Foam insulation a great idea
How should I insulate my basement? I’ve been researching foam products and they look impressive, but I can’t find any contractors who think foam insulation in basements is a good idea. All they recommend is stud frame walls with fibreglass and carpet on the floor.
Foam insulation is best for finishing a basement because it delivers excellent thermal performance and it’s not affected by moisture as much as other types of insulation. After all, basement rec rooms are holes in the ground, so liquid leaks and moisture infiltration is always a possibility.
In my experience, a threepronged approach works best when insulating a basement. Rigid sheets of foam insulation work very well on walls and spray foam is the best way to insulate the place where floor joists meet outside walls up at the ceiling. Nothing even comes close to the effectiveness of spray foam in this location.
The warmest and lightest weight rec room floor system currently on the market is called Barricade Plus. It’s a high-load two- by two-foot subfloor tile made of high density foam. The foam is firm enough to support most kinds of finished floors, and the one-inch thickness delivers R5 of insulation. Are low-flow toilets really any good? I have two old toilets I’d like to replace, but I want to be sure the new ones work.
About 10 years ago, I replaced the conventional toilets in my house with low-flow units made by Toto and they’ve worked perfectly ever since. There are seven people in the house, so I can recommend Toto for anyone.
I’d never heard of this Japanese company until I began researching toilets in the early 1990s, but Toto happens to be the largest manufacturer of toilets in the world.
Toilet performance testing done by a Canadian firm called Veritec has revolutionized toilet design worldwide by exposing poor performing models and alerting people to top performers. Low-flow toilets work much better today than they did originally. Should I be concerned about water dripping from inside the eaves of my house? It’s leaking from the ventilation holes in the aluminum underneath the roof overhang.
Yes, you should be concerned because you’re in danger of having water leak through your ceiling. The usual cause of this trouble is a buildup of ice along the bottom edge of a roof. This is called an ice dam and it poses a roof leak hazard. Ice dams trap water that pools behind the ice, allowing it to leak between shingles.
So far the problem exists close enough to the edge of your roof that the leaking remains away from your ceiling, but you still need to do something about it.
Start by having enough of the ice dam removed to allow water drainage. That’s the short-term fix. Preventing the problem will take more work. The root of the issue is too much heat escaping from the roof of your house and melting rooftop snow when ambient temperatures are below freezing. This temperature difference causes freezing to occur and a berm of ice all around the edge of the roof.
When temperatures finally warm above freezing, large enough amounts of rain and melt water will be stopped by the ice dam, forming standing pools and leakage further up your roof.
The long-term solution is to increase attic insulation levels while also boosting attic ventilation. Both these changes serve to lower the temperature of the outer roof surface, reducing or eliminating the formation of the ice dam.
If it isn’t possible to make these changes, then permanently mounted rooftop heating cables are your only option. Turn them on when ice needs to be melted, then switch them off to save energy.