>> Coming up on Home Diagnosis.

>> The Wyckoff House.

The oldest house in New York City.

The most multi-layered onion in the entire country.

>> Literally, every single room has a different history to it.

>> We're trying to do 21st century things with an older model home, it's going to be dangerous.

>> The water heater has busted.

>> The bedrooms are now office spaces.

>> Seeing these spaces that were kind of forgotten in one of the oldest houses that exists, very exciting.

>> Home Diagnosis is made possible by CPS Products, provider of indoor air quality products and test tools.

FLIR, maker of infrared thermal cameras for home owners and building professionals, and by Hayward Score, and Healthy Indoors Magazine, and by generous support from these underwriters, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> Welcome to Home Diagnosis.

>> We've talked about renovating old homes, but we've never dug this deep.

>> We had the chance to park the tiny lab next to the Wyckoff House, the oldest house in New York City, and we pitted them head-to-head with performance testing.

>> So let's explore the history of home performance with the queen of historic homes.

>> Hi, I'm Corbett.

>> And I'm Grace.

>> Since we met, we've been partners in everything.

>> In work, in life, and in love.

>> Fast forward to now, we've created careers in home testing, building science.

>> And started a family.

>> We also built a tiny lab.

>> To get people thinking about their home's problems dynamically.

>> We use scientific testing to diagnose a house's problems.

>> Because, more than comfort, energy, or safety, it's about gaining control of your home.

>> And with two cats, two kids, and 200 square feet.

>> We know this intimately.

>> For me, what was most exciting about New York City, we knew we wanted to test something really special, but we didn't know what house it was going to be.

New York's got the coolest kinds of houses.

You know, Brownstones, and, you know, really old, interesting structures.

And then, the New York City Parks came on board with Ian Minerva, and the Wyckoff House presented itself.

>> Everybody loves before and after, and parking the tiny lab next to the Wyckoff House, is the best before and after there is.

What a family that built a house themselves, back in 1650, versus what a family that built a house themselves in the 21st century, would do with it, is just really exciting.

>> Our tiny lab, while it is tiny, it's not very small on the road, and it's not very small going through gates.

And we had to go through the tiniest gate possible to get into the Wyckoff House.

>> The morning that I had to tow this house backwards, in Brooklyn, on a weekend, in traffic, in the middle of the day, into this gate, I absolutely knew it, and I was super nervous.

>> When you walk into the Wyckoff House, it feels very multi-dimensional.

Literally, every single room has a different history to it because this home has had so many additions.

>> So many things happened to this place to change how it was performing.

It is the most multi-layered onion in the entire country.

>> Two houses separated by 350 years, and both designed to go off-grid.

>> So here we are in New York City, and before this was an English colony, it was a Dutch colony.

Dutch women were highly literate, incredibly independent, and they even kept their last name.

I'm really excited to see how they dealt with the complexities of their life, and how they used home performance back in 1652.

>> Here we are in the Wyckoff House, the original room that dates back to the 17th century, and this Lucie Chin.

She is the historian of the home.

Lucie, can you tell us a little bit about the complexities of living in America's original tiny home?

>> We met Lucie, the docent who is going to be in charge of showing us around, and we immediately knew this woman was the real deal.

She knew every story about what was going on in that house through the generations, which was invaluable because just seeing the house is one thing.

But if you know the stories about all of the different closets, and the stairways, and the walls.

It was just amazing to see the intention, and the culture behind what you see in the house.

>> Well, I would like to welcome you to the Wyckoff House Museum.

>> Thank you.

>> This is the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House, and it is one of the oldest wooden structures in the country.

It's the oldest house in New York for sure.

>> Lucie's a real New Yorker.

She's got a background in theater, and in costuming, and management.

She really understands telling the story, and also how a home would be managed.

>> This was a one room cottage.

So what you see is what you get.

It had a dirt floor, actually packed earth.

Unglazed windows.

The doors and windows on the north side, and on the south side, so there wasn't really a front and a back.

One of the important features is this hearth.

It's call a jambless hearth.

These are unique to Dutch architecture.

>> The fireplace was where you cooked, and you heated, and all this stuff.

They spent literally all day long around the fire, that was the central communal space.

>> They're intended to stick out into the room like a range would, instead of sitting in the wall, the way a fireplace would.

The English would have cut a square hole in the wall, and put the entire hearth stack on the outside of the structure.

The Dutch encapsulated it within the house.

They liked to get at all three sides of their fire.

