A Couple of Top (and Bottom) Building Science Resources

Just a quick note for you this morning about some building science resources I found on the Web this week. As alluded to in the title, one relates to the top of the house (cathedral ceilings) and the other to the bottom (waterproofing basements). And actually, these resources that I’m referring you to today are mostly referrals to other resources. But this is good stuff and I think you’ll appreciate them. Both of these topics are fraught with risk for doing things the wrong way and owning liability that you could avoid.

Cathedral ceilings

RDH Building Science does a lot of great work: lab research, field research, commissioning, and more. They’re mostly in Canada and the west coast of the US and Professor John Straube’s company merged with them a couple of years ago. That division is called RDH Building Science Laboratories, and they’re the ones who posted this article on cathedral ceilings.

Really, it’s not so much an article as a collection of 5 articles. If you have anything to do with cathedral ceilings and want to understand, you should go there now, download the three pdf files, save the other two, and study them. This is the essential knowledge on the topic. So, here you go. Click and learn!

Design Options for Cathedral Ceilings – Reading List

Waterproofing basements (NSW)

The other one is a brief article by Peter Yost, another building science guru. Despite the heading, though, this one is completely safe for work. Yost focuses on the difficult issue of waterproofing a basement from the inside, or what is called negative side waterproofing. He abbreviates it NSW, which in this case does NOT mean “not safe for work.”

Yost distills some of the understanding he gained from one particular resource, the one that gave him “the adult supervision that [he] needed.” In his distillation process, he also provides a few other resources. Without further ado, here’s his article at Green Building Advisor:

Installing Basement Waterproofing from the ‘Negative’ Side

If you have any other resources like this, let me know.

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