David Meiland

John, if you plug in a 120V 1500-watt heater, you are heating up one hot leg and the neutral. If you plug in a 240V 3000-watt heater, you are heating up two hot legs and the neutral, which will be somewhat hotter than if only one leg were in use. There is just no appreciable difference in efficiency or output at all. 240V heaters are common because they produce more heat, and more heat is needed in some cases. I have a 240V 4000W electric shop heater instead of (3) 120V heaters because it's easier to install and operate as one unit. It doesn't cost more or less to operate. In your case (and mine), the efficiency gains can be had if switching to a heat pump, where you can get 200-300% efficiency pretty easily.

Agree with Kurt, the problem is water, further recommend that the building be moved inside another, larger building.

Man, that's a stupid place for an electrical panel too.

Don't feel bad, I've inadvertently fixed a lot of things by "laying on the hands". First instinct is to send it for repair. Second is to throw it out. Then I lose patience and start taking it apart. Failing to figure out what's wrong I put it back together, and it works. Special powers? Utter incompetence? Not sure....

That's a remarkably clean bend on that copper.

IR would have been useful for identifying wet areas inside closed walls, ceilings, etc. It sounds like they went ahead and stripped out the finishes in any area thought to be wet, but if there are still areas that are insulated and covered with sheetrock, you could scan those assuming you can get a decent delta T. I would take my camera to check out something like this, I might use it and it might help, but unless there are a lot of closed cavities I wouldn't go to the trouble of bringing in someone else.

When I click on the link in Mike's post, it takes me to another thread where I appear to be not-logged-in, and it will let me enter my username but not my password. Waahhhh!

Hee hee, You've just set a bunch of 'em back on their heels. They're all goin' "What the f....!" ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike I get calls to go out and locate tubes so that someone can drill a hole or nail down a floor. If it's an exposed concrete or tile floor, I have to "point" to the tubing loops so that someone else can lay down blue tape as we go... this might be made easier with a laser pointer, but I would worry like hell that the laser is pointing to the right spot and that there's not parallax error in play... unless you can see the laser spot on the screen... dunno about that, never tried. If I can draw on the floor with a marker, I tape one to a stick and sometimes add a piece of aluminum tape to the end of the marker for thermal contrast. With the wide angle lens I can easily cruise along and draw lines while looking at the screen. The laser would be useless for this. The easiest way to do this is to get 3 or 4 sharpies, put them in the refrigerator, and then use them one at a time until they warm up, then switch. The cold marker shows up perfectly against the warm floor and you can really fly. Download Attachment: tubes.jpg 26.03 KB

The laser pointer would be useful to me when mapping out radiant tubes. As it is, I use a sharpie marker taped to a stick. Not real high tech but it works. An IR window is a view port installed into the housing of a piece of equipment, so you can shoot through it without opening the cover panel. They're made of some bizarre materials and are transparent to IR wavelengths. http://www.fluke.com/fluke/usen/products/ir-windows.htm I paid the same as Kurt for my Ti32. Of course he's right about the file format, but if you want to edit the image in the office you need to save as an .is2 file, do your editing, then export as a .jpg. I tweak pretty much every image before pasting it into a report.

Dunno what the E will cost, but you don't have to pay $8995 for the Ti32. And if you want a wide angle or tele lens for Flir, what does that cost? From what I see in that video, the only thing I would really want is wireless transfer of images to a laptop or pad. Moving images via SD card is a minor hassle. Would rarely if ever use the laser pointer, maybe the built-in lamp once in a while. I'm not sure what they mean by "touch screen". Does that mean I have to put my greasy paws on the view screen to adjust the camera?? Flir does have a friendly .jpg format for their images. With Fluke you are using their proprietary format and have to convert to .jpg.

Should be easy to lower the interior humidity by ventilating. It would be a very easy HRV install, or you could use a quiet inline bath fan on a timer switch. That's a small house, so occupant load could vary wildly--one person who has a f/t job and some outside activities is one thing, a family of four with three dogs and a fishtank is another. I'm assuming that whatever drainage can be done has been done.

It would be worth finding out if there's spillage at the water heater draft diverter when the furnaces fire up.

Call me two-faced, but when I get around to remodeling the interior of my place, I'm probably going to use Corbond. I have 2x4 walls. The exterior is completely done, so there's no way to add foam over the sheathing, and the interior is too small to want to lose floor area to foamboard on the inside of the studs. One of my neighbors recently dropped $70K on a foam truck but is apparently still fumbling with it. Maybe they'll get good enough to do it right. Option 2 would be foil polyiso cut and fit. Since I've already been accused of specious prognostication, let me take it a step further and predict the next 5-10 years. We now have code requirements for blower door testing in some jurisdictions, and if the 2012 IECC gets widely adopted we'll be looking at 3 ACH50. That is going to cause builders to learn to air seal their houses in a big way. At that point, anyone who thought that foam was necessary to get a tight house will have an opportunity to rethink. I'm all for the hemp stuff. I looked into Bio-Based for one house but it's mostly petro, the bio component is very small.

