insulation-use-basements / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

The most common practices currently employed for finishing basement interiors as living space rarely account for the impacts that come with the added moisture load below grade, or the amount of heat that will be lost to the ground. Existing basements are typically under-insulated or not insulated at all, and if they ar...

  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...

Basements don't have to be moldy, that is the first thing to realize. It's easy to build a basement better, or to finish an existing basement correctly, we just need to realize that they behave differently than above grade walls and to build accordingly to effectively deal with the humidity found underground - and by d...

Insulating below slab-on-grade foundations Why insulate under a slab on grade foundation? For comfort, and to save money, that's why! In many areas Building Code has fallen behind common sense on what specification of insulation to use under a slab, It is common to install as little as R5 insulation below slab floors, ...

That musty, moldy basement smell that we have come to accept as unavoidable, is actually quite avoidable. The solution is really quite simple - stop building below grade with walls that were designed for above grade and your basement won't smell like old gym socks and potentially make you ill with mold spores. As a fre...

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) ...

What is the difference between a slab on grade and a crawl space? A slab on grade, or ‘frost protected shallow foundation’ is exactly that, a slab of concrete on the ground. There’s more to it of course, but let’s start with a ‘win’ in the comprehension department shall we?  A slab on grade rests directly on the groun...

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...

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...

Should I Renovate, Remodel or Rebuild? This very question comes up a lot for me during site consultations with clients. Some people buy an old home, maybe inherit an old home, or are just tired of living in an old home and aren’t sure of the best course of action. We toil over the same decision with old cars; sometimes...

A frost protected shallow foundation (FPSF) is an interesting and well-proven alternative to deeper, more-costly foundations in cold regions with seasonal ground freezing and the potential for frost heave - and the simplest way to build a solid and dependable foundation is to use frost protected shallow foundation (FPS...