As I took a walk through my neighborhood last weekend, I noticed that a lot of houses in my neighborhood have sump pumps, because they kept discharging water.  We’ve had a rapid snow melt here in Minnesota, and that means saturated soils… which leads to water in basements.

While installing drain tile, a sump basket, and a sump pump is usually a guaranteed way to prevent basement water intrusion, it wouldn’t be my first choice at controlling water in the basement.

The most important part of controlling basement water intrusion is to control water at the exterior of the home.  There are two very basic things that will prevent basement water intrusion in at least 90% of houses – and grading and gutters.  By the way, I say 90% conservatively.  The number is probably closer to 99%.

Grading

Grading is the first thing to look at if there are water problems at a house.  I know this sounds very basic, and it is, but I inspect an unbelievable amount of houses that have poor grading at the exterior.  This means that the ground slopes in toward the house, rather than away from the house.  The fix for improper grading is to change the landscaping.

Changing the landscaping to get water flowing away from the house is sometimes as easy as bringing in some dirt next to the house, laying down plastic on top of the dirt, then laying down rocks, wood chips, or some similar material as a ballast for the plastic.  The slope of the dirt away from the house doesn’t need to be anything dramatic – it just needs to be enough to prevent water from sitting next to the house.

In cities like Minneapolis and Saint Paul, houses will often be too close to each other to allow for proper grading.  In these cases, one option is to create a swale in the yard, which will allow for water to go around the house in a type of trench.

When a swale isn’t practical, an underground drain system can be installed in the yard.  This system consists of large plastic tubing installed underground that directs surface water to a more desirable location, such as the street.  I did this at my own house about four years ago, and I haven’t had any water in my basement ever since.  I rented a trenching machine and ending up burying about seventy-five feet of corrugated plastic drain tubing in my yard, and terminated the tubing at the street.  A lot of people in my neighborhood have done this, and it works very well.

Gutters and Downspouts

The other basic thing to look at when a house has basement water problems is the gutters and downspouts.  Without gutters, rainwater can often be concentrated from many different areas on a roof to one single location next to the house, like what’s happening in the photo below.  All the highlighted areas dump water in to one single spot next to the house.  That’s bad news, and in my opinion, bad design.  Gutters would really help to keep water away from the house here.

Downspout are just as important as gutters.  I’ve told many clients that it’s better to have NO gutters at all than gutters with improper downspouts.  Why?  A house with no gutters will typically disperse water along all of the roof lines.  A house with an improper downspout extension will end up concentrating all of the water to one spot next to the house.  Again, this is bad news.  Proper downspout extensions bring water well away from the house – ideally six to ten feet.

If you have water in your basement, take a look at the obvious stuff before calling a wet basement specialist.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Home Inspector Twin Cities

For the last two weeks I’ve blogged about HRVs. In part one, I covered what HRVs are for and how they operate. For part two, I covered HRV maintenance and operation. Today I’ll discuss installation defects.

The most common defect I find with HRVs is that they were never balanced. When HRVs are installed, a technician needs to balance the system to make sure the air getting exhausted is equal to the air coming in. If more air comes in than what goes out, you’ll have a pressurized house… and vice versa. Neither of these conditions are good for the home.

To make sure an HRV is balanced, I look for a balancing sticker and I check to make sure that the balancing damper controls have been screwed in place. If they’re not screwed in place, a balancing sticker means nothing. If I don’t see a balancing sticker, I don’t make a big deal about it, but I’ll often make a note in my report that it’s missing. If there are no balancing screws, I recommend having the HRV professionally balanced.

Most HRVs are installed hanging from straps or chains and springs to minimize the transfer of any annoying vibration from the fans. If an HRV gets mounted to the wall, I check the installation manual to make sure that this is an acceptable installation, and I listen on the other side of the wall to see how loud it is. When they’re mounted incorrectly, they can be very noisy!

As a rule of thumb, the intake and exhaust locations at the exterior of the home should be located at least six feet away from each other. I’ve never seen an installation manual that allowed anything less. It’s also important to make sure the intake is at least ten feet away from any sidewall vented gas appliances, such as a powervent water heater or furnace. The intake should also be located at least ten feet away from anything smelly, such as where the garbage containers get kept.

The ductwork that feeds the intake from the exterior and exhaust to the exterior needs to be properly insulated. If it’s not properly insulated, you’ll feel an obvious cold draft.

