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3398 Washington Road
Atlanta, GA 30344
USA

773.398.5288

Advanced residential construction and home improvement consulting and owner's advocacy in Atlanta, using the latest building performance diagnostic and modeling techniques and tools. Airtightness, insulation, HVAC, ventilation, moisture, and air quality and EMF consulting for homeowners and building professionals alike.

Videos/Podcasts/Articles

Home performance articles and stories from the field with internationally respected building forensics guru Corbett Lunsford at the Building Performance Workshop. Hear new episodes of the Building Performance Podcast, see new videos from the Home Performance YouTube channel, and learn all about how diagnostic testing (more than an 'Energy Audit') can make home improvement and new home construction a proven process!

Filtering by Category: Architecture

Ventilation Innovations at IBS 2018

Corbett Lunsford

Phil Rivas of Fantech shows Corbett around the Fantech booth at the International Builders Show 2018. Demonstrations of Inline Kitchen Exhaust hood with silencer, Energy Recovery Ventilator with balancing registers, HEPA filtration, and Dryer Booster Fans. Learn more at http://Fantech.net

Tour of the Building Performance Workshop in Atlanta

Corbett Lunsford

Welcome to the inaugural tour of the real life Building Performance Workshop on our high performance homestead in Atlanta, Georgia! From the translucent walls and roof to the airtight, insulated and dessicant dehumidified Dry Vault inside it, everything here is about making the invisible dynamics of building performance visible. Stay tuned for the blower door test, infrared thermal scan, air quality testing, and much more when the Workshop is built!

Testing a Downdraft Kitchen Exhaust Fan

Corbett Lunsford

Home performance diagnostics guru Corbett Lunsford demonstrates the simple test for kitchen exhausts of all types with a smoke pen. See how downdraft exhaust fans work (or don't work) and make a more informed decision on what to do in your own kitchen!

Air Sealing Tape: Proof of 100 Year Durability

Corbett Lunsford

Building performance expert Corbett Lunsford respects proof of performance, and ProClima's airsealing tape has now been proven to him. See Tescon Profil tape that was applied to the subfloor of the #TinyLab as it holds up to 5 months of pure abuse during the construction process.

HOW TO BUILD A SHOJI DOOR FROM PUREBOND PLYWOOD

Corbett Lunsford

Our #TinyLab is a touring tiny house on wheels, which means it takes a lot of abuse as we travel the U.S. on the Proof Is Possible Tour. We’re teaching home performance, showing people how to get diagnostic proof when doing home improvements or building/buying a home.

One of the major problems in the home market is that people just don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that air leakage is the biggest problem in their homes, they don’t know that they’re making carbon monoxide every time they use a gas stove, and they don’t know that the formaldehyde in plywood is slowly poisoning their families. That’s what the tour is about.

Because we built the #TinyLab very airtight, almost every visible surface in our home is made of Purebond Formaldehyde-Free Plywood. We didn’t even waste time thinking about air purifiers or other band-aids; if we don’t want toxins in the house, it’s easier if we don’t bring them inside in the first place. We decided to use the Purebond for our Shoji Door to the bathroom, too- faster than using wood framing pieces, and going with a hardware-free sliding door would mean more durability overall. Here’s how the door was built:

1. Cut two sheets of Purebond ½” pre-finished plywood to size, with an extra ½” in each direction. Clamp them face-to-face. Measure and trace the cut-outs on the unfinished top side, putting the extra ½” along just two edges (i.e., bottom and right side) so that the other two edges are your reference 'finished' edges. You'll cut the extra ½” off after the door is assembled, to ensure a flat, straight edge on every side.

2. Cut the two sheets with a jigsaw to create the spaces for the rice paper, and any vents for pressure relief between rooms.

3. Dust the sheets off and stain the interior cuts you just made to match the veneer.

4. Prep your glue table with clamps- lots of them. Cut your rice paper to fit the full span of cut-outs with 1" to spare on each side.  Working fast but thoroughly, spread glue on the unfinished faces of both sheets simultaneously, and sandwich the rice paper between them.

5. Clamp the hell out of the assembled door, making sure the rice paper is taut, the cut-outs line up, and the two finished edges are even.

