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Steve
Bump?
With tongue firmly planted in cheek I offer the following: maybe there are just so many places for your incense smoke to exit that it’s taking the path of least resistance and just sort of swirling around looking for enlightenment, or maybe exlightenment. I suggest you sit in a corner and repeat the OM(G)chant where OM stands for Oh My. . . God how did I let myself get caught like this!!
And my wife thinks that I’m the bull goose procrastinator
Spring will come. . . eventually
Zenishly
Patrick
Replies
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Steve
Bump?
With tongue firmly planted in cheek I offer the following: maybe there are just so many places for your incense smoke to exit that it's taking the path of least resistance and just sort of swirling around looking for enlightenment, or maybe exlightenment. I suggest you sit in a corner and repeat the OM(G)chant where OM stands for Oh My. . . God how did I let myself get caught like this!!
And my wife thinks that I'm the bull goose procrastinator
Spring will come. . . eventually
Zenishly
Patrick
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Hi Patrick,
Bump is what you do when you see your post going unanswered and sinking fast down the list. It raises it to the top in hopes of people seeing it with fresh eyes ;)
Steve
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Hi Steve
Let's bump it again. With my tongue back in it's somewhat normal spot I offer the observation that perhaps with so many huge holes in your building envelope you can't hope to do any kind of test (cheap or otherwise) that would be of any use. Fred's weatherization site continues to be only partially complete so I fail to see how anybody can get a handle on what he is promoting, hence your possible misunderstanding of the "neutral pressure plane". I doubt that any of his science would work on a place like you described.
I guess you're really wondering where to start. . . why at the beginning of course. . . or as current wisdom would have it, at the top.
The stovepipe thimble is meant to provide an air space for fire safety
you should not block it up, replace the existing detail with a piece of insulated pipe and run that through the wall, it still requires 2" air space but with metal firestop designed for this purpose you can cut the draft down considerably, alternatively re-route the stove pipe up through the building, using insulated pipe from the first floor ceiling upwards and out the roof, where you can get a somewhat better sealing arrangement, although never air tight.
Happy New Year,eh?
Patrick
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Hi Patrick,
I appreciate your talking about this with me. It's going to be 20 below here tonight.
I was blowing expanding foam into the cracks between my timberframe sill and stone foundation in the vacinity of my copper pipes today. That foam just doesn't like to expand or cure at 0 degrees. I wonder why? I've only known about the need to to do this since the little freezing incident last winter, so you would have thought I would have got around to it a little sooner than today, Eh? I win the procrastination prize!
I've hashed out Fred's thoughts in general here and in other forums elswhere, and feel I have a pretty good handle on his theories. It is annoying that he doesn't fill out his web site a little more, but what can you expect for free. He's a pretty busy guy. Without too persistent bugging you can usually get him to explain stuff here.
His description of the neutral pressure plane is the level in the house at which the air switches from exhausting to infiltrating. The better air sealed the house is, the closer to the floor this plane will be.
I'm just wondering if you can really tell much from waving a stick of incense around or if I need to generate some serious smoke and pressurize the place to see where the holes really are.
I've put plastic over the areas that had raw fiberglass for the ceiling. That should help. It'll be better than the years when *all* I had was clapboards on the outside and plastic on the inside--no insulation, no sheathing, no drywall. As Fred or someone else said before, given the choice of only a roll of plastic or a truckfull of FG, I'll take the plastic, please. It actually did a pretty good job!
As to the thimble, let me clarify that it's a clay thimble into a clay liner in a cinder block chimney. The thimble is isolated from flamables by passing through a brick surround that extends 12 inches in all directions. Do you think there is any danger of fire if I bridge the 1/4 inch gap between the metal stovepipe and the inside of the thimble with refractory cement? The Pipe is still a foot away through solid masonry from any framing.