>> Because the chimney stack is inside the house, it means that during the day, when there's a lot of activity here and there's multiple fires going on, it's absorbing all of that heat, and then at night, it would let it back out into the room like a little radiator.

>> They would have had shutters that they would close at night.

And this is one of the interesting things about this period of time, right from the middle ages through the middle of the Renaissance, for some reason, people firmly believed that night air was toxic.

>> Interesting.

>> So they would've closed those shutters every night, year round.

>> Can you tell me a little bit about the materials that were used to make this home?

>> This is a construction which in English is called, wattle and daub, and the wattle is the wood part.

It would've been White Oak, which was growing locally, probably within a half mile of the house.

The daub is the shredded straw and mud that makes up the surface of the wall.

And then the entire thing would've been sealed with plaster that was made from burned oyster shells.

There are also corn cobs situated in the walls.

It was something that they learned to do from the Native populations, and it was used as an insulation technique.

>> Was there an attic?

>> It wasn't exactly an attic.

It's what they called a loft space.

So the way the house is structured, it has these H frame sections.

And what they would do is, they would simply put planks across the beams to make some overhead storage space.

>> There was a root cellar that would have been associated with this house, and it would've been out in the garden someplace.

But the loft is where you would have worked off the sacks and the barrels, and the crates of whatever was open, and you needed immediate access to, so that you wouldn't have to keep going out to the root cellar.

And a convenient place to stick a kid or two at night, where they could sleep close to the chimney stack, which would actually have been warmer for the most part, then sleeping down here.

>> In the original house, the family actually slept on a loft, but it was very, very different from what we think of lofts today.

It was literally, just kind of slats of wood, that were just sturdy enough to have people sleep up there.

>> The original New York loft.

>> Every family grows right?

>> Yes.

>> So, the Wyckoff family, we know, in this property had nine generations, but in this original house, how many people lived here?

>> Well, when Pieter and his wife, Grietje, moved in here in 1652.

They had two toddlers, and an infant.

By the time they were done, they had 11 children.

They all survived to adulthood, and they all lived in here, along with three or four farm hands.

>> So for a period of time, there could have been as many as 16 people sharing this space on a winter night.

>> Wow.

>> It isn't until the grandson, in the 18th century, that any part of the house was expanded.

>> Well, let's go see what the grandson built.

>> Absolutely.

Right over this way.

>> Great.

>> There's this thing out there about how buildings learn, and this house, having another addition, and another addition, and another, as nine generations lived there, this is the building that shows how buildings learn.

>> Beautiful.

So this is where the grandson built the next addition onto the house.

>> In 1730, he added the parlor behind us, that we just walked through, and in 1750 he added this room.

The fireplace is half the size of the ones in the other two rooms, and was probably only used for the heating the room.

>> Interesting.

>> It's one of the things that designates it as a formal space.

>> Now, this part of the house is actually still made of wattle and daub, even though we're into the middle of the following century, and they have every architectural technique known to Europe, they're still making these houses in the old-fashioned method.

They knew how it was going to react to moisture, and to heat, and to cold, so they continued to make these farmhouses with that kind of construction.

>> There is now a cellar underneath here, and that would've been a much cooler space.

During the winter it doesn't freeze, and during the summer, it rarely gets above 62 degrees, and yet the floor here is the ceiling of the cellar, so any temperature variations between there and here would've passed right through the floor.

>> In the winter, most likely, they put down rush mats to help keep the cold at bay, but in the summer it may have been something of a relief, to have that coming up from the cellar.

>> Certainly.

Almost an air conditioning.

These three rooms all have fireplaces.

This fireplace is the smallest.

>> Yes.

>> And so, it's more of a formal area, as you said, for warmth, but also, did they use the fireplace a lot for light?

We have this little candle here, right by a chair.

>> Not that much.

Even at this period of time, candles are not really commercially available, so they're going to be making all of that.

They're going to use as few of them as possible.

There's what they called a cask light.

There would be one candle per night on the table.

Everybody would be surrounding it, doing whatever it was that they needed to do that evening.

>> A candle, because they were trying to be energy efficient with their light use, so they literally will huddle all around one candle, and everybody's reading.

>> Or writing, or needle point.

>> In the middle of the night.

Just amazing, so that, again, why they had the oyster shell infused whitewalls, so that it would reflect as much light as possible because even in the daytime, not a lot of light getting in here.

>> The tiles around the hearth, for instance, are all glazed.

That's going to add to the reflectivity.

