David Meiland

With a HRV, you have the option of pulling air from multiple locations and supplying air to multiple locations, so better mixing of air. With a whole house fan, you have one exhaust point, and makeup air is drawn through the cracks. HRV is perhaps more "surgical". It sounds like you have something extreme going on there. Is this slab on grade? Wet basement? Air-drying laundry? Fish tanks? Five large dogs and a collection of tropical plants? Someone steaming vegetables for every meal? Other sources of humidity besides the occupants? How many square feet and how many occupants? I wonder if something else is going on. Furnace exhaust is a good suggestion to check.

The winter air is dry enough to easily remove humidity if you ventilate the house. It works like a charm in my place, and Randy is ~50 miles away. One thing I do if I get up in the morning and notice condensation... crack a window in the bedroom and dry a load of laundry. The dryer pulls its makeup air through the bedroom window. Run a load of wash the night before so you have something to work with.........

I did the same thing, tightened my old farmhouse so much (about 2.5 ACH50) that now we have a lot of humidity. We have dual glazing but still get some condensation on the bedroom windows in some cases. The answer is to run a bath fan enough to remove the humidity. This can mean several hours per day. You should have a hygrometer to keep track of things. I installed a Panasonic WhisperGreen fan, rated for continuous use, with a low/continuous setting of 30 CFM (can by adjusted up) and a full speed of 80 CFM (when you hit the switch). A HRV retrofit may be worthwhile, if you have a perfect setup for it (probably an open attic with an easy way to run short, clean duct runs that are insulated). The value of the saved heat you can recover is low if your electric rates are like mine, and the cost of the equipment and install is high, but it can do a better job than a single point exhaust fan. Replacing the windows or adding storms will or course help the condensation, but not the humidity.

That's an awful detail. A guy who cared could have simply determined elevation for bottom of siding and stopped the wood there. In most cases you'd be safe assuming 1" below bottom of mudsill. What a putz. Treated doesn't mean it lasts forever, just somewhat longer than untreated.

Kurt, you got any pics of what those honeycomb air vents look like?

I find that a lot of heat pumps don't start if you raise the stat one degree--the air handler and the emergency heat come on. I'm looking for energy efficiency issues, and that's definitely a big one in houses where the owner likes to goose the stat when they feel cold, so I normally check that and advise them if that's what they have. If they're amenable, I leave the front door open for a few minutes so the system starts itself, then check to see that it's in heat pump mode. I see a lot of systems where the heat pump is performing poorly, or isn't performing at all even though the fan is running. IR is very handy for looking at heat pumps.

Straight from the meter.

There is a fair amount of electrical work in this house that was not carefully inspected, mostly romex run freely across the framing like spaghetti, rather than being drilled through. I know that the current electrical inspectors would not allow the conduit in the photos. It would be OK if it ran under the joists, although I think runs too far under the house to be legal. There is a location directly above where it enters that would have been fine for the panel.

... then there's the issue of plywood left under the house in contact with concrete and grade...

This is atypical for these parts, and I'm not sure it's legit. 2" PVC comes through the foundation, runs slightly above grade for several feet, makes a turn, runs through this plywood trough filled with concrete for several more feet, then emerges and rises to the subfloor, then up into a wall to the main panel. There are two places where anyone crawling around to do work is likely to put their weight on the pipe. Seems unsafe to me. Most of the time, the pipe comes straight up out of the ground within a few feet of the foundation and goes directly into the wall above. Click to Enlarge 53.27 KB Click to Enlarge 45.5 KB

I assume these are not WDO, just peaceful visitors.

There were quite a few of these in an attic. The soffit screens are all intact but there was one area of ridge vent screen that was damaged, probably during installation but possibly by these guys if they wanted in bad enough. Some of them were in exposed locations in the attic, others had taken up residence behind insulation, on the back of drywall. None appeared to be living or particularly recent. In addition to the ridge vent screen, there were plenty of access openings from the walls and even the crawl space (pipe and wire holes wide open). There was also a paper wasp nest in the attic. Click to Enlarge 53.44 KB

Hmmmm... those gaskets are uniformly regarded by energy auditors to provide little air-sealing. Here's an image of a receptacle that has a foam gasket behind it. This is during a blower door test in cold weather. You can see air leaking in and cooling the drywall, and cold air has also cooled the receptacle itself (because it has air pathways through it), but the trim plate is warmer (and nicely uniform) because it's insulated. In spite of that, I put them in my house. They were giving away handfuls of them at the county fair, so I got a bunch. We may end up sealing between the drywall and the box, and putting kid protectors in the unused outlets. Click to Enlarge 32.8 KB

That's not a retrofit, though... right?

Is there a NEC-approved method or material for sealing air leaks into electrical boxes? I have seen insulators use canned foam (a gun with a metal nozzle that allows for fairly precise work) to squirt a bit of foam into the wire entry hole, from the inside. A tiny bit of foam ends up inside the box, most of it outside (and a diligent worker can scrape off what . There are other caulk/sealant materials that would probably also do the job. I have personally used thin sheets of clay to soundproof electrical boxes from the outside, before the wall was closed. Any thoughts on this? I have a customer who is highly motivated to reduce the air leakage in parts of her house, and quite a bit is coming from electrical openings. Doing something that is not code-approved is not an option.

You raise the question of wire gauge from the 60A breaker, and of course that should be answered. The breaker is there to protect the wire in question. Assuming you have a proper 60A subpanel I see no reason why you can't add another 20A/240 breaker to it and run your ejector. Curious why your ejector is 240. I have a Liberty 350 (I think) and it's 120. Lots of those around here.

I can't improve on John's answer, but that was a helluva blow up here too. Here's something that happened far away: http://mediacdn.wral.com:1935/vods3/_de ... ylist.m3u8

http://www.sfvictoriana.com/

I'm used to seeing air handlers with electric heat strips and heat pumps, and there's always a condensate drain. Rarely see gas furnaces and yesterday saw an American Standard 90 w/o heat pump, with a 1/2" CPVC drain line from the cabinet to daylight. There was a drip coming from it. What is the source of *that* condensate? Is it just what drips back out of the vent pipe?

Should be popular with hunters.

I see "gas drains" on LPG boilers and furnaces in crawl spaces around here. Generally there is a large sheet metal pan under the unit with a 4" ABS drain piped to the outside air. If the unit leaks gas it will pool in the pan and then start flowing out through the pipe.

Brick warehouse, Spokane, Wa, about 6800 HDD, gonna take a lot of BTUs.

That happened to customers of mine with a house in the great white north. They went away for the holidays, the boiler pilot light went out, pipes froze and broke, it got a little warmer and some water leaked onto the floors, it got a little colder and they came home to find a skating rink of the first floor. I don't remember the rest of the story but I believe the remediation company melted and simultaneously sucked up the water. Around here we have regular events where someone is walking down the street and notices a flood coming out from under someone's front door.

Jim, is that your laptop on the stand?

I don't see how there could possibly be step flashing there, unless it had a very short wall leg. I bet that what you can see is what there is. And yes, it could work... well enough...... or it could fail.