If the HRV ducts are only attached to the furnace’s return air, they must be at least three feet away from each other, and the furnace’s blower fan must turn on with the HRV to prevent the air getting added to the house from short-circuiting and getting pulled back out of the house. Every manufacturer recommends connecting the furnace’s blower fan to the HRV for optimal performance, but it’s not always a requirement.

Every HRV needs to be plugged in to an outlet. If the HRV is running off an extension cord, this is an improper, unacceptable installation. Repair requires the installation of an outlet.

That’s about all of the HRV installation defects that I can think of, and that concludes this mini-series on HRVs. As always, please email or post any comments or questions!

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Minnesota Home Inspections

Last week I blogged about why houses need HRVs.  This week I’ll write about maintenance and operation of HRVs, and I’ll try to cover the stuff you should know if you own one.  The information in this blog is general – every manufacturer will have their own set of instructions and their own maintenance schedule.

Maintenance

• Every three to six months the filters should be cleaned by vacuuming to remove as much dust as possible, then washed with warm water and mild soap.  Some filters can also be washed in the top tray of a dishwasher, but this may tarnish the aluminum finish.  The filter below should have been cleaned a long, long time ago, and this is what I find at almost every home inspection – way more than dirty furnace filters!

• Every three to six months Clean the condensation tray with damp cloth.  The condensation tray is the area where water will collect in the bottom. The condensate drain should be checked, and replaced if needed.  The drain tube usually consists of clear plastic tubing with a little loop that creates a trap to prevent odors from the floor drain or wherever else from getting sucked in to the HRV.

• Every three to six months Check the intake grill at the exterior of the home to make sure it’s clean.  These get very dirty, as there is a fan constantly pulling air in.

• Every six to twelve months the core should be cleaned by removing it and letting it soak in a mixture of lukewarm water and mild soap.  Rinse the core thoroughly when done.  If you own a summer core, don’t get it wet, as you’ll cause permanent damage to it.  Summer cores can be cleaned by vacuuming with a brush attachment.

• Every one to three years the fans should be cleaned.  This typically requires removal of the fan assembly.  Check the owner’s manual for specific instructions, or hire a professional to do this.

Operation

Operating an HRV is usually quite simple.  If the HRV has a switch located on the unit itself, it will typically have a couple of the following settings, but not all:  On, High, Low, Off, or Remote.  If your HRV has a “Remote” setting, you’ll probably want to use that one. This will allow the HRV remote controller, usually mounted on the wall next to the thermostat,  to turn the HRV on and off.  This remote will also typically have a dehumidistat, which controls how much moisture is in the air.

If the bathrooms in the house have funny little wall buttons instead of bathroom exhaust fan switches, it typically means that the HRV system has had ductwork installed in the bathrooms.  This is an acceptable alternative to bathroom exhaust fans.  When the wall button is pushed, this will turn on the HRV for somewhere between 15 – 60 minutes, or will kick the HRV in to high gear for 15 – 60 minutes.

Every HRV should also have a defrost cycle, and the HRV should go in to the defrost cycle automatically when it gets too cold.  The defrost cycle is actually quite simple; the exhaust fan just runs for about five minutes, which forces a bunch of warm indoor air through the core without bringing in any cold air.

If you plan to operate your HRV during the summer, check your owner’s manual to see what the manufacturer has to say about it.  If your HRV is designed to run during the summer, you’ll probably need to remove the standard winter core and install a summer core.  The difference is that the summer core is designed to remove moisture from the air coming IN to the house, rather than the air leaving.  If there is no mention in your owners manual about running your HRV during the summer, you probably shouldn’t.

That’s about all for maintenance – for any more specific instructions, you’ll need to check your owner’s manual.  Next week I’ll talk about installation defects.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Minneapolis Home Inspections

Many months ago I wrote a blog about how houses can often have moisture problems when old furnaces are replaced with high efficiency furnaces. The fix that I mentioned at the end of the blog was to install a Heat Recovery Ventilator, or HRV.  The character in that blog finally got around to installing an HRV in his house, and solved all his moisture problems! For the first time since he installed his high efficiency furnace, he no longer has condensation on his windows during the winter, and he couldn’t be happier about it.

Today I’ll share some basic information about how HRVs operate and why they’re needed in today’s newer, tighter houses.