All of the sconces, and the doorknobs, and all of that metalwork that's on furniture, and on doors, is brass, and it would have been highly polished so you could find it in low light, because it would reflect everything.

>> Nowadays, we expect every room to be as bright as we want.

And we even refer to light bulb colors as daylight.

So having this kind of, bringing the outside in, was not always a thing that people expected out of their home performance.

>> What were some of the health concerns for people working in a big kitchen like this?

>> Houses like this, because you have, particularly in the 17th century, you had unglazed windows, there was a lot more air circulation going on in here, but that doesn't mean that your fire was not dangerous.

They were extremely dangerous.

Fire was the second greatest cause of death among women, right through the end of the 18th century.

The first being childbirth.

>> To me, the kind of story about this house is a woman's story, because the women spent a lot of time inside, and there was a lot of activities in there that were potentially even life threatening, not in the way that we talk about now, with carbon monoxide, but also fire, childbirth, all of this stuff was just kind of a live or die kind of a moment for these women in these houses, in this generation.

>> The fire was more about catching in your clothing.

They would end up with second and third degree burns on their legs, for the most part, because medicine in those days was still not really considered to be a science.

Generally what they died of was the sepsis that set in afterwards.

>> Lucie told us that the fireplaces were built to be super efficient.

>> So Lucie, you mentioned that the chimneys were especially efficient for cooking.

Can you explain what you meant by that?

>> The chimneys drew very, very well, which meant they not only expelled pretty much all of the smoke, but they also supplied a constant draft which put oxygen into the fire, and that's one of the things that you need in order to maintain the flames, and particularly the coals that they're using in multiple locations throughout the hearth.

>> So, a big, big fireplace like this would actually make a home more drafty.

>> They were supposed to suck like a vacuum, and so it was freezing cold in here.

If you really had that fire going, it was just amazingly cold in that house, and it was because the air quality was the more important thing.

The reason this fireplace worked so well in the Wyckoff House, back in 1650, is because the house was leaky.

If you built a house that's like the tiny lab, air tight, there is no way to suck things out of there, and this is what is interesting about this march through the ages of this house, through its additions, through it's remodels.

>> So, our ventilation is unique, because we constantly have fresh air coming in, and stale air moving out.

Right here, we have a chase that runs all the way along the house, and then it also dumps down into the sleeping area.

Because we want fresh air to be going into our dining loft, as well as into our sleeping nook.

>> Now, the ventilation system for the fresh air circulation is a separate system, but this is our heat pump.

A heat pump moves heat.

It is an air conditioner, so it steals heat from the inside in the summertime, but also it can create heat and pump it into the house in the winter time.

>> This one happens to be highly efficient.

The energy efficiency of some of the units out there, that you'll see on your neighbors' houses, is about 13 or 14-SEER, is what we call it.

This one is 33-SEER.

Also, it's running right now, and if you think about your neighbors' unit that sounds like a band saw when it turns on, and then listen to this one, you will notice a big difference.

>> Noise control is very important to home performance control because we want to make sure that the quality of life gets better, not just energy efficiency.

>> By the time we get into the 20th century here, we now have an HVAC system in the basement, so we have heat in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer.

And it's kind of compromised our cellars, to a certain extent.

>> The three major problems that we felt we were going to have with the Wyckoff House, we're dealing with the fireplaces, and the attic, and the crawlspace.

>> But, they were not originally problems.

When the house was originally built those were all working fine.

Now that we've taken it into the 21st century, and tried to modernize it, introduced forced conditioning, water heating, all this stuff to make it more comfortable for us, that is what has actually plagued it's performance, is these new factors that we've introduced.

>> And the bedrooms are now office spaces, because this is a working museum.

>> The bedrooms are offices spaces, yes.

There are no outlets on this side, so we don't have any ceiling lights, we don't have any wall plugs.

All of that is in those three rooms, on the 19th century side.

>> So you rely a lot on natural light for tours.

>> A lot of natural light.

So how would you like to see the cellar?

>> I would love to see the cellar.

>> Okay.

Let's go.

>> Trying to do 21st century things with an older model home, achieve 21st century comforts, it's going to be dangerous, and this is why the testing is so important, to make sure you're not causing problems.

>> Welcome to my root cellar.

>> Wow, this is great.

>> These cellars were a very important part of any household, whether it was in the country, or in the town, there would've been something similar to this.

>> So we have this old root cellar, and we also have modern electricity.

>> Yes, we do.

>> We've piped in.

