Classic Trim Details Do More Than Just Look Good

By Dan Morrison

Well detailed walls push water away from the foundation with trim elements. Flares, frieze boards and foundation water tables aren't there just because they look good. Their job is to protect the house from water.


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They look good because their proportions are well thought out. Rules for proportions were figured out thousands of years ago by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

They're worth following.

-- Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Classic and Durable Window and Door Trim Details

For durable window details look no farther than the oldest houses on your block. Build small roofs over windows and doors; recess them into the wall if you can. The trim details can be as simple or fancy as you want. For design guidence, look at classic houses.

I was driving through Maine last week and saw great examples of water shedding details on houses that have been around for 120-250 years.


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It's like Dr. Brusque said at summer camp a few weeks ago: "they built leaky houses 100 years ago too, it's just that the pigs have been torn down by now." What's left, is what worked.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com

Day 2 at Building Science Summer Camp

By Dan Morrison

What did I do at summer camp? met with our advisors, learned about physics, ate food from from Alaska to Dallas, Miami to Maine. And there were cubans with cigars, too.

Building science summer camp is an invitation-only information and consumption festival held during the first week of August each year and hosted by Building Science Corp. Officially calld the Westford Symposium on Building Science, summer camp attracts the best and the brightest in the commercial and residential building fields. There is also very good food, beer, wine, and cigars.

Classes are held during the day at the Westford Regency Hotel and Conference Center, networking and feasting opportunities are at the clubhouse each night. The classes are taught by whoever Joe Lstiburek, one of the founders of Building Science Corp, wants to invite. Typically these teachers are amoung the best in their respective fields. This year was no different.

Opening remarks by Pete Consigli:
“They ate all of the whale blubber” (John Woodward brought whale blubber and seal oil for us lower 48-ers to try. I guess it was pretty good.)

Today's first speaker: Pierre Brusque
According to the official Summer Camp brochure:

Pierre Busque is an engineer with Levelton in Vancouver, BC. He has over
twenty years of experience in one of the most miserable places in the world to
build but one of the most attractive to live in - the building science version
of beauty and the beast. He will regale us with stories of metal roofing
in Whistler, curtain walls and the Qube, historic buildings, recladding of
schools in Sayward and a few lawsuits. He has so many images of building
porn that he is on a most watch list. The second most important thing to
know about Mr. Busque is that he is a talented guitarist - the band is in for a
treat.

Vancouver has had its share of water problems. The rotting condo catastrophe is the most famous, but there have been water problems in the area for a long time. One reason, according to Mr. Brusque, is that there is tremendous variation in rainfall, both amount and distribution, among towns in the area. From desert to rain forest, and from slow and steady rain to sideways gully-washers. But weather variation isn’t a problem if designers (architects and engineers) don’t try to impose their home town’s weather patterns on a different city.

When designers from occasional gully-washer cities underestimate the power of constant light rain, they can do as much damage as a designer from the desert underestimating a gulley washer. Brusque: “Small leaks over a long period of time will really cause your building to go to crap.” Big leaks followed by long dry spells are easier to overcome than little leaks that can never dry out.

There are four basic causes of building failure:

• Ignorance
• Carelessness
• Negligence
• Greed

Ignorance, according to Brusque, is the only one we can do anything about. Designers need to look at local solutions, talk to local experts, and don’t forget to talk to old trade contractors. Pierre showed us a sill fan flashing design that a roofer showed him -- without cutting the metal (Stay tuned, I’ll make a short video using paper as a model). “They don’t build them like they used to -- well, buildings leaked 100 years ago too, but the real pigs were torn down.” The good ones have remained. The guys that built the good ones know how to shed water.

He also offered four rules about windows:

• Treat all windows like they are leakers, because they really are.
• Storefront windows should only be used under cover (this includes residential)
• Because all windows leak, a sub-sill membrane with upturned edge is necessary
• Never fasten a window through the sill. Even if the manufacturer demands it. If you must break this rule, elevate the membrane at the fastener with a shim to direct water away when it leaks through the hole (this tip from Ray Moore in the audience).

A liquid membrane that Pierre likes is called Siplast, a PMMA membrane (polymethyl methacrylate).