6. After letting the glue dry, unclamp the double-thickness door and cut the extra ½” away from the two edges, leaving all four edges perfectly even and smooth. Stain the outside edges to match the veneer.

7. Install the Shoji door in the jamb where it will slide (we used a pre-made sliding door frame, and removed the hardware and metal components for wheels) and seat it in a 1/16" waxed groove in the threshold. Attach adhesive felt strips to the pocket jamb to keep the veneer from being scratched.

8. Install the door and the jamb pieces that will lock in the top and closing side- DONE!

How to Insulate a #TinyLab (and any other house)

Corbett Lunsford

Infrared expert Corbett Lunsford uses the FLIR T660 infrared thermal camera to illustrate how insulation was installed in the #TinyLab for optimal control over heat bleed.  For more info about where you can tour the #TinyLab on its 20-city Proof Is Possible Tour, visit:
http://ProofIsPossible.com

Airsealing Membranes and Tape for the #TinyLab

Corbett Lunsford

Home performance guru Corbett Lunsford explains 475 Building Supply's Intello air barrier with vapor variable control. See how you can ensure control over drafts, condensation, and air quality problems. Feel the difference yourself on the Proof Is Possible Tour!

How to Ventilate the #TinyLab (aka How To Pull Your Hair Out)

Corbett Lunsford

From the beginning, we've planned on this high performance tiny house on wheels (THOW) being airtight. That's a no-brainer, and everyone else wants airtight homes too, whether they know it yet or not. If you want to see how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed we were when we started planning the Tiny Lab, check out this webinar on the HVAC design:

After airtight construction, the next important step is always making sure the home is VENTILATED right, with fresh air in just the right amount. Too little fresh air, and you get staleness, odors, condensation, and a deep-seated disgusting feeling. Too much fresh air, and you're flushing conditioned air down the toilet.  The calculation for determining how much fresh air any house needs is called ASHRAE 62.2-2013, and you can see a simplified breakdown of that here:

And finally, you need to decide How Exactly You're Going To Do This.  That's always the sticking point, and designing and building this tiny house on our own has taught us that all day, every day. The devil's in the details. So began our ventilation adventure, and we immediately talked with our longtime friends at Panasonic, who recommended three pieces of equipment:

The ventilation strategy we were planning on initially was to exhaust air (20cfm minimum) from the shower (at the top right), which is only a few feet away from the kitchen (the L-shaped cabinet just below it), and supplying fresh air at the rear of the tiny house, in the underloft bedroom (at bottom).

We immediately faced a challenge with pressure equalization. Since this tiny house would be so airtight, the results of the blower door test would likely be less than 67cfm@50Pascals (2.0 ACH50). Without all the mumbo jumbo, that means that if I ran a regular exhaust fan in the bathroom or kitchen at anything close to 70cfm, I'd be sucking so hard on the house it would be as if a 20 mph wind was blowing on every single surface of the house (and that's a lot of surface- about 1000 sq. ft.)

Also, while the WhisperGreen bath exhaust fan can be 'manifolded' (which means connecting a duct system to the fan to distribute the air wherever you want it), the spot ERV cannot. A really cool MacGyver hack was recommended by Panasonic's technical team, which I think is awesome and could easily be done by anyone else per the instructions:

Although this is all very cool, it was deemed too iffy to work properly for the Tiny Lab because of all the customizations we're making with the on-wheels aspect, the tightness, the tiny size, etc. 

To keep this story from being ten pages long, let me just say that we are now on our FOURTH and final ventilation plan. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Brett Singer and our favorite dehumidification guru Lew Harriman both strongly urged us to use a fully-ducted HEAT Recovery Ventilator instead of the ENERGY Recovery Ventilator (which exchanges both heat and humidity). We'll be fighting the humidity the whole way, since every shower, cup of tea, and exhale will add to the moisture in the tiny house.

Also, we all agreed it would be infinitely better to exhaust the stovetop gases directly to outdoors with an ENERGY STAR kitchen exhaust hood.  We're keeping the pressure imbalances in check with a hole in the wall controlled with a mechanical damper that's activated by pressure imbalances.

Our final ventilation strategy is from our Product Partner BROAN, and we'll show you exactly how that miracle cure works when the system arrives next week!  Thanks for tuning in, and for your support in these trying times. Whew.