>> We've got duct work over there in the corner because our HVAC system is in the other cellar.

This house actually has two separate cellars.

They were dug separately 20 years apart.

But now they are connected.

And back here in this room, is where our HVAC system is.

It's had its moments of efficiency, but for two years, we didn't have any heat in this structure in the winter.

>> Oh, no.

Even though you had an HVAC system?

>> Even though we had an HVAC system, it was not functioning properly.

>> With the Wyckoff House, we knew we were going to have a hard time with the blower door metrics, but basically, the three major problems were going to be the same problems that we always encounter, which is-- >> Air sealing, insulation, and HVAC.

>> One of the things we were able to do was, we were able to help them solve some of their water heating problems.

>> 1652 house was not built to perform like a 21st century house, with air conditioning, and hot water, and all the amenities, and so there are a lot of problems with trying to make it fit that mold.

>> First one is, we're in a root cellar, which has a dirt floor.

It's wet down here.

>> Secondly, nice, wet, yucky condensation all over the duct system, partially because we're underground, and it's a little damp in here.

And also because the water heater has busted, and is now leaking hot water all over the place, and there is actual steam in this room, along with all the other moisture from the ground.

It's warm, moist air coming in contact with cold surfaces.

We can tell with my infrared camera, that I always carry with me, that the duct right past the air conditioner coil is about 68 degrees.

And I can tell with my humidity meter, and my gauge, that anything that is colder than 73 degrees in this room is going to be wet.

So that's why we're going to have a problem here.

It's why you might have a problem in an attic, or in a basement.

>> Now we're going to run the blower door test.

When we run a blower door test on the tiny lab, we use this ring.

>> And today, with this old house, we're going to be using this ring.

This house, or course, was not designed to be airtight.

In fact, if it was airtight, that would be bad.

So this house would've been tuned to very air leaky.

>> In other episodes we've talked about air changes per hour.

What are we looking for?

What numbers?

>> Well, the energy code of the future is going to be three air changes per hour, but we don't actually care about that here, since this house was built before there was electricity, before there was energy codes.

But the number would be, for this house if it was built this year in New York, would be 800 CFM.

>> So knowing how old the Wyckoff House was, were you even thinking of doing a blower door test on it?

>> Sure, totally.

It's the most important test for anybody to do, number one.

>> Right.

>> Number two, I was a little like, "This is probably "not going to work," because I only have one fan.

>> Man, it's working hard.

>> And this house is definitely a two fan job because you just can't reach the number in there.

>> I don't see the number three in there.

>> Because it's so so leaky.

>> So this number was supposed to be 800 if it was actually meeting the energy code of the future.

It's 13,000.

So this is over 15 times leakier than we had hoped that it would be, if it was going to make energy codes.

Again, it's not supposed to, so it's not a problem.

>> This house had probably never been tested like this before.

>> No.

>> So using an infrared camera on a house that had never had an infrared camera used on it before, testing the HVAC, even stepping into the attic.

Nobody goes in the attic.

It's not actually a used loft anymore, so seeing some of these spaces that are neglected, it's nobody's job anymore, to kind of go up there and visit.

Nobody lives there anymore, so seeing these spaces that were kind of forgotten, hidden spaces in one of the oldest houses that exists in this country, getting to be the pioneers, you know, the people who put the flag on the moon, basically, and said, "This is what this house does," was just very exciting.

>> Now, we designed and built this house to be the grownup version of all the houses that we have seen and tested over the years.

>> We really kept air pressure in mind, so even in our bathroom, we have a designed door which allows ventilation to continue.

>> So when you're taking a shower, for example, all of the air that is going through this hole, is going that way.

None of it is coming this way because of simple pressures.

People ask us, "Did you use ozonators, "or filtration systems, "or bleach "to make it smell so nice?"

No.

>> No.

>> It's just elegantly affecting the physics.

Now, you can see here, that the house is super airtight.

There's a couple of gauges here.

What you're seeing on the top channel is, this tells me that my ventilation system is working.

That is the pressure of the incoming air.

>> That pressure, right there, is the pressure in the house with respect to outside.

That means that we're totally equalized.

There is no pressure difference between inside and outside the house.

That's what we want.

That's why things like fireplaces, and atmospheric draft water heaters, are starting to be a problem with more airtight modern construction, because you want that equalized pressure, and you really have to pay attention to things if that's what you want.

>> Now, this room over here, is actually the original Wyckoff House, built in 17th century.

This room was built in the 18th century.

