Over the years, we keep getting invited back to George Brown College to share stories from the front. Amazingly, I never had the chance to check out the laboratory facilities at the Casa Loma campus; what a treasure trove for budding building scientists!
I was invited by the Building Science Lab co-ordinator, Dr. Dahai Zhang, to tour the facilities. Between two labs, they had everything it seems to do some amazing research and I wouldn’t be surprised if this college becomes a centre for some exciting research in the coming years. If it wasn’t the guarded box for doing R-value testing on samples, it was the climate simulator below. Take a tour if you have a chance!
The climate simulator above was made by Building Science Labs in Waterloo. Essentially, the apparatus is shown separated in the above photos. You can see the lapped siding on the left of an experimental wall section. The two corrugated metal halves can be rolled together and sealed. On each side of the wall, precise temperature and relative humidity settings can be set to measure anything your heart desires about air leakage, dew points, condensation…