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.