The easiest way to stop the bathtub from overflowing is to turn off the water. If the faucet leaks, we have to pull the plug to let the dripping water out the drain as fast as it comes into the tub.Warm, humid air leaking into the walls of a house is like a faucet flooding the tub. Even a go...
Yes, but maybe not good enough.Sheathing paper is designed to keep outside water and wind out of the walls but to let inside vapour breath out (like your skin does for your body). Over the years, manufacturers have made the traditional sheathing or building paper stronger, but at the same tim...
The general rule is that a basement or crawl space should have at least 0.1 square meters of screened ventilation space for every 25 square meters of floor space (1 sq. ft. per 250 sq. ft.) -- that is if the floor is made of poured concrete or if a dirt floor has a ground cover. If the floor...
Not true for all parts of Canada!In certain regions (most of the data is from the National Research Council in the Saskatoon area) it appears that the only effective way to stop continuous accumulation of frost in the attic is to not ventilate at all during the worst of winter, but to seal the...
Power vents and turbines are not a good idea in northern climate attics. (search keyword "attic" for the title " CONFUSION: POWER ATTIC VENTILATORS ARE NOT RECOMMENDED FOR WINTER USE. WHY?")That leaves gravity vents, vents that allow warm air in the attic to rise and escape out the top of t...
The main reason for not recommending power vents in the attic is that the attic is usually not well sealed, and the power vent, in sucking air out of the attic, creates a negative pressure in the attic. This negative pressure sucks warm air and humidity through the ceiling leaks into the att...
Be careful, we are still learning how to deal with these difficult structures after adding roof space insulation. The problem is that the air volume and its flat thin shape do not efficiently dry out the roof space as does the large vertical air space of a peaked roof.The cardinal rule is to ...
Yes. The attic absorbs a great deal of heat from the sun during the summer and becomes much hotter than the rest of the house. The better your attic is insulated, the less this heat build-up will affect the temperature of the house. Venting the attic replaces this heated attic air with air...
A common problem is found in B.C. when people pile lots of insulation into suspended ceilings below cold attics. Ventilating the space above the insulation to the outside can only be recommended if you have successfully made the suspended ceiling air-tight at the ceiling level. If anyone ha...
Air leaks account for the greatest loss of heating dollars from Canadian homes. These are easily solved by sealing. The greatest conductive heat losses occur through the basement. Canadian basements typically lose more heat than ceilings because attics usually have a little insulation (eve...
