- Weatherproofing workshop. My name is Noah Sandweiss and I'm the historic preservation program manager
- for the city of Bloomington. Tomorrow is going to mark the beginning of historic preservation month,
- which is May. And our thoughts are once again turning toward cold weather and winter. So we're going
- to be having a little
- weatherization workshop here with Electrify Indiana. So I'm going to let Madeline Hershland take it
- away with introducing this organization and giving a little low down on what they do. Great. Noah, thank
- you so much. And thank you so much for organizing this session. It's really wonderful to be partnering.
- Yeah, I just want to very briefly say who we are and then pass it over to Greg. I am with Electrify
- Indiana, the co-chair of the board. And we are a vendor with the city of Bloomington on the Bloomington
- Energy Works program, energy navigator program. So we're working with homes to help them reduce their
- energy use. One of the primary ways to do that is through sealing and insulating.
- We're just very grateful to the city for enabling us to do this. Our mission is to help homes all over
- the state quickly know that they should switch to electric equipment when the time comes that things
- start to break down, like a furnace, a gas water heater, a gas stove, or a gas dryer. So we're very
- happy to provide you with any information you want.
- and just sign up outside or email us at electrifyindiana.gmail.com. So with no further ado, I want to
- introduce Greg Diemer, who is a builder who specializes in his expertise in sealing and insulating.
- And I'm just going to pass it over. We're very, very, very grateful to you, Greg, for joining us today.
- Thank you. Yes.
- were not my fireworks and I wasn't near that mailbox. Oh, okay, that didn't work. That's how I did the
- sound test. Your honor, those were not my fireworks and I was not near that mailbox. So, yeah, my name
- is Greg Diemer and I've been a builder here in Bloomington for about 30 years and
- I worked on all kinds of houses from new to very old. And so I've seen a lot of how houses work and
- don't work. So the goals for this talk I'm getting tonight are understanding your house so that we can
- have stewardship of both houses and the planet. So stewardship is something important to think about
- when we're taking care of our houses,
- You're not the first person that's owned it generally and you're not gonna be the last. So we wanna
- think in terms of the future when we're doing things to houses. Second one is we wanna know what to
- ask of pros you might hire because they're also learning as they go. And then the third thing is do
- it yourself.
- So there are lots of details. It's not physically easy, but it's not the space shuttle. So also see
- the caveats later, we'll talk about what could cause fires. So building science, what is it? It involves
- physics, the physics of heat and moisture, as well as biology and chemistry for making healthy and durable
- an energy efficient shelter. So building science causes some people anxiety. You don't want to think
- about your house rotting or not performing right or being expensive to fix. So I brought along a support
- animal here. This is the BS bear. So if you start to feel nervous, just look at the BS bear and it'll be OK.
- I was going around looking for a shirt for my bear. And I found this little paper bag. And it brought
- back a memory of my grandpa. When I was little, he cut up a grocery bag and put it on me when he was
- taking me to the grocery. So grandpa was sober for the last 20 years of his life. So he had that going
- for him after that.
- Why build tight as possible? Or why air leakage is a problem? So the word tightness was kind of a poor
- choice because it doesn't make you feel good. So another better way, I think, to say it is you don't
- want your house to leak air. So reasons for building tight. Air leaks take away energy and money. And
- they bring in polluted air.
- Air that has emit pollen, exhaust, fiberglass, mouse turds, radon. And they also, air leaks also move
- warm, moist air into your wall assemblies and roof assemblies where it can cause mold and rot. So we
- want to try to limit air leaks. So the other thing about insulation is,
- Solar lasts decades, while insulation can last centuries. So it's a really good investment. If it's
- done right, it can continue to pay for generations to come without any additional maintenance to it.
- So there's a lot of opposition to building tight. A lot of people are just, they have a reflex and many
- builders, and less so every day, I think builders are coming around
- to accepting it, but why do we have this opposition? So people will say we need natural ventilation.
- Maybe, but I would say not through filth. So you don't want it coming through your walls or up through
- the dirt in your crawl space. So there's a natural ventilation feature that comes with every house.
- Does anybody know what it is?
- Windows, yes. So you can open your windows at any time if you feel like you want natural ventilation
- and you'll get a lot of it. So people also say you will suffocate. That's not like actually possible
- because houses are just not that tight that you can run out of oxygen. So air quality issues need to
- be addressed because if you're not
- moving air in by having your windows open, pollutants build up and moisture can build up as well. So
- pros are often trained to worry about things like the paint color and the speed of construction. We
- need to ask more of them and we need to let them know that we're willing to pay for tighter construction.