New Houses Don’t Breathe As most people know, new houses are constructed much tighter than they used to be – they don’t leak air all over the place.  I’ve heard a lot of old-school home inspectors and building contractors complain about this, and you probably have too.  The rant goes something like this: ”We build houses so damn tight that they don’t breathe, and they end up rotting from the inside out!  Things were a lot better when we didn’t have all these stupid house wraps.”

These cranky doom sayers are only partially right – yes, we build houses tighter today, but we’ve also figured out how to prevent mold and moisture problems, and how to improve indoor air quality.  This is where HRVs come in.

HRVs Provide Fresh Air An HRV works by constantly bringing fresh air in to a house and exhausting stale air.    The air that gets brought in to the house gets passed through a screen at the exterior, then through a filter inside the unit, then through the HRV core, which is actually a heat exchanger.  The heat exchanger allows the fresh outdoor air to get warmed by stale indoor air right before the indoor air gets exhausted to the exterior.  This allows about 60 – 80% of the heat in the air to be re-captured.  The diagram below illustrates this principal.

To understand how an HRV works, interlock your fingers together and picture warm air flowing through fingers in one hand, and cold air flowing through the fingers in the other hand.

HRVs Remove Moisture Besides providing fresh air, HRVs also remove a lot of moisture from the air.  Old, drafty houses get dry in the winter because they’re leaky, and the moist indoor air is always getting replaced with dry outdoor air.  Not so with newer houses – they stay humid during the winter, and HRVs are often needed just to get rid of all the excess humidity.  As the warm, moist air passes by the cold air, the moisture will condense.  This is why HRVs have a drain running out the bottom.

HRVs Lower Radon Levels Because HRVs constantly change out the air in a house, an HRV will reduce radon levels when working properly.  During a recent Eden Prairie home inspection that I also performed a radon test at, I had the HRV running during the majority of the radon test, but I tripped the GFCI outlet for the last hour of the radon test during my inspection.  Look at the jump in radon levels at the house from NOT having the HRV running!  Any time a radon test is performed, if there is an HRV present at the house, it should be up and running throughout the duration of the radon test.

HRVs Have Many Names If you hear any of these terms, someone is probably talking about an HRV:

• Air-to-air heat exchanger
• Air exchanger
• Whole house ventilator
• Big square thingy in the furnace room
• VanEE system (brand name)
• ERV

The last one, ERV, stands for Energy Recovery Ventilator.  These are similar to HRVs, but ERVs are pretty rare here in Minnesota – I think I’ve seen two of them, ever.  They’re designed for more humid, southern climates.

If you don’t have an HRV at your house and you think you need one, you could always just turn on an exhaust fan and leave it running.  This will be very inefficient, but it will change out the air in your house.  I call this the Poor Man’s HRV.

Next week I’ll talk about the maintenance needs of HRVs, and the week after that I’ll discuss installation defects.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Eden Prairie Home Inspections

With winter officially here, I’m on a big insulation kick.  This is the time of year when I can really tell which houses have attic problems, oftentimes just from looking at the house on the outside!  Today I’ll talk about a few things I look for when inspecting an attic when it comes to air leakage, insulation, and ventilation.

When I inspect houses in the winter, the first thing I look at is the roof.  I do this out of habit, and I can usually identify a house with attic problems without even going in the house.  The most obvious things to look for on the outside are ice dams, icicles, and patches of unevenly melted snow or frost.  These are all signs of heat loss from the house to the attic space.

If I find a Minnesota house with obvious problems on the outside, I look for two conditions in the attic which cause heat loss; lack of insulation and attic bypasses.  Most people readily understand what lack of insulation is, but attic bypasses are generally less understood, and much more time consuming to correct.  An attic bypass is a passageway for heated air to rise in to the attic – insulation won’t fix this.  To understand how attic bypasses work and why insulation doesn’t help, think about wearing a knitted sweater on a cold windy day; the wind will cut right through the sweater, but if you wore a thin windbreaker over the sweater you would be much warmer.  The same principal applies to attics – warm household air will pass right through a foot of fiberglass insulation, but if the air is stopped by a physical barrier (such as the drywall at your ceiling), it won’t pass through the insulation.  According to the Minnesota Department of Commerce, attic bypasses can reduce the overall effectiveness of insulation by as much as 70 percent!  This is why it’s critical to fix attic bypasses before adding more insulation to an attic space.