Both of them have these enormous fireplaces for cooking, for warmth, et cetera.

Fireplaces are connected directly to outdoors.

These rooms were made to be connected to the outdoors.

So we're going to take the manometer, and we're going to do a zonal pressure test on these rooms, to see how connected they are to outside, versus connected to the house.

>> So we have the leakiness of the whole house, in general, but also we have the crawlspace that was not intended to be warm.

It was supposed to be a root cellar.

It was supposed to be cold, and damp down there.

That was intentional.

And there was no insulation, because they didn't have insulation in 1650.

And then the attic, which was a sleeping place, but it was warm because the fireplace was warming everything, and all the hot air was going up there.

>> It also was super connected to outside.

You can see with your own eyes, there's no insulation, so it seems like, "Oh, this might be "an opportunity "for improvement."

But where you put these layers now, as a renovator, becomes much more of a challenge, because you don't know what the house is doing unless you test.

>> This is Ian Minerva, from Green Power Associates.

Ian works on historic houses, and before we start comparing these two, let's find out what the tiny lab is doing.

Now, remember, with the Wyckoff House, we had 12 thousand CFM moving through the fan.

Here...

Here, we're in the neighborhood of 50, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of air leakage that we had in the older house.

>> This number is a lot less than three, which is the best energy code in the United States of America.

So you can tell, as first time home builders, we were able to hit the legal limits for airtightness in our new house, and surpass them by a long shot.

>> Now, of course, the zonal pressure test proves whether the enclosure works, or does not.

In the Wyckoff House, the rooms were made to breathe to outside, so they had almost as much relationship to the house, as to outside.

Here, my mechanical shed, which houses all of the nerve center of the tiny lab, is totally outside.

We've got the house being sucked on very hard, by the blower door, and nothing is happening inside the shed.

>> So Ian, in working in older houses in New York City, what are you finding as people are trying to make houses that are 100, 200 years old, come up to the standards and expectations of 21st century homeowners?

>> One of the things we typically find, especially with older, Victorian type style houses, is the fireplace.

People tend to think it as the beauty of the house.

But actually, it is the villain of the house.

Even though, it's intended to supply heat, warmth, and overall comfort for a family, it however, sucks whatever heat you have produced outside, up through the chimney, out the house.

>> Because that's what it was designed to do.

>> Designed to do that.

But most homeowners have the mind set, it's a comfort, and it's also something that will supply energy.

We, in our industry, have to let them know, "No.

"The radiators that you have, "that supplied by "whatever heating system, "is a much better alternative."

>> Mm-hmm.

Pulling moisture is a big job of the air conditioner, and if you get one that's too big, it's not going to do that.

It's just going to cool the house, and you end up with cold, damp rooms.

One of the problems I had with clients when I worked in Chicago was that we had old houses, no air conditioning.

They had a boiler system, which was the next generation of the fireplaces.

And of course, you would have to put window air conditioners all over the place.

And if you're rich enough to live in New York City in one of these older houses, then you probably don't like window air conditioners.

>> That may be true, but you and I both know, it may not be the most efficient way to spend your money, and in some cases, it may not do the job.

You now have to create openings in the walls for duct work, which again, will bring to you more issues with air sealing, with cost, and you're not necessarily guaranteed you'll get a desired result.

>> If you do go that route, we certainly recommend a mini-split system that should do the job at a lower cost, and much more effective, and much more efficient.

>> Because it has no ducts.

>> No ducts.

>> Achieving today's home performance in the Wyckoff House wasn't really going to work because of decades of poor planning, but if you live in, or want to live in a historic home, and have the comfort and control of the modern one, you can.

You just have to work with a home performance professional who can test for you, and a contractor who can implement the design.

>> So, do you have any advice, Ian, for homeowners in a 350 year old house?

>> Test prior to do any work, or any improvements, and test after you've done those improvements, so you can see the significant changes that you should obtain from doing any work to make a house more energy efficient.

>> Bam.

Proof is possible.

>> Proof is possible, I like that near the end.

Proof is possible.

>> Home Diagnosis is made possible by CPS Products.

Provider of indoor air quality products and test tools.

FLIR, maker of infrared thermal cameras for homeowners and building professionals, and by Hayward Score and Healthy Indoors Magazine, and by generous support from these underwriters, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Home Diagnosis is all about education.

>> Learn more about your own home's performance with our new online course for homeowners, and our Proof is Possible booklet.

You can find both at homediagnosis.tv.