Foam-a-home-phobia

Cincinnati is a mixed climate with extreme highs in the summer and extreme low temperatures in the winter. But, since my wife and I regard AC as more of a luxury, we are not big air conditioning people. We are way more concerned about keeping warm in the winter which we can't do without spending a ton of money and feeling really guilty about all the fossil fuel energy required to do it.

The wonderful thing about a 1920's craftsman/cape cod home is the predictability of it's energy sins. Cute as they are, they are little bastard children unfit for any performance challenge. They've got lots of problems...but at least we know where to find them--everywhere!

Look at my cute home.

Oh my gosh that's cute!

If you are thinking to yourself, "It needs new windows" You need to come back to planet Earth, take my class, and wean yourself off of the marketing teat of those window companies advertising on the back of public transportation. If you've taken my class, then you know how to do my Curb-Side Energy Audit in about 30 seconds and can name 4 of the 16 architectural features of my home that need to be addressed, and CAN be addressed with some foam insulation.

I've actually formed a great friendship with a guy who has access to a new formula of cavity filling foam and is open to alternative no/low-cost transactions and bartering. SCORE!

My stick-framed walls were built with true dimensional 2x4's in the balloon-framed style, which means behind the plaster and lathe walls there are stud cavities are open to the basement and they have no insulation. (It used to be a perfect getaway route for the mice we had until our cats learned to hunt like a pack of velociraptors. Although foaming the walls has immediate sex-appeal...NOT SO FAST.

There are several ISSUES to be concerned about:

• What do we do about existing knob and tube wiring in the wall cavities?
• How do we trace and stop the moisture issues at the roof/chimney?
• What is the home's Building Tightness Limit (BTL) and will we need to revise our ventilation strategy?
• What are the indoor air quality effects of the foam to be installed?
• Where will this foam go and could it damage anything?
• Do we fill the stud cavities from inside the home or out?
• What is the long term performance of this product?

I'm not quite foam-a-home phobic about these issues, but consider the following:

• knob and tube wiring was installed in the 1920's and is rated for 20 amp circuits because it can stay cool by dissipating its heat into the air around it. Insulating the cavities however would cause it to stay hot. There is a lot of urban lore out there that says insulating the cavities with K&T wiring is a fire hazard. I haven't found a lot of available information to substantiate these claims. Electricians have told me my house will catch on fire unless I rewire. Their bids range from $4000-$8000 to rewire my house. (Fear tactics from the fox guarding the hen house?) Insulation contractors have told me they can insulate without rewiring, but they won't pull a permit. Electrical engineers have told me I can insulate the cavities around the existing K&T but I would have down grade the circuit from 20 amp to 15 amp.
• The only thing worse than no insulation in the walls is wet insulation in the walls. Now, if this were dense-pack cellulose or even fiberglass insulation, that could be a major problem, but installing a closed cell foam, we would would hope that would be a much smaller problem. But we can hope on the one hand and $#!X in the other and see which one fills up fastest. Why hope? Let's just fix the roof first, regardless of whether this is open cell foam, closed cell foam, cellulose, soy or mushroom insulation.
• The Building Performance Institute (BPI) would say something like, "There's no such thing as a home that's too tight. But there is such a thing as an under-ventilated home." There is a quick calculation I will show you in a later blog that lets you know when your home has become under-ventilated.
• Insulating from the inside requires drilling holes every 16" in the plaster and filling the whole house with plaster dust. I'd drill them in the middle of the wall so I wouldn't have to climb a ladder to install the insulation or, more importantly, when I have to patch, sand, prime, color match, and paint, and paint, and paint those holes at the end. 
• Insulating from the outside requires taking off the cedar shakes and risking breaking them, or else drilling holes in the cedar shakes and risk breaking them, definitely breaking drills bits drilling through 3/4" of pine sheathing, patching, sanding, priming, color matching, painting, and paining the entire exterior walls of the home. 
• The long or even short term performance of foams has been mixed in many of my infrared inspections. I have seen some installations where foam was injected into stud cavities of walls only to shrink like a refrigerated waffle and leave air pockets of no insulation at all six sides of the stud cavity, making it very ineffective. I've also seen foam spray out of outlet covers and switch plates and beneath toe molding.

Even if we were swimming in money and answers and remedies to these issues, we would still NOT start our retrofit project here. Instead, AS ALWAYS, we need to start up high in the attic with air sealing.

When I say "air sealing", I don't mean what most people think. It has been my experience, in the thousands of homeowners I've visited with, that most of my clients have this bucolic image of Little Red Riding Hood skipping her way to the home improvement store and coming home with a satchel of baked bread and two or three tubes of caulk. They say, "Can't I just climb in the attic and do the air sealing myself?"

My answer is usually, "Yes, you could, It's not rocket surgery, but you need about 2-3 shopping cars full of foam and caulk (~$900 worth), and more importantly, to complete the job, you'd have to have the physical stamina to do something like the guy in the pic below, if you don't want to kill yourself, falling between the roof trusses."

The parallel bars are about as tricky to maneuver as 24"on center roof trusses when air sealing an attic. Olympic gymnasts make great insulation contractors.

Even without a gym membership, this guy is doing his exercises to become an insulation contractor. It's the most respected job in his eco-village. Everyone falls through the drywall ceiling at least once before they realize they have to spend more time on the elephant tusks training.

And don't assume that because your home was a custom-built McCastle that you don't have air sealing issues-- you're usually the worst ones of all with all your tray ceilings, built-in book cases, bulkheads, planter walls, and recessed lights.Air follows the path of least resistance, which is almost always upward through the home's cavities.

I'll keep you updated on the foam project, but FIRST AND FOREMOST:

1. it's a roof project first because durability issues are more important than energy bills.
2. it's a rewire project because I can't afford an electrician and I can do some electrical work. (I actually just finished the bulk of this project-- see the pics below and come to my house to see that I have not yet taken care of the chimney issues--YIKES!)

White ceramic knobs hold the black and white insulated "tubes" of the so called hot and neutral wire. They travel somewhat parallel to their load but always kept at a safe distance from each other. The yellow wire is a new 12 gauge Romex now serving their load. This circuit has been disconnected. What am I going to do with the $7,800 I just saved?

That's not good. Water damage to plaster above window. The root cause of this is very likely associated with the issues I describe in my blog"Saving the Planet by Saving Cincinnati's Obsolete Real Estate (AKA Troublesome Architectural Features)"