorporating plumbing systems that separate grey water from black water which can result in costs savings.
Greywater may contain traces of dirt, food, grease, hair, or cleaning products. It can look dirty but is beneficial to use as an irrigation as a beneficial fertilizer. Reusing greywater not only saves on water usage, but also reduces the amount of water that is sent through the septic or sewer system.
Basic Greywater Guidelines
1. Don’t store greywater for more than 24 hours. The nutrients start to break down and can create a bad odor.
2. Minimize contact with greywater to reduce the chance that a human or animal might drink from the source.
3. Infiltrate greywater into the ground, don’t allow it to pool again to reduce the chance of humans or animals drink it or mosquito breeding.
4. Keep your system as simple as possible as it will last longer and cost less to implement.
5. Install a 3-way valve for easy switching between the greywater system and the sewer / septic.
As our weather patterns change, we have to change the way we think about the built environment. We have seen the challenges the built environment faces from Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. We have seen it in the flooding in Texas. We have seen the challenges from tornadoes in the mid-West. How do we change our approach to design and building?
According to the Resilient Design Institute resilience is the capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain or regain functionality and vitality in the face of stress or disturbance. It is the capacity to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption. Compared to climate change, resilience addresses the adaptation to a wide range of regional and localized impacts that are expected to come with a warming planet including intense storms, greater precipitation, coastal and valley flooding, longer and more severe droughts, wildfires, melting permafrost, warmer temperatures, and power outages.
Resilient design is the intentional design of buildings, landscapes, communities, and regions in response to these vulnerabilities.
Infrared Thermography, thermal imaging, or thermal video, is a type of infrared imaging used for determining air leakage in energy audits. Thermographic cameras detect radiation in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum (roughly 900–14,000 nanometers or 0.9–14 µm) and produce images of that radiation. In other words, you can see temperature variation on a surface in bright colors to determine air movement or thermal bridges. This allows you to determine strategies for reducing energy usage in a building.This is a tool that is used in energy audits.
Since infrared radiation is emitted by all objects based on their temperatures thermography makes it possible to “see” one’s environment with or without visible illumination. The amount of radiation emitted by an object increases with temperature, therefore thermography allows one to see variations in temperature.