More speakers to come!

Day 1 at Building Science Summer Camp

By Dan Morrison
What did I do at summer camp? Met with our advisory team, learned about physics, ate food from from Alaska to Dallas, Miami to Maine. And there were cubans with cigars, too.

Building science summer camp is an invitation-only information and consumption festival held during the first week of August each year and hosted by Building Science Corp. Officially calld the Westford Symposium on Building Science, summer camp attracts the best and the brightest in the commercial and residential building fields. There is also very good food, beer, wine, and cigars.

Classes are held during the day at the Westford Regency Hotel and Conference Center, networking and feasting opportunities are at the clubhouse each night. The classes are taught by whoever Joe Lstiburek, one of the founders of Building Science Corp, wants to invite. Typically these teachers are amoung the best in their respective fields. This year was no different.

Each day opens with a rundown by the chef, Pete Consigli, on the menu.
Summer camp participants do their best to out-do eachother each year with their native cuisenes: The Alaskans bring halibut and salmon, the Texans bring a steer and slow roast the brisket, North Carolina barbeque, Maine clams and mussels... Pete's opening comments this year: "The food at summer cam can be summed up three ways: Best quality, huge variety, and a hell of a lot of it."

Even smart people get confused.
Dr. Lstiburek likes to say that he's not a consultant, he's an insultant. Dr Anton Tenwold added another layer to the title game: Confusant.
After recently retiring from the USDA Forest Products Lab, physicist Anton TenWolde has discovered that what he thought he knew, is really stuff he doesn’t know. Dr Tenwolde's eyes lit up when someone raised a hand during his presentation to say "I'm confused."

But there's a lot to learn from the stuff Dr. TenWolde doesn't know. Here’s what I learned:

• A lot of water in houses comes from people, but it isn’t all from respiration (breathing). A lot can come from transpiration (sweating) too -- up to 3 lbs of water per day per person. Coupled with respiration, a family of five dumps up to 33 gallons of water into a house every day.
• Foundations add a lot of water to a house too: .4 kg per square meter per day (about a gallon per 44 square feet) evaporate from bare soil in a crawl space.
• It takes six weeks for a sliver of wood to come to moisture equilibrium with its surroundings. And then Lew Harriman asked if we could all undlerline that in our notes: SIX WEEKS for a teeny piece of wood to come to equilibrium with its environment through sorption. So the oak flooring probably ought to be in the room for more than a couple of days before installation.
  

Houses can be a huge part of the solution to our energy problem
Ren Anderson works at the National Renewable Energy Lab and is interested in Net Zero Energy Houses. It's pretty well known that we can use a lot less power in houses, today he talked a lot about the challenge of syncing up local power generation with grid demands. Many houses can generate a lot of power with PV, but can they provide electricity to the grid when the grid needs it most -- during the hot part of the day when everyone flips on the AC?

I learned:

• Today’s houses are much bigger than houses from the fifties and they use much more energy.
• While today’s big houses use less energy per square foot, it’s total energy use that’s important because we don’t make power by the square foot, we make power by the kilowatt.
• Small houses are more efficient at space heating than large houses -- they use a smaller percentage of total energy for space heating.
  Large houses get better RESNET scores than small houses because RESNET is based on performance per square foot. For this reason, it (and Energy Star) are biased towards larger houses (but the Energy Star bias may be changing).
• It is very cost effective to slash home energy use by 50%. The second 50%, to get to zero energy, is less cost effective at current energy prices. If energy prices go up (which they may) higher efficiencies will be very cost effective too.
• PV panels on houses can provide peak power needs to the grid if they’re turned to face west rather than south because their generation curve will be shifted an hour or two later in the day -- just when houses need the most electricity.
• 80% of the houses in America are built by 20% of the builders. Production builders risk going the way of GM if they don’t lead the world in energy efficiency.

At the clubhouse, I learned that more and more regional green building programs, such as Earth Craft House from Atlanta and Earth Advantage from Oregon, are expanding. Earth Craft is in six southeastern states and Earth Advantage is moving towards New England. This may mean that the big National programs need to get their acts together and start making sense.

--Dan Morrison is managing editor of GreenBuildingAdvisor.com