Your product is only part of the puzzle.
We live in a very interesting time in the construction industry, where it seems like there is a new product being launched every day with all kinds of new performance benchmarks being smashed. Sounds pretty good, right? Buildings should be getting better every year, and mould growth should be a distant unpleasant memory to an unlucky few.
Except that’s not happening.
Yes, that’s an entire multistory building covered in plastic.
But it could be.
One of the biggest problems in introducing new products is that manufacturers don’t seem to want to look at how their product fits in with the entire building. It’s important to remember that a building these days is a complex system of interactive parts. Changing one element can have some very interesting flow on effects, sometimes not for the better.
It’s kind of the same as when designers and architects don’t think about how their building will interact with itself and the environment, but kick the can down the road to the builder.
It’s becoming more important for product manufacturers to acknowledge that their product is not a magic bullet, but rather an important partner in this complex system. There are a few building products that I’ve seen poorly advertised and marketed, which is a real shame as they aren’t inherently bad products. Heck, if installed correctly they are some of the best products available on the market. Two big examples I can think of are:
Air/Vapour control membranes will work against you if you end up making a house that traps moisture. Remember, a family of four at rest can exhale around 1 L of water vapour a day (assuming 8 hours spent out of the house of course, hope there aren’t any pandemics going round). An airtight house without adequate controlled ventilation is going to hold that water somewhere, and modern materials have a very small hygric buffer capacity (which is a fancy way of saying they can’t hold much water safely).
Thermally broken windows that are installed where the thermal break material isn’t aligned with your insulation layer aren’t thermally broken anymore. The whole point is to provide a continual insulation layer so that materials with less thermal resistance won’t bleed heat out or in to your building in an uncontrolled manner. Exposing the rear of your thermally broken frame just means it will leech heat outward in winter and inward during summer.
A lot of these newer products, in one way or another, provide a way of building that is often less labour intensive, which is pretty important in a high wage economy. It would be great if we could utilise older methods of construction with cheaper materials, but somewhere along the way the average Joe got some uppity ideas, like having a warm home in winter that doesn’t require selling a spare kidney to heat (and the opposite in summer). Outrageous.
Turns out that all that extra insulation required costs money, so we had to find ways to skim costs elsewhere. So goodbye timber lath and plaster, hello gypsum and glass-wool batts as the new normal! Great for reducing costs, but all of a sudden those previously uninsulated walls with fantastic airflow and thus great drying potential are stuffed with filler material that retards airflow and keeps the often damp air trapped around your framing. And to make things worse, those cheaper materials can’t hold the same levels of moisture older materials were able to.
Oops. No wonder people are distrustful of new products.
Guess Australia isn’t immune to mould growth either, considering the state of this kitchen in Brisbane following storm damage. No, gypsum isn’t normally that colour. A typical Queenslander would ironically have fared better since they aren’t normally insulated and have great airflow to carry moisture away.
But imagine then, if you will, a product manufacturer who doesn’t try to hide the eccentricities of their product, but works with manufacturers of other products to deliver a full system that shuffles workload around for an overall reduction in time and an increase in performance! All of a sudden you might see a window manufacturer who specifies standard interfacing details with the insulation layer or an insulation supplier coming up with those details as a reference guide.
You might think to yourself “but I’ve seen those details in the product catalogue!” and wonder what my issue is. Well, open up a typical insulation installation guide that the average project home builder might use and try to find a detail that talks about windows, let alone how to align insulation layers with thermal break materials.
You’ll get a fantastic guide on how to install insulation and avoid crimps and gaps, but you will rarely see an acknowledgement that the insulation R-value suffers greatly when installed with big holes in the wall because the thermally broken window sits proud of the insulation line. Or when installed in between studs with high conductivity (like light gauge steel).
Steel framing may have huge conductivity issues, but the potential for recycling at the end of the building lifespan is something we certainly can’t ignore. So we need to think differently about how we insulate.
Better building wraps contributing to air-tightness may mean a musty home during peak winter when we want to keep heat inside, but those same wraps combined with a complementary mechanical ventilation system can enable us to maintain a house at the perfect temperature and humidity for optimum health - all year round.
Perhaps it’s time for suppliers to be more forthcoming about where their product runs into issues, because at least then we can start planning how to avoid those issues and provide better buildings. And just because a product has some shortcomings, that doesn’t mean we should write it off - it just means acknowledging and adapting.
Maybe instead of running away from our shortcomings, perhaps we could overcome them together?