Renaissance House Playlist:
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Home Wrap Defined – Home wrap provides the secondary line of defense against weather between the exterior surface (stucco on our Project House) and the sheathing (Oriented Strand Board or OSB on our Project House). It’s an unavoidable fact that weather will penetrate the exterior cladding – it’s a question of “when” and “how much”, not “if”. Home Wrap is designed to combat the three primary weather forces that will drive up energy bills and potentially damage a house: water, moisture & air infiltration.

Air Infiltration Defined – Insulation in a house works best when the air inside the insulation is still & dry. A house has thousands of places where building parts come together. Everywhere they join there’s a crack or a gap that lets air infiltrate in, which raises your energy bills and can make you uncomfortable inside the house. The average (2500 square foot) home has up to a half mile of these gaps and cracks – that means our 6000 square foot Project House has more than a mile of gaps and cracks where air can leak into the house. That’s like leaving a window wide open all day every day.

Here are places where air can leak - fireplaces, doors, windows, exterior corners, interior wall intersections, electrical & plumbing cutouts, framing joints

Every wall in your house has a Resistance to heat or cold, measured as an “R” Value. A Higher “R” Value means that material is better at keeping energy dollars inside the house. A draft of only ten miles an hour can decrease the effective “R” value of insulation by 63%. Even a draft as light as that will create pressure differences between the inside and outside walls of a house. That negative pressure can suck the cooled or heated air right out of the house. Every time the wind blows into your house it’s replacing air you’ve already paid to heat or cool. Adding thicker insulation does nothing to stop the problem. Stopping the air infiltration will.

Water Intrusion – rain and snow will penetrate the exterior surface of a house. If that water hits the OSB and cannot dry in a reasonable amount of time, it can raise the moisture content of that wood to the point where mold & mildew can rot the wood.

Moisture Intrusion – House are built “tight” to keep energy in, but that also keeps moisture in. The average family creates nine gallons of moisture a day (cooking, bathing, dishwashers, plants, pets, humans, etc). All that moisture gets into the walls, and if it can’t escape it can cause the same damage as rain or snow.

Proper Installation – The best time to install a home wrap is before the windows and doors go in, but you can install afterwards (as long as you’re careful about proper flashing). The whole point is to drain water down and away.

Existing homes – There are simple Do-it-yourself ways to cut air infiltration in your house. To get a sense of how leaky your house can be, check for air infiltration around the house with a candle and a blow-dryer. Stand inside with a candle while someone else runs the blow-dryer from the outside. If the candle blows out, you know you have a leak. The best first step is to seal windows with caulking and doors with weather-stripping



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