- The final thing on opposition to building tight
- It's a fact that adding insulation slows drying. When you have less heat flow through materials, they
- dry less quickly. So this must be done with care. You have to make sure things don't get wet, and then
- you have to build things in a way that they can dry if they do get wet. New construction or old construction.
- Yeah, you don't want anything to be wet.
- for long periods of time. They say that houses need to dry, but they don't need to breathe. People need
- to breathe. So how do you get fresh air when you don't want to open your windows? Let's say it's like
- 20 degrees outside. There's a very clever device that's been around for a long time called an energy
- recovery ventilator, or ERV. And it has fans on it.
- It brings in, it exhausts stale air and brings in fresh air and it passes the streams without mixing
- them where heat can go from one to the other. So it can recover 70 to 80% of the heat from the air that
- you're exhausting. And if you have on it a MERV 13 filter, the air it's bringing in will not have pollen
- in it and it can also remove smoke
- other kinds of pollution that might be high outside. You can also have a timer on it so it turns off,
- say during rush hour when there's a lot of exhaust around your house, you might just turn it off for
- those two hours and then the exhaust won't come in your house. I'd also like to say if anyone has a
- question or an interjection, I'd like them to just come throughout the thing. That'll help keep people awake.
- Because if building anxiety doesn't make you anxious, it might make you sleepy. Or it could be the CO2
- in here. It's at 1,000, but you're supposed to be at under 1,000. So this is a CO2 meter that I just
- picked up there. Okay, so does anyone have any questions so far? Yes?
- haven't heard of that exactly. No, I haven't heard of that. An ERV that's a bath fan. You can suck air
- out of your bathroom with an ERV. The one thing you have to do there is make sure the ERV stays on until
- all the moisture is out of it, because it can make your core in the ERV get moldy if you don't.
- So there's some discussion that you don't need bath fans if you have an ERV in your house. But ERVs
- also exchange moisture across the air streams. So in the summertime, they'll dry the incoming air. And
- in the wintertime, they'll moisten the incoming air. They don't do it at 100%. So there is still a drying
- effect in the house from the ERV. When we were running this winter when it was out,
- colder it gets the drier the air is outside. We got our relative humidity down to 30% which was the
- driest I've ever seen it in the winter in that house before we had an ERV. So there's another device
- similar to an ERV called the HRV and that's a heat recovery ventilator. It doesn't have a moisture
- transferring ability. So 30 years ago they were recommending those for
- cold climates, which were kind of a mixed climate here. But anymore, the ERVs, every place but Alaska,
- they're recommending an ERV because you want that moisture exchange when it's humid out in the summertime.
- New models of ERVs have what's called an ECM motor.
- which automatically adjusts the pressure. So you want as much air coming in as is going out, basically
- have it a balanced system. When you bring in the fresh air in the winter time, it's good to bring it
- in high because it's cool. It recovers 70 to 80% of the heat, but they're still coming in.
- freeze your toes as it comes in, which we discovered because we blew it like across our kitchen floor
- at first. And it didn't mix very well because it just went across the room and then down into the vent
- on the other side. So I reducted my house or I put ducks upstairs for the first time. So I ran it up
- to my upstairs bedrooms and it keeps them cool while we sleep, which is good for your health too. You
- sleep better when it's a cool room.
- and then it's able to mix as it comes back down through the house. So the geometry of the duct work
- is important on that. So I mentioned that tight houses can build up moisture, which is kind of unbelievable
- if you've always lived in a loose house in the winter time, but you can actually build up moisture to
- like 50, 60% if you don't have any air exchange, and then you'll get condensation on walls
- or on windows, which is quite annoying. So the ERV helps with that. One more thing about moisture is
- as you heat and tight or as you insulate and tighten your house, your air conditioner may not run enough
- to dehumidify your house because air conditioners only dehumidify when they're running. And if your
- house is well insulated, it doesn't run.
- So you might consider getting a dehumidifier in addition to your air conditioner. And then you can keep
- your house at a warmer temperature if it's dry, which kind of feels better when you go in and out anyway.
- And you'll feel the same comfort if the house is dry. Any questions about ERVs before we move on? I
- think they're a really important thing to put in the house. It's being made very tight.
- So you can watch your CO2 levels. This is a $200 meter. They actually rent one, I think, at the library
- that you can take home. And this also has a really good humidity thing on it. It's 43% in here right
- now and 74 degrees. The CO2 reading at 1089 might not be right because I'm sitting really close to it.
- But it was saying that earlier when there weren't that many people in here yet. I have a question about
- ERVs. Yeah.
