ASHRAE Journal -November 2012 - 52

building sciences
How many would I need? How far apart? Dad gave me “the look.” The look I had been getting since I was in short pants. Build a wall and you will know. He was a flight test engineer at DeHaviland. He was an old school engineer. I was his son. I knew what to do. Mock-ups, test walls, experiments. The Wright brothers were his role model. His sketch book and his slide rule were part of him. He was my role model. I built a test wall and tested it until it broke. Six fasteners for every 4 ft × 8 ft (1 m × 2 m) sheet of insulation. Two at the top, two in the middle and two at the bottom. Eight inch (203 mm) thick foam. No way that would work. Except when you built it, it did. You could hang a pickup truck off that wall.** Then it got weirder. The cladding. It was going to be stucco. Even with my limited building experience, I already hated stucco. Dad hated stucco. This was Ontario. We don’t build stucco walls. Except when we do. The client wanted stucco. He was going to get stucco. I went to see John Timusk. He was “JT” to me by then. He started talking to me about the concrete canoe club at the University. I rolled my eyes. Those undergraduate civil engineering students were always hitting up us engineering science students for cash to fund their dumb-ass competition entries in the international concrete canoe thing. I was away from the University less than four months, and here I am, hearing about these losers again. But JT loved his stories. If you listen to them, you actually learn stuff. So I listened. Apparently, you can make very thin shell concrete canoes with fiberglass cloth, Portland cement paste, latex polymer and ammonia; and the Germans were already ahead of us putting it up as a thin cladding on foam on the outside of buildings. It was lightweight and it had tensile strength. I liked it. JT had my attention. He took me down to the Gardiner Expressway†† where they were using it to fix and patch the concrete supports and concrete deck. He made sure I understood that the fiberglass cloth needed to be treated to handle the alkalinity of the mix or that the mix had to be buffered. I asked him how he knew. He handed me another book. “Properties of Concrete” by Adam Neville. He started to say something. I waved him off. “I know, I know, give it back when I am done,” I said. So I mixed up a batch and did a test wall. Awesome. There was no Sto or Dryvit around yet. I hadn’t met John Edgar yet. I

Figure 3: Avoiding EIFS Problems. I avoided all those EIFS problems that came a decade later by wrapping the EIFS lamina into the window opening and then installing the window. The lamina acts as an under window “gutter.” A stucco “pan flashing.” was in the EIFS‡‡ business before there was one. I was getting my chemicals from guys fixing the expressway and using the mix design from the guys in the concrete canoe club. So how did I avoid all those EIFS problems that came a decade later? Easy. I wrapped my EIFS lamina into the window opening and then installed the window (Figure 3). I also had a water control layer behind the foam. And I had a masonry wall. And I had the CBDs. Especially CBD-40 “Rain Penetration and its Control.” Kirby Garden’s classic, first published April 1963. Was I really that smart? No. I was very lucky. When the problems of EIFS started popping up in the late 1980s, I already knew the score because I had done stuff with synthetic stucco that worked, I understood water management because I was learning at the feet of the masters, or at least reading their stuff, and I compared it to stuff that I was seeing that didn’t work. The failures I was seeing explained to me why what I had done worked, and why it was consistent with what I had read. It is often better to be lucky than smart. It is even better if you know smart people. And I was meeting them in spades. I finished the first house in fall 1979 (Photo 1). Continuous exterior insulation (Photo 2). Beautiful split ribbed concrete block interior with timber beams (Photo 3). Triple-glazed

Photo 1 (left): God’s Country 1979. Super-insulated continuous exterior insulation, triple-glazed windows, airtight and ventilated right. Photo 2 (center): Air Control Layer. Cement rendering is the air control layer. Mechanically attached 8 in. (203 mm) thick expanded polystyrene (EPS). Photo 3 (right): Interior Finish. Split rib decorative block with exposed structural timbers.
**No SUVs back then. ††They were fixing it then. They are still fixing it. It should have been taken down a long time ago. ‡‡EIFS stands for “exterior insulation finish system” also known as “synthetic stucco.”

ASHRAE Journal

ashrae.org

November 2012

ASHRAE Journal -November 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal -November 2012