Insulation vapor barrier question for living quarters inside steel building
Crazywolf
| Posted in General Discussion on
We are in north central kansas. We have an existing all steel building with vinyl faced insulation. We are wanting to build living quarters inside but arent sure what to do for insulation and a vapor barrier. We plan on cutting x’s in the vinyl to add an additional layer of insulation then frame the walls in wood. Do we need a vapor barrier or vapor retarder? There is no way to completely seal all air gaps from the steel structure…to our understanding they are designed to breath. We occasionally have frost on some of the screws and definitely dont want to trap moisture in the wall system due to a plastic vapor barrier.
Replies
Anyone?
Are you heating and cooling the entire steel building? When I worked out of a larger shop (60x100) I built company offices inside the building. Essentially, we built the offices like a separate free standing building w/in the structure. We maintained about a 6” airspace between the walls of office and steel building to allow moisture to dry out if any became present. We built the offices as any other wood framed structure w/ sheathing around all exterior surfaces, a vapor barrier and maintained a climate controlled interior. The main steel building was not cooled, but we had tube heaters that were used to heat the space as necessary in the winter, so it was essentially not really a climate controlled building. If your steel building is continually climate controlled, condensation may not be as much of an issue. I’m satisfied with how the offices have performed. It’s been close to 20 years now and it is holding up well. The building is in Zone 5, so matches the typical weather you will see in Kansas as well. The building was located way outside of town in county, so we had the luxury of no inspections. I do know that if we were to build in town with a permit we would have needed to provide a fire rated assembly for the offices as the main building housed a few combustibles and diesel powered equipment. We would have built slightly different in that situation. Hope this helps. Good luck to you.
Thank you for sharing your experience!