Lori from North Gower, Ontario has purchased an old farm house with one part covered in board and batten wood while the main house is brick. She wants to know what she should do to protect the old board and batten. Presently it has simply been left to "silver" with age.Painting or oiling that o...
No, those are not plastic igloos that you see in the photo above, but temporary winter structures called Tempo. As you can see in the photo, and if you caught the TV show you saw even more, there are Tempos as far as you could see in every direction. Most people use them as a temporary garage, ...
The EcoEnergy program of homeowner grants to help retrofit homes has been brought back to life by the federal government in late September of 2011 -- part of the EcoAction initiative. I love this program and the hard workers at NRCan have done a great job of organizing it, explaining it and ma...
Ventilation in a Canadian attic does very little to remove moisture when the temperature in the attic is below freezing. During that time, the moisture is in the form of Ice and the passing air simply won't remove it -- whether you have passive vents or power vents. When things warm up, if the ...
Connect to your favourite weather forecaster and look for the following conditions:
Category: Roofing Product: Asphalt & Gravel flat roofing
Temperature Limitations: Roofing materials flow best above +10 C (+50 F) -- emergency repairs can be made down to -10 C (+14 F)
Rain Limitatio...
When there is morning frost or light snow on a roof, you can learn a lot about a heat losses from the house and how to eliminate ice dams and icicles.
What causes problems
Melting the bottom of a snow pack or melting off all snow at the crown of the roof sends water down under the snow to ...
Frost Protected Shallow Foundations
The foundation for a house is generally poured below the soil grade level so that the footing itself is well below the frost depth for any given region and soil type. This protects the house from frost heaving caused by expanding soils beneath the foundation....
Leafs and other debris clogging up the rain gutters can be the death of a roof. On a one story bungalow you can pretty easily keep those gutters clean but when things are higher up, or you have a lot of mature trees in the yard, it can be a big maintenance task. If you have tried any of the scree...
One of the most successful, but most expensive ways to keep leaves out of rain gutters is to place a solid shield over the top.
Using the principle of surface tension of water, the water flows over the shield and wraps around its outside curve. That curve extends out over the rain gutter itsel...
For most houses, never -- let nature handle it. The reason for that is that most roofs are built to handle the snow that is piled up on it, removing snow is dangerous to you and often the process of snow removal causes more damage to the roof than the snow would. Those were the conclusions tha...
