Attic Insulation Truth Debunk the Myths - LIVE Stream Ask theBuilder 11-18-2021

Hi, I'm Kim Carter

You are listening and watching to Ask the Builder here on YouTube

And it's great to be with you today. And I just literally 20 seconds ago hung up the phone with Frank and Kim and Rihanna on WLIP.com

I'm at WLIP. It's a real radio station up in Kenosha, Wisconsin

And it was a very lively show today. And we talked very, very little about home improvement

and that's usually the case. So always great to be on WLIP

So thanks very much, Frank. Thanks very much, Kim and Rihanna. So today we're going to talk a little bit about attic insulation

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All right, let's get started. So attic insulation. And the reason this came up, so Ignacio emailed me yesterday, and I'm going to go back to his email right now

I need to find it, and here we go right here. And he had some really good questions

So I'm going to read his, his. questions and then we'll kind of we'll kind of unpack it all. All right. And so he said

he says, I am toying with the idea of removing the original blown in insulation from the early

80s and put down bats My issue is using face versus unfaced fats in the attic My concern is moisture and trapping moisture causing a mold problem That a very good concern And he says basic physics states that moisture travels from hot to cold Yeah kind of We going to

talk about that. If I have faced insulation, I may trap condensed moisture as opposed to unfaced

that may allow free moisture travel. I have not been able to find any studies regarding what is the best

way to insulate an attic and deal with moisture transfer and avoid mold problems

Is the face that, oh, and it says, should I pay, if I use the face bat, is paper facing up

will I have moisture problem within the insulation? It faced down, will I have a moisture mold problem at the ceiling surface

If I used unfaced, it may be a moot point. All right, so that is what Ignatio wrote to me

All right, so let's unpack all that, okay? So the first thing to do is to let's talk a little bit about condensation

And if you paid attention in high school physics, then you understand it

And you also have a really good grasp of it anyway if you have ever taken a cold can of

soda or a beer can out of the refrigerator or a cooler and you put it on your patio in a summertime or your picnic table And within a few minutes the outside of the can is wet with condensation

So what's happening? All right. So here's what's happening. It's all about due point. So the air

the the air, basically, and this is kind of what Ignatio was talking about. So as the temperature goes up

the due point can go up too. And here's a really interesting thing

that a lot of people don't know about dew point. If you want to look, if you live in like the Midwest

or down south, you know, like in a spring, summer, or fall

and you want to predict, or if you wonder, like if you wonder, how is it that the weather people

always can figure out what the low temperature is going to be at night

All right. Well, here's how they know it. So the air temperature can never drop below what the dew point is

All right. So that's a really interesting thing a lot of people don't know. All right. So and just think about how dew forms in the morning, like when you go outside and there's dew on the grass and everything's wet

All right. So what's happening is, you know, cooler surfaces, the water is going to condense on them