When I evaluate the insulation in attics, I focus on areas with missing or minimal amounts of insulation.  Any gaps can drastically reduce the overall effectiveness in the attic.  Attics in new homes should have insulation that provides an insulating value of at least R-38, which equals out to about a foot of fiberglass rolls, or a foot of loose-fill cellulose, or about eighteen inches of loose-fill fiberglass.  If I can see the bottom chords of trusses in an attic, this is an obvious sign that the attic needs more insulation.  While I don’t have any hard and fast rules for my recommendations, I generally say that an insulation level over R-38 is good, between R-19 and R-38 is marginal, and less than R-19 needs correction.

Attic bypasses are much more difficult to identify because they are usually covered by insulation.  While national home inspection standards don’t require inspectors to move insulation, I always make a point of doing this anyways because this is typically the only way to identify them, and they’re important to know about! While bypasses are major sources of heat loss, they can also allow moist household air in to the attic space, which will often condense on the roof boards, creating a frost covered attic space.

In the summer there is never frost in the attic, but a dead giveaway that frost accumulates in the winter is small black stains around the roofing nails. The frost in attics will form the heaviest around nail heads because they’re the coldest components.  Possibly the worst bypass that I frequently find is a bath fan exhausting in to the attic – these pump warm moist air in to the attic at a ridiculous rate.  Another common place to find bypasses is around the furnace or water heater vent.  I frequently find gaps around the vents that are several feet wide, and these areas are always covered with insulation.  The Minnesota Department of Commerce puts out an excellent brochure on finding bypasses in the attic and how to fix them, which you can download here.

The last thing I look for in an attic space is ventilation.  Attic spaces are almost always unconditioned spaces, so they need to be ventilated to the exterior.  Attic ventilation helps to keep the roof cooler throughout the year, which will help to minimize ice dams in the winter and help prolong the life of the roof in the summer.  While the traditional reason for ventilating an attic space was to prevent condensation in the attic, I’ve read a number of studies lately that say that this may not be as important as we once thought.  I always verify that proper ventilation is in place, and I make suggestions on how to improve ventilation when necessary.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections – Email – Minneapolis Home Inspections

With the cold weather officially here, it’s a good time to talk about insulation.  This is such a huge topic that I hardly know where to start!  There are so many different aspects to insulation that this will have to take up several blogs.  Today I’ll talk about why it’s important to have a well-insulated home.

Perhaps the most important reason to have a well-insulated home is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  While a recent survey conducted by Owens-Corning revealed that most Americans believe transportation and industry to be the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, in truth the largest contributor is buildings!  Buildings use 40% of our energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.  The number is even higher in Minnesota – 60 to 80 percent! The most cost effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to better insulate buildings.  Yes, this is even better than driving a hybrid vehicle, but it’s certainly not as hip.

The most obvious reason to better insulate your home is to reduce your heating and cooling bills – especially here in Minnesota.  Adding insulation to attic spaces is often a project that even unskilled homeowners can tackle, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money. Homeowners will typically see a payback in five to ten years. Adding insulation to poorly insulated walls is also a good thing to do and will surely help to save on heating and cooling costs, but this not as cost effective as adding insulation to an open attic area, as this will often require a professional to blow insulation in to the walls.

Arguably the most important reason to better insulate your home is to make it more comfortable. Even if a thermostat says it’s 70 degrees inside the home, poorly insulated walls will make a room feel much colder as the heat from your body radiates out to the relatively cold walls. In older houses with uneven heat, you may even have parts of the house that never warm up enough. I can tell you from experience that insulation makes an incredible difference in the comfort of a home. I live in a one-and-a-half story home with a finished upper level that used to be so cold in the winter that I couldn’t even use it. After re-insulating the upper level last year, I no longer need to heat the upper level! Enough heat rises up from the rest of the house to keep the upper floor so warm that I can shut off all the heat registers and it’s still comfortable.

There are many more reasons to properly insulate your home, but I’ll just mention one more that you’re surely aware of if you live in Minnesota; ice dams. While ice dams are a large subject on their own, suffice to say that lack of insulation can lead to large accumulations of ice at the edges of roofs that cause leaks in the home and destroy gutters.

In my next blog I’ll talk about how to determine whether more insulation is necessary, and what critical steps need to be taken before adding insulation. Hint: the photos throughout this blog all show homes with major room for improvement!

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections – Email – Minneapolis Home Inspections

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