Skip to main content

Lets Try This Again: A Well Insulated Slab

Time was ticking and we ran out of 2" type II EPS.  Luckily our local building suppliers carry a small supply of 2" 2'x8' Foundation Plus.   The next morning we finished up placing the foam.  Pipe and conduit penetrations in the foam were cut slightly oversized to allow some room for aligning the foam pieces together.  After the foam was laid, we spray foamed around the pipes (Photo 1-1).  This serves 2 purposes:  The first is to insulate, the second is to stabilize the pipes during the cement pour.

On to the next task:  Vapour barrier, air sealing, and rebar!



Comments

  1. Anonymous21 June 2017 at 19:57

    Did you go with 10 in insulation, and is your garage insulated to the same standard
    Winston

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David J. Goodyear22 June 2017 at 01:06

      Hi Winston, it's been a while! Hope all is well. There is 10" of type 2 eps under the house slab with the exception of the thickened rebar reinforced section in the middle. That section has 6" of type 3. I wanted a well insulated garage so we went with 4" under the garage slab. There is also a check poured into the foundation wall at the top so foam could be added in order to isolate the garage slab from the foundation walls. The garage walls will be insulated to r20 with batt but there is 3" of eps to the outside. I think the effective r value works out to be about 28 but I would have to calculate to confirm.

      Later!

      Later

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building the Air Tight Barrier: Door Flashing Details.

It took us a while to wrap our heads around the door details on my plans.  The main exterior wall is composed of 2x8s.  The rough stud opening was substantially larger than the door.  Because the walls are much deeper than a standard door frame for a 2x6 wall, the interior of the 2x8 opening was studded with double 2x4s.   Outside of these 2x4s, there is 1.5" of foam and another 2x4 on face which brings the door frame opening flush to the exterior 3" of EPS foam.  The brick mould of the door will sit against the exterior of the wall.  The ganged 2x4s which define the opening will allow the door to open a little further than that of a 2x8 wall.    With the door details finalized, I had to flash the opening as per the plan.  I specified the size/shape for aluminum sill pans and CBS Eavestroughing made them for me.  The sill pans have a kind of end dam to prevent water from entering under the under the stud opening should the door ever...
3 comments
Read more

Alot has happened....The greenhouse is now complete! The Three year project is now Done, Done and Done.

So.....A lot has happened!  The greenhouse is now complete!  My regular blogging frequency prevented me from making headway with various projects.  It was a very busy spring, summer and fall in 2019.  Working, planning our crops, maintaining a vegetable garden with weeding and regular succession plantings, and building a greenhouse all proved to be an exhausting task.  Funny, foreseeing all of the other stuff to be done, I was on the fence about building the greenhouse this past spring, but decided at the last minute I would move ahead with the project.   Now that it is finished I am glad that I did.  It turned out to be a great project with great dividends. The Greenhouse Unfortunately for the readers, I don't have many pictures to share illustrating details for air sealing, insulating, or how I designed the air barrier, or how I vented the rainscreens and roof...but I do have results!  Growing in an insulated subterranean environment do...
10 comments
Read more

The Attic: A hatchway, A Landing and a Catwalk.

  Attics are one of the neglected spaces in the our homes....an afterthought really.  Many trusses are designed the same way they were years ago.  There is no thought put into the lack of insulation above the top plate on exterior walls.  Heeled trusses were developed as a solution to this problem (https://www.apawood.org/raised-heel-trusses).  Adding a small heel enables deeper insulation over the top plate of exterior walls and helps prevent thermal short circuiting to and from the attic space.   It seems that heel trusses may become a mainstay for the future since new code changes now required attics to be a minimum of R50.  Large heels mean more blocking and higher baffles to combat the effects of wind washing on the thermal effectiveness of the attic insulation.  The key here is to direct any wind (entering the attic through the soffit) far above the layer of insulation.  The air contained in the insulation remains stagnant which ...
Post a Comment
Read more