Going Green. It is no longer a trend but a common practice, government enforced, and quite plainly the right thing to do. But is it possible that we could let the pendulum swing so far as to negatively affect the very thing we're trying to protect?
The U.S. Department of Energy, through their research, has uncovered factors in modern construction that leads to unhealthy conditions in the home. Within the residential building sector, 38% of the primary energy used is spent on space heating and cooling. A large fraction of this energy is lost through the building envelope [read: you are conditioning the air in the neighborhood]. Sealing is the logical answer, but with the push to go green and seal homes, unhealthy conditions being trapped inside the home have been overlooked.
In the lower level, your foundation walls and floor can rob your home of the warmth or coolness that your HVAC system has expensively created, so the most obvious way to seal warm or cool air in is with insulation. Problem solved, right? NO! Insulation is an easy target for moisture that infiltrates the foundation wall from the outside. The same is true with the floor of the basement; padding is the answer for minimizing heat transfer, so protection is needed here as well. For crawl spaces with a dirt floor there is greater concern since it is easier for water to travel through dirt as opposed to masonry.
Moisture that does not have an easy escape route, now that we have created an energy efficient environment, needs to be channeled away from the home. For the walls, Rigid Sealer™ is a permanent solution for water permeating through the wall, by channeling it beneath the slab while protecting insulation and wall coverings. Installing drywall? Your vertical studs can be adhered to Rigid Sealer™, bypassing the need to nail them into the wall (nails, by the way allow a path for water to traverse - the miniscule space around nails and anchors lead water inside).
For basement and crawlspace floors, a drainage solution is needed to capture water delivered from the Rigid Sealer™ and from around the outside of the foundation.
There are 5 ways water gets in:
- Through mortar and joints in walls
- Through sweating and bleeding through pores in walls
- Over the footer which walls rests
- Under the footer and through seams where walls meet floor
- Through cracks or pores in the floor itself
FreeFlo™ is a cutting edge pipe that has numerous properties that make it the most effective in the industry. The facts back up this boisterous claim:
Architectural Testing out of York, PA sent back results on Water Flow and Flattening that showed upwards of 150% superior efficiency than the next two leading types of pipe (Black Corrugated PVC and White Perforated PVC). Both of these can be found at any Home Depot or similar hardware store. Leave them there on the shelves if your desire is to have a dry basement.
The history of these two products originates from the company who still leads the cutting edge race in product development in the waterproofing world: B-Dry®. Since 1958, B-Dry® has been awarded more patents than other waterproofers and have had more solutions installed across the nation (2011 marks a significant achievement with their 300,000th lifetime warranted solution going into a customer’s home). Your benefit comes by having the opportunity for a home that has the best of both worlds. Keep the green and rid yourself of the... clear. Water that is.
Contact B-Dry® at 800-737-BDRY (2379) or contact your local B-Dry® directly.