About the Author

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and they should be attributed to him only. These are not the opinions of his employers, friends, family, acquantences, or any one else. Everything on this blog is his fault and no one elses.

I’m a mechanical engineer for building products manufacturer in the northeast US. In this roll, I’ve gotten to see the do’s and don’ts of building with high performance materials, particularly engineered lumber and foam plastic insulation. Since you only stop learning when you’re dead, I continue to research and investigate high performance building envelopes.

The motivation for writing this blog comes from the dozens of nice home owners I’ve met and how often they don’t get what they pay for when building or renovating a house. Honest tradesmen and good construction managers still build unhealthy, unsafe, inefficient, and high maintenance houses. Why is this?

As fuel prices continue to rise a people start taking conservation seriously, there is great demand for “high performance” homes. As soon as we start effectively insulating and air sealing houses, the indoor environment, the mechanical systems, the finishes all behave very differently. Most of the durability and health-ful knowlege a designer or tradesman brings to a construction project comes from practical experience rather than academic education. When we change something in the house as substantial as reducing the natural air infiltration (aka leakage) by a factor of 10, suddenly an awful lot of that experience doesn’t apply any more.

The worst part is, many times it looks like the traditional technique looks like it is working just fine for many years. Down the road, however, the damage from the inappropriate technique is revealed and the repair is never fun or cheap. In extreme cases, replacing the house is more cost effective than repairing it.