- In general, would you say that newer or older houses would benefit more from them? Or does it really
- just depend on how tight the building is? So I've heard the idea that in the shoulder seasons when there's
- not a lot of stack pressure pulling air through your house, that even a leaky house doesn't have enough
- ventilation. In my experience watching that in my own house,
- If I open the windows, the CO2 levels stay good. So I don't know if I quite believe that. I think tightening
- up your house is an important part of providing like mechanical ventilation. One thing is you have to
- be kind of careful with, and HVAC, I'm not completely versed in it, but the pressure
- pressures of a house can drive air into walls and such. That's why you want to keep it balanced. So
- I'm not sure it's a really good idea to put an ERV in a really, really leaky house for that reason.
- But I think I might be a little off on that.
- It is, so they're usually like a box that's, you know, 60 inches tall by two or three feet long. And
- you can hang them on a ceiling in a basement or the ductwork can be, the shorter it is before it goes
- outside is slightly better, but it can be some distance too.
- But the incoming has to be separated from the outcoming where the ductwork goes outside. A good thing
- to do when you're installing them too is to have them isolated from what you're hanging it from by rubber
- straps of some sort. And then you want the first section of ductwork to be flex duct, just even like
- a foot of it before it goes to the rigid duct. Yeah, so the vibrations won't spread through your house.
- They are very quiet.
- The fans in him are pretty amazingly quiet, but any kind of vibration kind of bugs me. So, yep. Yeah.
- So the way the tightness of houses is measured, and I would have to do more research on whether you
- need a ERV in a loose house. I'm not sure about that question. But the way you measure the tightness
- of a house is they put a blower door in one of your doors, and they pressurize the house or depressurize
- it. And from that, they can tell how many air exchanges you have per hour. It's like the equivalent
- of a 50 mile per hour breeze blowing across your house.
- So a really tight house, like the passive houses that they build in Germany are like half an air exchange
- per hour. That's their standard. A loose house in the United States could be 25 air exchanges per hour.
- The new building codes are requiring, I think, three or four air exchanges per hour. So if you want
- to know how tight your house is, you could have a blower door test done.
- And that would also, they can go around with a smoke pencil and see where the air is flowing into different
- things and give you some ideas about where you would start. You can also use, I brought my thermal camera
- here. This is like a $200 camera. They have better ones, but they can, if they're pressurizing the house
- when it's a different temperature outside, you can see like the blue circles on the thermal camera around
- leaks. So they can go through very quickly and tell you where all your leaks are.
- So I think I got a little bit away from your question there, but yeah. Yeah, older windows are definitely
- a sign of a place where it can leak. Mostly today I'm going to concentrate on the addicts because that's
- like a common place where most leaks are.
- But in a minute here, I'll go into my model here that I brought about where you can find the leaks in
- your attic. Anyone need to hold the BS bear? Okay. So ERV is done.
- There are definitely people out west that are keeping smoke out of their houses with ERBs, which is
- pretty cool that you could survive that horrible experience by having that running. So I'm going to
- move on to the vented attic. That's one way that a house's roof is constructed is called a vented attic.
- and I'll move over to my model here. So this is a model of a roof. This would have shingles on it here.
- And then this would be the ceiling of your house. This is an interior wall. This is a light fixture.
- It'd usually be round. So this is what's called a baffle.
- And the baffle allows air to enter on the lower side of your roof. This would be the roof overhang and
- it would have a gutter out here. So this is a soffit vent here. It's got holes in it, aluminum. There's
- a lot of different venting materials, some of them kind of on more modern houses. So the baffle allows
- air to come in.
- and it will extend up above the insulation that you've got on your floor of your attic. So they come
- four feet long and you usually use most of them when you're putting like 20 inches of insulation in,
- it'll go up that high. So the baffle allows air to enter the attic and then you have another vent up
- at the ridge of your attic and the air rises because it's heated and leaves up there taking moisture
- away with it.
- The baffle down here also keeps the insulation away from your attic, which keeps your roof deck cold.
- Can anybody guess why you want your roof deck to be cold? That's it, yeah, ice dams. The roofers get
- all kinds of calls when we have certain weather where it's cold out, snows, and if you ever had ice
- dams, they're not fun to deal with.
- Metal roofing is much more resistant to ice dams too if you're ever replacing your roof with metal panels
- instead of shingles. So if you enter your attic you probably won't see it all clean like this. It's
- maybe one in every 20 attics has no insulation at all. A lot of older homes have old bats or blown in
- that's only to the top of the rafters. So you can see all the tops of the rafters.
