Trust, but Verify
Quality Control of High Performance Insulation & Sealing on a Full-House Renovation
Even when you hire the best talent, it still takes a team approach to produce the highest quality finished project. We snapped some photos, as seen below, at a Jones Pierce job site this week. This project is a complete renovation & addition residential project in a North Atlanta neighborhood. The house has already been sheathed then insulated with open cell foam. At this point, we perform a blower test to find out if/where gaps in the insulation allow air leaks. Addressing gaps in coverage at this stage assures a quality product once the sheet-rock walls and ceilings have been installed. Afterwards, leaks are more difficult to address. Trust but verify is the key.
Sealing
The project highlighted in this blog post uses the R-Zip System by Huber, a system that combines a water-resistive vapor barrier with insulated sheathing that is taped at the seams & corners, creating a continuous insulated wrap that air-seals the house. This system mitigates thermal bridging of hold & cold through the finished wall that, when combined with full cavity fill insulation, offers a huge savings on energy bills. We are able to create houses that will sip rather than gulp energy.
Heating & Cooling
In these photo sets, the photo on the right is the infrared image of the location in the house seen in the photo on the left. A yellow-orange spectrum indicates a warmed interior insulation without leaks. The red-purple colors indicate gaps in the insulation where cool outside air is getting through. The cool area within the insulation indicate less than optimal coverage below the surface. The purplish lines on the framing in the above photo indicate air leaks between framing members. The same goes for the thinner points of insulation in deep corners as seen in the photo below. Using these images the contractor will wait to sheet-rock these walls a day in order to touch up the insulation coverage and caulk gaps in the framing, thus ensuring a high performance building envelope for the client.
We thank the contractor, Carl Moen from Intown Renovations, for his knowledge, attention to detail and commitment to giving the client all that they paid for, and more. Thank you also to Airedale Energy Consultants who engineered and performed the infrared leak test.