exterior-rigid-insulation / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

LEED Platinum V4 Wall Design: Building Science  The wall we designed for the Edelweiss house, Canada's first LEED Platinum V4 Home is best categorized as a 'REMOTE' wall, a high performance building envelope developed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Centre in Alaska. REMOTE stands for 'Residential Exterior Membr...

Home Insulation - how much is too much? A House can definitely be under-insulated (millions of homes throughout the United States and Canada have this very problem), but can a home have too much insulation? In short, yes it can. In reality, there is an optimal balance between the up-front cost of insulation and the lon...

Polyisocyanurate (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS), Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) or Styrofoam? When building or renovating a high-performance building envelope there are really three main kinds of rigid foam panels you are going to have to choose from - Polyisocyanurate known as Polyiso (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS) ...

  Insulating a basement is a great idea if it wasn't insulated when built, as before we began insulating foundation walls and below slabs (see slab on grade), it was generally estimated that basement heat loss accounted for about 1/3 of the total heat loss of a house. It is likely that such an abysmal starting place ma...

Hemp insulation manufactured in Canada! Nature Fibres is a young company based in the town of Asbestos, Quebec, which began manufacturing hemp insulation in the winter of 2018. As the town’s name suggests, it was heavily reliant on the manufacturing of asbestos, but those mining and manufacturing facilities are closing...

Not all insulation materials are the same, and they are not always interchangeable A basic understanding of how walls work is needed to help you understand what you can reasonably expect insulation and building materials to do for you when they are part of a wall assembly. If you have a working knowledge of building sc...

Crawlspace insulation - be careful to get it right A crawlspace comes with all the downsides of a basement, but it is just too low a space to be functional either beyond the folded plastic christmas tree and a couple of boxes of baubles. Unless there is a good reason for it, going through the process of pouring a footi...

How to insulate house walls from the outside Adding extra insulation to the exterior walls of an older home when renovating or remodeling is a great way of improving a home's walls thermal performance and reducing energy use while reducing heating bills, carbon footprint and improving a building's comfort level. It may...

Insulation slows the rate of heat transfer, helping keep homes warmer in winter and cooler in summer. How well-insulated your home is will determine how comfortable it is and how much you will spend on energy for heating and cooling, and in some respects, how durable it will be. The transfer of heat (or heat loss) occu...

No matter that engineers and architects long ago debunked it, insulating paint still occasionally finds its way into buildings. Powdered ceramic chips that can be added to any paint are said to reflect heat in or out of a building and reduce heat loss by staggering amounts. I was under the impression that this had been...

We all know that coffee has many a wonderful benefit, from that ever-so-necessary espresso first thing in the morning, to rubbing it on your skin for a bit of exfoliation (you can thank us later). However, for all its goodness, are coffee grounds really that beneficial to use in the garden? Our initial searches suggest...