Shivering in Cooperstown
Steve
*Hi there Fred,Glad you got a chance to read this.How's the book coming? I'm waiting with (frozen) baited breath!It's twelve below zero, and I'm heating 1700sf to 60 degrees.Actually I'm not doing too bad. I've got my Consolidated Dutchwest Extra Large Federal Woodstove fired up (rated at 55k BTU/hr, though I doubt it's hitting half of that) and now the oil burner is only cycling on for about 90 seconds minutes every twelve minutes or so, or about 8 minutes an hour w/a 1.35 GPH nozzle on the burner.Of course without that woodstove going it's got to be sucking twice that much at least.I was hoping that you would tell me my NPP is so low because my house is really tight as a drum! Oh well, let's make it a New Years Resolution to get it there for next year. I guess one reason it could be low is because the cellar/crawlspace is on a Central New York unmortared fieldstone foundation that is pretty much transparent as far as air goes. Actually that's not true, the cellar half is mortared pretty tight, but it is open to the sieve that is the crawlspace, There is also the matter of that chimney that runs from the cellar floor to 40 feet up, with the large airspace all around it at all penetrations. Would this large "flue" in the cellar help pull the NPP down? If it makes any difference, The chase runs outside of the thermal envelope where it goes through the living spaces, but it's open to the cellar at the bottom.Where would be the best place to seal this chimney penetration? It would be easiest where it passes through the first floor ceiling, as there is very irregular fieldstone wall around it where it penetrates the cellar ceiling. It's very hard for me to read my poly on the windows because I stretch it pretty tight, but it doesn't really seem to bow in unless the wind blows.Anyway, thanks for the note.Steve
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Hi Steve
Be glad your not about 200 miles north, it's 25 below here. You've got Fred on board now, and he and I have already had a 'tilt' over this but I think you make a huge mistake discounting the effectiveness of F/g. Given the choice of a truck full of f/g and a roll of poly I'd take both and be warmer for the combination. It may not be as amazingly wonderful as dense pack cells but don't believe the crap that it's 'worse than nothing'. Fred's credibility took a nosedive for me when I read him promoting that idea back in the fall. I also carefully read his rationale, and about how he makes big bucks crushing f/g with blown in cells and turns uninhabitable buildings into owner happy comfort zones, but I too have taken igloos and turned them into snug abodes, my own and others, and I've done it with f/g. and while his may be more energy efficient than mine it still puts the lie to the idea that f/g is useless as an insulating material. In a perfect world etc.,. . . but it sounds like your current world is a might short of perfection, and in desperate need of some quick insulation. A sheet of poly might save you 5 or 10 degrees, but add some f/g behind it and you'll start to feel warm. Notwithstanding all the installation requirements needed to maximize it's effect, and noting the rhetoric about suspect R values, it's still waaay better than nothing, and you can always toss it later when your structure is tight enough to allow cells to be blown in.
Snug at 25 below in a house stuffed with f/g and covered with poly, with an acceptable oil heating bill too!! With room for improvement of course.
Hunkering down to withstand the barrage,
Patrick
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Hi Fred,
I just went down in the basement with my incense to the bottom of the chimney chase (which begins at the cellar ceiling), and the smoke sometimes went up the chase and sometimes blew back at me. It's not perfectly still outside however.
Let me elaborate on the placement of this chase. It's boxed into the corner of the house. There is about a foot between the chimney and the exterior walls, and about two inches between the chimney and the interior walls that I've boxed it in with. The thermal envelope goes on the walls that are between the chimney and the interior space, leaving the chimney essentially outdoors, but with a hole to the cellar at its base.
I'm not sure what the expected behavior of this hole would be. Since the hole is at cellar ceiling level to the out-of-doors, I would expect it to suck air since it's below the neautral pressure plane. But I would also expect it to blow out anytime there is heat being generated in the cellar, such as by the boiler, the hot water heater, and the exposed heating pipe runs. *BUT* The cellar ceiling is very porous in relation to the living space above, as well as to the adjacent crawlspace, which is also very porous to the ouside air and to living space above it.
What I live in is essentially an upside down box. The bottom of it is pretty wide open but the top and sides are somewhat sealed. The Thermal envelope has no bottom. It stops at the sills. It holds heat pretty well until the wind blows, not unlike going outside in a long bathrobe on a cold day--your legs stay pretty warm until a breeze comes along, endangering the warmth of your plumbing!
Any further thoughts?
Steve
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bump
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Hello all you weatherization folks,
I've just been running around the house with an incense stick trying to figure out where to best apply some slapdash air sealing to help slow the rush of oil to the oil burner during this Upstate NY cold snap.
It's very hard to read the swirling smoke.Can you help me make sense of this and recommend some options?
It's the first floor only of a two story building.The second story is gutted and wide open to the elements in many places, so the first floor ceiling is essentially the roof for now. One room has plastic sheeting for a ceiling with no insulation. Another room is drywalled with FG between the drywall and the upstairs floorboards. Two other rooms are insulated with FG in the ceiling, but have no covering (no drywall or plastic sheeting) and yet one other room has drywall ceiling but no insulation at all.
There is a piece of 1/2 inch particle board laying over the hole at the top of the staircase, and where there are visible gaps, some smoke goes throgh there, but not at nearly the rate I expected.
Many of my "windows" consist of a single sheet of plastic.
By all rights I should see the smoke flying out all over the place, but I don't. It doesn't seem to rush out of anywhere except the gap between the woodstove pipe and the chimney thimble.
I expected to see it flying out of the four recessed (IC) cans. Not so. Losing some there, but not tons.
I expected to see it disappearing around the FG in the rooms where it is exposed, but it's not, really.
I am unable to crack the windows to do the sash test, because I have plastic over the exterior of them. But the chimney thimble is about 2 feet below the ceiling, and the smoke goes out there. When I open an exterior door a crack, the smoke goes out down to about a foot above the doorknob, then starts blowing in below that. Of course it's not super still outside, so who's to say how much is wind driven in either direction.
Cold air of course pours in from various holes in the flooring that are above both the cellar and a freezing cold crawlspace.
Many questions:
How can my Neutral Pressure Plane be so low with what ought to be so many leaky spots?
Where should I start? Plastic over the areas with raw (Kraft faced) FG showing?
What should I use to seal the gap around the stovepipe and thimble?
I would love to hear anyone's take on this.
Steve Zerby
*bump