- You really want to get like 18 inches and that gets you up to an R value of like 60. So how do you air
- seal in here? Cause so these are all holes. You can see this electrical box has holes in it. The wall
- here has holes. You would have drywall here, but if you go down the wall,
- it's connected to wood again and there's nothing to keep the air from going in at the bottom of your
- walls or coming in electrical boxes and going up both through the wire holes and all along this crack.
- So it can really substantially move a lot of air into your attic. So when you're starting to think about
- air sealing, you,
- You can use this as a product called spray foam. This is the red can, which is a fire block as well.
- This is my pro gun, which is like 50 bucks. You can get disposable cans and they're about the same price
- for the foam, but this gives you a little more control. I'm gonna try not to make a mess. A friend of
- mine was working on his own house, which was a mistake. He's a carpenter on the weekend.
- started foaming something on one side of his house and it got stuck open. And so he had to run through
- his house like this, shooting foam into his hand, which is why I brought a tarp here. But so hopefully
- this works. There we go. So we're gonna foam holes in electrical boxes and we'll run foam in the cracks
- along walls. Foam along these cracks too. Fill holes where wires come through.
- weeks get done here if anyone wants to come up and shoot some foam they can. So if you look in here
- under the baffle too I've got a piece of styrofoam out here and it's on the outer side of the wall and
- eventually this styrofoam it's two inches thick it would be foamed in so the wind can't blow it in and
- because what you'll see
- A lot of times people will stuff bat insulation in out here to keep the insulation from going out and
- filling your soffit up. And the wind will come along and blow in the soffit, blow that fat out, then
- blow all the insulation into a big mound on the far side of the attic. So you want to secure this in
- here with foam. Some of these baffles also come with a fold down side of it that you can staple to the
- sides and then foam that in to secure that as well.
- The baffle is just stapled to the roof deck as well. But the foam also gives you a little better insulation
- out there at the outside of the wall. And since you've only sometimes got four inches to work with,
- you don't want it to settle out there. What I've done before too is I'll get that sealed up and then
- I'll take like a rock wool bat and fill the outside like six inches with that.
- because that won't settle. And that keeps that R value out there at like R 15 or something for the end.
- The rest of the installation, you're counting on it to settle and then have the settled R value. So
- you'll put it in at 20 inches and it'll settle down to 15 in the end. Not quite that much, but. Oh,
- one more thing about electrical boxes.
- So you're going to fill these holes where the wires come through and then go around the perimeter of
- them. But you don't want to fill the inside of the box. You want the electrician in the future to be
- able to work in there. And I hired an installation contractor once. And I paid him to foam around the
- boxes. And he filled about a dozen of them completely. So that wasn't good. I had to clean all that out.
- So I asked him to fill the boxes, both for air sealing, but also because when he was spraying walls
- with cellulose, and the dust from the cellulose will blow into your house as you're doing that. And
- I was on another job where I wasn't in charge, but he had filled up a nursery with cellulose, because
- there was a hole by one of the light switches. And the woman wasn't very pleased. Her baby wasn't in
- there, fortunately.
- He came around the corner and he goes, which was an odd response to a mother being upset that her nursery
- was filled up with insulation. But there you go. That's the building traits. That's why I do it for
- things like that. So this is another box that I actually had installed in a house once. And so you can
- see inside there, I filled up the holes in the boxes have a bunch of little cutouts in them.
- So you want to make sure you fill all those. And this was a remodel box. So I had caulked it to the
- drywall when I put it in, because it has this flange on it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can't. It might occasionally
- be put on when a roof is redecked at the same time.
- but you'd probably lay the deck, nail the first sheet of decking down and then climb under there and
- do it. Yeah, so what you're going to be doing if you have to install battling, either you tear the soffit
- off and do it from the outside or you lay a strip of plywood down. And for all this work, a strip of
- plywood will really help save your body. Get in there and,
- It's gonna be pretty tight on a lot of houses, but you just have to crawl under there and you can staple
- it in up here. You can get them in usually. So this model I built was off a porch I built last year
- that was only at a two pitch. I used the same rafter cutoffs. So this is a really flat roof. Usually
- it'll be a little steeper. The steeper it is, the easier your work will be out there.
- Maybe you don't have any soffit vents. So it's a good time to tear that board off out there and replace
- it with a vented material. Like Alex was saying, he doesn't have soffit vents on a lot of his house.
- So what would happen if you insulated without putting in soffit vents, if you didn't have soffit vents,
- the ridge will suck air out of your house because air is trying to rise.