I don't dispute that it can perform well. I think you would find it very interesting to get a blower door and start checking out houses with it. You already have the IR. In the long run it seems likely to me that foam will go away. Oil will get too expensive, in fact it appears poised right now to derail the "recovery". Oil at $50-75 per barrel makes for semi-affordable foam. Oil at $200 makes foam way too expensive for most people. Lower-cost details will have to be used to make housing for the masses, which is 99% of everybody. Here's a piece on fire retardants in foam, another angle worth considering: http://www.ecobuildnetwork.org/the-buil ... -chemicals

I think that blown fiber in those walls is going to be a better choice. Batts laid against lumpy SPF are going to have air gaps all over the place.

What I am reading is that the few guys out there who have really learned the details are getting around 1 ACH50 using air-sealing and dense packed cellulose everywhere. That seems pretty good to me. It would interesting to compare a house like that to a foamed house where the same attention was not paid to the small details.

So then a foam attic is the right choice for a builder who doesn't want to learn how to do the air-sealing right. Hopefully he's not also using pull-down stairs, or if he is, he's building a really nice insulated/weatherstripped cover over them. I'd be interested to hear from Richard how he got into the attic he photographed, and whether air leakage actually was near zero. Convection in fiber insulation is certainly an issue, but I think that it's very minor compared to the air sealing mistakes that are common. I have not heard or read anything that makes me think that convection is a big enough issue to make foam the only workable option.

What I am seeing--so far, and in the few foam-insulation houses that I've looked at--is that foam is being used to try to make up for sloppy air-barrier work. Guys think that if they spray foam into the stud bays there will be no air leakage at the walls. Unfortunately, it still comes in under the mudsill, at the corners, between stacked framing members, etc. And of course there is leakage around window and door weatherstripping.

It is quite possible to air-seal an attic with caulk and small amounts of canned foam, and then insulate it with cellulose. This application performs very well, the cost will probably be far lower, and the whole thing is serviceable and can easily be remodeled later without destroying the insulation. There are possible failure issues with foam as well--sometimes catastrophic--that may or may not become apparent immediately (i.e. before the whole thing is covered with drywall). Foam is a petroleum product, and it will go up as the oil price increases, and of course the embodied energy of the material is extremely high compared to most other forms of insulation. While I suppose it's possible that the foam job would be slightly more airtight than anything else, remember that air exchanges are necessary, mechanical or otherwise, and turning the house into a beer cooler is not the goal. The only place I see a need for foam in new construction is under concrete slabs.

Greg's situation sounds like one in which a drain pan under the washing machine wouldn't have done much, if anything. We always install those, but I'm doubtful.

http://www.watts.com/pages/_products_de ... sp?pid=603 I have a few of these installed. Dunno if they work because they've never burst. Until recently I had a stupidly uninsulated piece of copper hot water supply in my crawl space, abandoned just above the floor behind a bath vanity after I made some changes. It burst during a freeze and started flooding the bathroom while my wife was in the shower. My daughter came in the office with a delighted look on her face and said Mommy wants me to come right away, there's water leaking. We had just cancelled a 4-day trip out of town due to poor weather. My calculation was that 17000 gallons of 120-degree water would have poured out on the floor (3 GPM well, propane tankless heater with 500 gallons of gas available) if this had occurred while we were gone. Sometimes I'm too stupid for my own good.

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Four shots in one area. The meter pins thru the Tyvek are into the back of the siding near grade on the north side of the house. This is the only place with the back of the siding exposed in the crawl, the rest of it is joists directly on mudsill. Click to Enlarge 39.09 KB Click to Enlarge 33.05 KB

I took readings at quite a few places and the lowest was 18%, up under a roof overhang.

The owner had taken off one piece of horizontal band that was over a joint in the ply. No paint, no caulk, nothing behind. They sided and trimmed the house raw, then painted. I checked the meter out on some lumber and plywood that's been in my shop for over a year. The lumber is in the 9% range, a piece of AC fir plywood read 10%, and a piece of shop maple ply read 13%. Someone on JLC commented that pin meters are not entirely accurate in engineered lumber (assume that includes plywood) and I think there's something to that. When I was in the crawl space of this house, the joists and girders were around 12%, the bottom chords of the TJIs were 14-15%, so that also makes it seem like readings in engineered wood are higher than actual.