WARNING: COMPULSORY READING II
We’ve been in the business of making recommendations on how to insulate double brick (aka solid masonry) walls for over 14 years now and there have always been fears, risks and dangers associated with insulating these load bearing walls. Frankly, the concerns are enough to keep a building scientist up at night.
Our interest in double brick homes comes form the fact that we both live in 100 year old homes in Toronto and we always tried to keep up with the bits and pieces being published in Europe and North America.
In a recent blog I mentioned Building Science Corps awesome technical report on Internal Insulation of Masonry Walls as well as Measure Guideline: Internal Insulation of Masonry Walls and now I see they’ve gone one step further and produced another great study on the subject Interior Insulation of Mass Masonry Walls: Joist Monitoring, Material Test Optimization, Salt Effects Research Report – 1307 May 2013 Kohta Ueno, Randy Van Straaten and Chris Schumacher.
A big thank you to the United States government who’s Department of Energy branch funds this prescient scientific research.
So if you or your loved one lives in a leaky, uninsulated double brick house, give the paper a read over! If you’re a contractor, insulator, architect you have to read this before you do another project!