- and it actually will suck it from anywhere it can get it, which will be these holes from inside your
- house. So you want to make sure you get at least as much. You want it to be balanced more or less, but
- if you're airing, have more ventilation at the bottom. Otherwise your house will suck. You don't want
- that. This glue.
- This is more or less a modern innovation. I mean, they've been around for probably 50 years or better.
- And a lot of times people, when they're re-insulating, will just try to keep the insulation away from
- the perimeter. But if you don't have 10% of your ceiling insulated, that's a really significant loss.
- I mean, it degrades the rest of the insulation value
- not a statistician, but half maybe. It can do that too, yeah. Yeah, if it's not blocked out here, then
- you can have big mounds of installation on the other side. It's a baffle. So I think I've got most of
- what I'm saying in this handout.
- Yep. But the baffles come in styrofoam or hard plastic. Yep, some people make their own with styrofoam.
- Yep. That'd be an interesting thing to see if they mention it, because it's important.
- So I would hope an energy audit would look at everything and then recommend a whole systems approach
- to what you need to do with your house.
- So Therese is just saying that in most of the quotes that she's been seeing, the contractors include
- putting baffles in because that's just standard. Thanks. Can you field the questions? I keep forgetting to.
- So you want to also build, you'll have an attic hatch. You'll want to build walls out of plywood around
- it, you know, 24 inches tall or something so you can blow insulation right up to it. And then the lid,
- you'll want to glue some rigid foam to the top of it. You can make like a six inch thick layer and then
- weather strip around the perimeter of it so it fits down on that weather stripping. And then you can use
- If you've seen on old fashioned windows, they have cam closers. They're just like a little half moon
- shape piece of metal. You could put some of those on it to tighten that thing down. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh-huh.
- Or vented attics.
- Generally, that's the beauty of a vented attic is you can get a lot of inexpensive R-value with blown-in
- insulation. There's other ways of doing an unvented attic or, I mean, with cathedral ceilings, people
- still do bats oftentimes, and they can do those with a vent up there. There's also some unvented options.
- I don't think we'll get into that tonight,
- Yeah. Yeah. That is, that's called a gable vent that's in the triangle. And if you have a ridge vent,
- the gable vents can be counterproductive because they bring wind through. And so you want to
- If you have a continuous ridge van along the whole ridge, then you might consider closing that off,
- which could be done from the outside. But if you don't have a ridge vent, then that's probably better
- than nothing. Yep.
- Okay, so I'm moving on to danger. If anybody's getting sleepy, this is the danger talk. So I didn't
- mention this actually. So you might get into a paddock that has like six inches of insulation or something
- in it loose fill. They rent a vacuum for that at Sunrise rental. And I haven't yet to use it myself,
- but you can vacuum out all the loose fill into these gigantic bags.
- And if it's clean, you can put it back in after your air seal. Otherwise you can rake stuff around or
- if it's old bats, you can lift them out of the way. So while you have stuff uncovered, you wanna inspect
- all your wiring. So there's sometimes rodents in attics. You wanna find out if you can, how they get
- in and block that off with hardware cloth.
- and you wanna check for any wiring that's been damaged. You may also wanna install lights if you've
- always wanted a light in your hallway closet or, cause this is the last easy time to do that. Fan boxes
- as well can be added or you can upgrade your existing lights to fan boxes and then put the existing
- light back in if you think you've got fans in your future.
- Fans don't use very much energy and they can make you feel cooler. So that might be a good thing to
- do that wouldn't be very expensive. So sometimes you'll see can lights and old can lights can be what's
- called non-insulation contact, which means you can't put insulation over them. So a lot of times people
- would just leave a big circle of it undone
- You can get from Amazon, there's a rock wool bucket that you can glue over it. You can glue it down
- to the top of the drywall and that makes it all airtight. And that could be done with the, or you can
- make boxes out of drywall, which is non-combustible and glue those over the can lights. If you don't
- like, but the buckets are an easy, bad way to do that.
- Even if it's an LED light that doesn't make much heat, you probably still want to put that bucket over
- it. And the modern can lights just say they're airtight, but I don't think they are. You can see holes
- through them and you still got the crack all the way around it. So I would bucket any can light you
- see, you know, put a cover over it and then you can insulate right over that bucket. Special bucket,
- not just a
- Rubbermaid. Okay, so here's something important that if you haven't been in an attic, you don't walk
- on this ceiling because you'll fall through the ceiling. I knew a carpenter who fell through a ceiling
- once and he was really good at all the trades. He was actually an electrician and he had it rehung and
- re-dry walled before the owner got home.
