Michael: Experts agree that thoroughly insulating your house is one of the best investments you can make when building a new home. Most building codes require full insulation inside all exterior walls. But for even better comfort and energy efficiency, it’s a good idea to install insulating foam boards on the outside of the walls and places that are difficult or impossible to insulate from the inside. Insulating foam boards can also be used to increase energy efficiency inside the house. Like on walls that separate an air-conditioned attic space from the air-conditioned interior. The one very important area that sometimes overlooked is the part of the house that lies below gray. Doug Bibee is technical specialist with Dow Building Materials.
Doug: For an energy standpoint, it’s very important to insulate basements. And if you look at the whole house you can loose at least 22% and sometimes up to 40% of the entire heat loss on the house can occur through basement walls. So it’s very important to insulate basement walls.
Michael: Insulating basement walls with foam board also protects against condensation.
Doug: When it’s cold outside and warm inside the basement then you can have condensation on the inside of the basement wall or on the basement floor. And you can reduce that potential for condensation by insulating the basement wall. When you do get condensation that is liquid water, then that can lead to other problems like mold or if it’s in contact with wood, rot things like that and odor. So you did not want any moisture or condensation inside of the basement wall. Another benefit of foam insulation in addition to energy and moisture is it protects the water proofing membrane that usually sprayed on the outside of basement wall and if that’s not protected then the backfill can damage the water proofing membrane and allow water into the house. The insulation that you use is going to be subjected to lot of extremes of conditions, it’s going to have extremes of temperature, extremes of moisture, extremes of pressure against the foam from the dirt backfill. So the foam insulation has to be able to survive for many years under these extreme conditions.
Michael: Some foam boards manufactured with grooves on the outside. These grooves reduce the wear and tear on the board by channeling moisture down and away from the wall.
Doug: Now if your basement is already been backfilled with dirt and you can’t get up there to insulate it, for something you can do on the inside. Dow makes a product out of Styrofoam called wallmate and you just put it together on your wall and as you see there’s a notch right down the middle of it, well that’s where a piece of wood goes in to fir out the wall itself.
You just mount this up against the wall, put the piece of wood in there, screw it to the concrete wall and then you’re ready to go ahead and put drywall on top of it. And you can have a finish basement that is well insulated. It’s going to save you every month that you live in the house. But you don’t have to worry about the outside. If the dirt’s already there, you can still insulate from the inside.
Some foundations are built using a concrete steam wall as the perimeter base. This raised floor foundation will have a cross base instead of a basement but it still needs to be insulated.
Doug: Now concrete makes for a great foundation but not a great insulator. If it’s cold outside, it’s going to be cold inside. So we need to insulate this steam wall just like we would in any other wall of the house. We’re doing that with a Dow foam board that we actually just put in place and before you slide it there, we put foam board adhesive on the backside. You stick it right up against that and that’s going to keep the temperature from coming through. That means that inside underneath our house, our temperature is going to be approximately the same as up in the house. That will prevent any condensation from forming at the bottom side of the homes. That will cut down on mold and allergens and other things in the air.
Michael: For more information on how Dow foam board insulation can make your new house more energy efficient and protected from moisture, visit Dow on the internet at DowInYourHome.com.
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