Tiny House Blower Door Test: #TinyLab Test Series #1

Corbett Lunsford

Watch as Corbett and Grace test their airsealing work on the Tiny Lab with a Retrotec blower door! They fire up the new Model 5000 fan and find that the house has approximately 160 CFM@50 of air leakage, which is 4.7 ACH50 and 0.14 CFM per sq. ft. of enclosure surface area- and that's with stupid tarps over the window holes! We're going to test again when the windows are in.

Thanks to Julie Tolliver of Energy Fitness for Homes for the idea, to Retrotec for making awesome equipment, to 475 High Performance Building Supply for supplying America with awesome airsealing kits, and to Hewlett-Packard for creating awesome video editing stations that we work on every day.

How to Frame a Tiny House to Withstand Earthquakes + Hurricanes Simultaneously

Corbett Lunsford

Corbett explains advanced framing techniques and components for making as strong and as efficient a tiny home (or any home) as possible! Get a quick tour of anchor bolts, hurricane straps and ties, jack and king studs, headers, top and bottom plates.

And come see the Tiny Lab when it's done on its 20 city Proof Is Possible Tour in 2016: http://ProofIsPossible.com

How to Frame Up a House in Two Days (like a Boss)

Corbett Lunsford

Corbett and Grace (assisted by lots of family and neighbors) assembled and erected all four walls of the Tiny Lab in two days over Thanksgiving weekend- watch the process accelerated 100x!
Find out more about the Proof Is Possible Tour and where you can see the finished Tiny Lab at: http://ProofIsPossible.com

Wondering where that snazzy song came from?  You can Shazam it or check it out here: http://cdbaby.com/artist/mysteriam
"Velvet Giver" from the album UNMISTAKABLE

If you really want to dig deep check out the music video starring Lennie Johnson, one of the most amazing performing artist we have ever worked with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=174LvV_qOeE

How to Perfectly Balance a Tiny House Trailer

Corbett Lunsford

Today we ordered the fabrication of our custom tiny house trailer- big step, and it took a lot of sweat and time to get here. The process is like anything- the more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and it just gets more sweaty and time-intensive as you go. Here's what we learned about how to place the axles for your custom tiny house trailer:

  1. Know how the balance should work on a tiny house. Because you're not building it to sit still, the balance should not be in perfect equilibrium. You don't want to let go of the front of the trailer and have it remain upright and balanced; generally you'll want 10% of the total weight to be resting on the tongue. This means if our tiny house is 10,000 lbs, the tongue will weigh 1,000 lbs. You will not be picking that up.
    You don't want the trailer pulling up on the back of your tow vehicle, and when you get it moving, the momentum will do weird things to the trailer's behavior if it has a shed roof front-to-back like ours. The wind is going to want to push down on the back of the trailer to flatten out the plane (we have not hired an aerodynamics engineer to find out how much, but we believe it's not substantial).
    There's a great article on managing tiny house towing weights here.

  2. Know where your trailer fabricator likes to put the axles as a default. It's interesting- the two main trailer fabricators, Tumbleweed and Tiny Home Builders, put their axles at slightly different points along the length of the tiny house trailer as a default. Tumbleweed puts the center of axles 55% of the way back, and Tiny Home Builders puts theirs 58% back (both of these are measured from the front of the trailer bed, not the tip of the tongue). Either of these are approximately correct enough for most tiny house people, but if you want to use a more accurate engineering approach, then read on...

  3. Know how much your tiny house will weigh. This is very challenging. You need to account for every stud, joist, insulation unit, fixture, piece of heating/cooling equipment, furniture, etc, etc. We did this by building a 3D computer model of our Tiny Lab and creating an inventory from there in a spreadsheet. Our engineer buddy John Bergman then figured out where the center of gravity was in the X, Y, and Z axes (vertically, front to back, and left to right). The Tiny Lab is estimated to be 9,300 lbs, with the center of gravity right down the middle, and 45% of the way back.

  4. Split your axles over the point 10% of the way further back. Our axles are located 55% of the way back, which Dan Louche at Tiny Home Builders was easily able to include in our trailer design. Stay tuned for all the videos of the construction process, which starts in under a month!