- Oh, all the way through onto the floor. So if you have metal furnace vent or water heater vents, they've
- got to have a one to two inch clearance, depending on what the pipe requires, as well as masonry chimneys.
- So you want to put a second dairy metal pipe that's spaced away from the original one.
- They can be sealed to the drywall with a ring of metal that you can use high temperature caulking on.
- But that's an important thing. Water heater vents, I've never seen one where you can't put your hand
- on it when they've run for the whole time, but that's a good precaution. Alternatively, you could electrify
- and ditch the vents, pull them out of there and not have gas in your house anymore, which is good for
- a lot of reasons.
- Most addicts have in them cellulose or fiberglass or rock wool, which is similar to fiberglass. Occasionally
- you'll run across vermiculite, which from certain mines, it's a shiny like gold kind of thing like you
- see in potting mix. Some of the mines unfortunately had asbestos naturally occurring in the rock. So
- if you have any doubt about what you're working with, you wanna get it tested.
- You can send off a sample and get it tested. So you want to wear good protective equipment, ventilators
- and jumpsuits. And I've heard some insulators say that talcum powder can help keep insulation off of
- you when you're working in the old stuff. The new stuff, by the way, is almost completely itch-free
- now. It's amazing what they did with it. So that's good.
- That's my time. Am I still in the ballpark? Good. Okay. I could talk about building science for many
- hours. So TALC, unfortunately, for a certain period of time from Johnson & Johnson had asbestos in it
- as well. This is just a side note. But they've got a class action suit going from all the people who
- got cancer. They knew that it was in there and they just sold it to people to put on their babies.
- We're almost done with danger here. Cold showers, I've heard can help get the fiberglass off you. It's
- supposed to keep your porch closed and get it washed off. And then the last thing, this is not a danger
- to you personally, but you want to make sure you get your ventilation right. Because if you don't,
- You know, it can either draft more air out of your house or moisture can build up in your attic and
- rot your roof sheeting. And that's not really what you want from this. We want our houses to be as durable
- as possible. So now that you've done all the hard stuff, the re-blowing of the attic is the icing on
- the cake. The loose fill is faster than putting baths back in between the rafters.
- And it fills everything better. So I think there's no reason to think about that. It's also less expensive.
- Fiberglass and cellulose loose fill both work. They both have some pros and cons. Cellulose is dusty.
- Cellulose is made from old newspapers, although I don't know how much longer they're going to be able
- to do that. So cellulose actually locks carbon away. Fiberglass can be largely recycled content.
- It is itchy. Fiberglass is inherently flame resistant. Cellulose, despite being cellulose, is treated
- with borate, so it's supposed to have a good flame rating. So it's kind of up to you. There is a certain
- amount in really cold climates, and I think it doesn't apply here, is that fiberglass might have a little
- convection in it, and it has a slightly less R value for the thickness. But if you're in an attic, you
- can compensate with the thickness.
- there. So you can rent the cellulose or fiberglass machine, I think it's 50 bucks a day, it's probably
- 75 with inflation now, from Menards. And then they also have a free one at Lowe's that you're only supposed
- to spray their fiberglass with, which usually costs 10 to 15% more than Menards' fiberglass, which is white and
- Lowe's is pink, that's why. So if you use Lowe's machine, take the pink out of it that comes with it,
- there's always a handful in, and then put it back in when you're done. Okay. So there's a calculation
- chart on the bags. So you want to R60, which is 18 to 20 inches, and that'll tell you how many bags
- to get for your square footage or your house.
- And you wanna get extra bags and return them with a machine. You don't have to run out in the middle
- of the job to get more bags. You wanna duct tape the hose sections together if you need more than one.
- It usually comes with a metal coupler. If the hose is clogging as you're spraying, you'll want to, there's
- an adjuster on the machine that you can turn down the feed rate. Okay, so that is all I've got for roofs.
- or for attics. Does anyone have any questions before we move on from that? Yeah, sure. So I've heard
- that the part of the house where the most heat is lost is through the roof. Do you find that to be the
- case? I think that is true. I think the amount of penetrations in the ceilings and the fact that heat
- rises, I think that's accurate. Yeah. And it's a place that you can address.
- Because it's usually accessible. You don't have to tear off any finishes to do any of the work and Go ahead.
- So the question is, do you have to work through the hole inside the house? So that's not ideal to have
- a bunch of stuff flying through your house. If you have vinyl siding and it's easy to remove and put
- back on, you can cut a hole through your gable. If you're getting a new roof, at the time you're getting
- a new roof, before you get it, you can cut a hole through the shingles.
- and make an access door there. You wanna tarp it in between uses, tuck the tarp up under the shingles.
- So that would keep all that mess out of the house. But generally, so the hose going through the house,
- if you kind of roughly cover the hatch, generally you can keep most of the mass out of the house.
- I mean, it's not like it's gonna be flying down there in a crazy way. You probably should keep the door
- shut to the room that you got the hatch in.
- Maybe put a fan in the window so you have a little bit of, although that would bring it down from the
- attic too. Yeah. Yeah, the attic hatches aren't always put in the best positions.
- But blown in is so much easier to install and pulling bats through a small hole in a closet is much
- worse than dragging the hose through once and then working up there. You got a little wire and a remote
- control that you turn the thing on and off with that goes all the way back to the machine. Then you
- want your partner down there feeding the bales in.
- Yeah, that's good to know. It's a little bigger machine that can do cellulose, because the cellulose
- is a little heavier. So maybe you do get a faster flow rate with the Menards machine. Yeah,
- and like I said, the cost difference between Menards and Lowe's kind of covers the rental anyway, if
- you only want to go to one place.
- little bit more time. I wanted to run through crawl spaces really quick. So crawl spaces maybe are a
- little more involved than attics. Crawl spaces can be a place that affects your health a lot more than
- attics because you've got that moist and often moldy air rising into the house from down there. There's
- businesses, several businesses that encapsulate crawl spaces, you know, the crawl space doctor and
- several others but they are pricey but there's a lot of details there so that would take a lot of looking
- into to do it yourself correctly but so I'm going to give a quick overview of crawl spaces so rigid
- foam blocks can be fit in between the joists so you got these floor joists in the basement this is a roof but
- You'll fit that rigid block in all the way to the outside band and then you can foam around that to
- air seal the band area. So the bands often will glow bright red on a house or because a lot of heat
- escapes there. It's usually just a single two by board that's out there and if it's not insulated. You
- can also put a piece of bat insulation in if you have the room and then put the foam block on top of
- it to raise the R value there and then
- air sealed in. Oftentimes people will put just bad insulation in there and without it being sealed in,
- it's not effective. It needs a dead air space on both sides and air can also move around it. And when
- you're sealing that up or you're not sealing it up, then that air and fibrous insulation can be a problem.
- So you want to air seal that area if you're working with it. A bit of caution there. So houses usually,
- modern houses sit on this, it's called seal sealer.
- And this will sit on your concrete and then the wood will go on top of that. And it's usually a treated
- board on the bottom. Got an older house and you don't see this sticking out on top of the foundation.
- Older houses oftentimes have termite shielding that was made out of metal. Either of these were called
- capillary breaks and the concrete wicks up a lot of water. And especially if your grading isn't right,
- you can see concrete that's just completely soaked. So when you insulate here,
- You're slowing down the heat flow. You're slowing the drying. And that can cause this to rot where it
- never did before, if there's no capillary break before. So that's a place where you want to be cautious.
- Generally, they'll put down a 6-mil plastic or better. I don't think any of the professionals use 6-mil.
- but 10 mil plastic that's a little more rigid. Some of it's fiber reinforced. They'll put that down
- over all the dirt in the crawl space and run it up the walls. And that stops the rising moisture from
- coming out of the dirt. A lot of the moisture in a house can come right out of the dirt and then go
- up into the house from below. And that plastic also blocks radon. And if you have a radon problem,
- encapsulating and putting a depressurizing tube and a fan underneath the plastic will
- move the radon in the right direction out of the house. The radon I understand is if it's high enough,
- it's like smoking half a pack of cigarettes possibly a day. That might be fear-mongering, but you can
- also get little radon meters that are the same size as my CO2 meter. There's all kinds of indoor air
- quality meters now for particulates and CO2 and volatiles that are all like
- about two or $300 a piece if you really want to scare yourself every day. I've stuck with the CO2 so
- far. I'm thinking about particulates next. So something that I've done before is you can get inexpensive
- foil bubble wrap at the ABC roofing supply. And I put that down on the dirt before putting the plastic over it.
- And it makes the whole crawl space soft and it keeps you from poking the liner on stuff sticking out
- of the dirt. So all seams on that plastic should be taped. You should try to use as big a sheets as
- possible. And then rigid foam can be added to the walls over the plastic. And you want to leave a bare
- strip of concrete along the top to inspect for termites. Termites love burrowing through foam.
- which is why I don't really approve of putting it on the outside of houses, foundations. They will just
- chew it to nothing. And then if it's an ICF wall going up into a house, they'll use it as a highway
- to go up to the wood. Yep. Installing sump pumps if your basement regularly floods, a lot of crawl space.
- A lot of crawl spaces usually will get like six inches of water in them after rain
- That might be from gutters or draining on the outside that needs to be fixed, but you don't want that
- happening when you have a new liner in there and it messing everything up. Dehumidifier might be a final
- step. So I think that's about it for crawl spaces. Any questions on this? We could go on crawl spaces
- for a long time. There's a lot to do with them, but. Yeah.
- Would a lot of these tips also apply to unfinished basements? Or is that sort of a different? Yeah,
- unfinished basements are very similar. So would these tips apply to unfinished basements? The code can't
- let you have uncovered foam in a basement. So if you go putting foam on the walls, you have to cover
- it with drywall or another material if you want it to be decoded.
- Basement floors, if you've already got concrete down there, they can be coated with epoxy paint. They
- should be prepped very carefully and then coated with epoxy paint and that'll keep moisture from rising
- through the basement floor because moisture will wick right through concrete. It's very porous. So I've
- got some resources listed here. Some of them are, the first ones are YouTube videos.
- YouTube's very useful for learning technical things, as a lot of you may know, if you work on cars or
- anything else. I'd say be careful because it's addictive and it's meant to sell you stuff. But anything
- about insulating an attic, there's several good ones on there where they show why you want to do it.
- They'll show people testing them with thermal cameras and smoke pencils and then going through and doing
- the filming
- There's a show called the Build Show that I really like watching. They are often sponsored by a particular
- material, but they have really good building information. Joe Listebrek from Building Science Corporation,
- they've got like 100 free articles you can read on building science, and they're very straightforward.
- And he's a good speaker to listen to. He has a very wry sense of humor.
- Robert Lunksford with Home Performance is good for everything HVAC. He's a little hard to get the big
- picture from at times, though. He really narrows in on things and goes on for a long time. Then you
- also have Fine Home Building Magazine, which is available at the library and podcast. Building Science
- with a Beat podcast is short, little bits that are fun with nice music.
- Any final questions?
- I don't really want to endorse or go against any companies, but hopefully I've given you enough that
- you can see how they respond to this different stuff when you ask them about a project. And if they
- say, oh, we don't do air sealing in attics, we just blow more insulation, then you maybe want to find
- somebody that does do the harder thing first. But I think contractors are evolving.
- You know, it may be difficult to find people that want to do everything correctly. But I think they're
- out there. So, yep. So also, if you're hiring someone, we're going to have a lot of info out on the
- table about the different rebates that are available. There's quite a few rebates available. And I think
- everybody needs to write their
- Congressman and say we want to keep rebates available and keep low interest loans available so that
- people can afford to do this stuff, make their houses healthy and have their energy bills go down and
- maybe slow climate change down.
- Cooling costs, maybe. Yeah. So your question is, you've heard of a solar fan that you can put on your
- roof that saves you money. Yeah. I don't know about that in particular. I've seen power vents on houses
- that, for one reason or another, they might have been a hip roof, which are a little harder to vent,
- or sometimes they just stick
- three power vents on a house. They're really big circles of metal. That's how you can see them from
- the ground. And they've got a big fan, big noisy fan that pops on when it gets hot up there and blows
- air out of the house. I think if you can do it without electricity, that's way better. But I'm not familiar
- with that. If they're offering a rebate for it, maybe it is a good new technology. I can see it possibly
- So if you have thick enough insulation, you may not be as concerned about the heat of your attic.
- You know, they sell different radiant barriers that can be stapled to the rafters or laid on top of
- your insulation. And there's a bit of skepticism about how useful those are if you've got really thick
- insulation.
- Greg, thank you immensely. This was really, really, really helpful. Yeah. And I think there's refreshments
- thanks to hand and to NOAA and to Electrify Indiana. There's lots of refreshments out there. Please
- help yourself. And Greg is available for one-on-one questions and conversations. So thank you so much
- for being here. Really wonderful. Yeah, thanks. If you want to look at my CO2 meter or shoot some foam
- or look at the thermal camera, you can look at yourself in it. It's kind of weird to see your
- glowing eyeballs. Yep. Yeah, I should add that there are sheets out there. If you have any questions
- or want information, just write your name down and what it is that you'd like, and we can get that to
- you on any aspect of electrification. So thanks so much. All right. Thanks for coming. I guess I should
- add to the people who are with us on Zoom,
- please just email us questions at electrifyindiana and we'll get them to Greg or to ourselves and get
- back to you. Thanks.