>> Coming up on Home Diagnosis.

>> We've got a rainy climate.

>> Weather is one of the reasons we built houses.

>> The house has kind of evolved over time.

And I've done a lot of mechanical changes in the house.

>> The HVAC system is incredibly complex because all of a sudden there's all this piping and tubing and systems that we have never seen before.

>> You can see that we're having some problems here.

>> Moss is just growing on the building right now.

>> What exactly is happening?

We can find out.

Holy moly.

We have an open chase way.

>> And that's something he's gonna have to consider when and if he decides to sell his house.

>> 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.

>> Welcome to Home Diagnosis.

>> For even the most educated home owner, understanding every aspect of your home can be a challenge without testing.

>> Especially if that home comes with some interesting customizations.

>> In Atlantic City, we met Matt.

A DIY homeowner whose engineering was very creative.

>> 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 the tiny lab.

>> To get people thinking about their homes' 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.

[music] In Atlantic City, Matt found us mostly because he was curious.

>> That's his main thing, is that he just wants to know what's going on.

So, basically the same as taking your house for a check up.

He's got all these complicated systems that he's had a hand in designing and installing and he wants to make sure that it's actually working the way that he thought it was.

And today is a perfect day to diagnose what is going on with the house behind us because we have excellent weather.

>> Weather is one of the reasons we built houses right?

To get out of the elements.

>> We've got a rainy climate.

So this house happens to be in a location that makes it a little bit more difficult to manage, or high maintenance is the way that we'd put it.

>> You can see that we're having some problems here.

>> Moss is just growing on the building right now.

>> Because of moisture, because there's so much shade, and so it just doesn't dry out.

>> So let's take a walk around the house and check out all of the complicated things that are going on here.

>> There's a really cool thing called passive solar which is using the sun to heat a house.

Usually you put up a big window array south facing, which this house has.

>> However, in this case, we're not actually getting that much benefit because two things-- One is a lot of trees around that are gonna shade the sun.

Second thing is that those windows, which are huge, are made of metal in all of the frames.

Metal is 400 times more conductive than wood is.

So really the heat is actually bleeding out of that enclosure rather than coming into it when the sun is shining.

>> So, in this situation, it doesn't really work but passive solar can still be a pretty cool thing.

Also, we have a crawl space over there.

>> And one over there.

We're gonna wanna know whether these crawl spaces perform like they're inside the house or outside the house.

>> This was one of the most complicated houses that we've ever tested.

Just the sheer number of complex systems that are in the house at the same time, paired with this home owner who is singularly educated and informed about his home as a system, was really an interesting conversation because he's operating on this different level than a lot of the home owners that we deal with.

>> Matt, thank you very much for having us to your home.

Why did you call us here today?

>> I'm just concerned mostly about some of the energy efficiency issues that I have here, the high utility cost.

>> In addition to energy efficiency, are you having any comfort issues?

>> This winter, you know, particularly, I don't know why but we did experience some humidity issues.

It was very dry in here.

The house has kind of evolved over time and I've done a lot of mechanical changes in the house with heating and pool.

When we got all the additions on we removed some air to air heat pumps and we put some typical air conditioning in, except for the heating side we did hydronic coils.

>> Are you an engineer?

>> No.

>> You seem like you're a very hands on person-- >> I did go to vocational school when I was in high school for climate control for two years.

>> There you go.

>> So if I had a canvas, this would be it.

>> When I train professionals to do what we do, one of the things you really have to be sensitive about is if you've got a DIY home owner, you cannot ask questions that are gonna be insulting to your home owner.

So, the whole time that I'm doing the inspection and asking Matt questions, what I'm trying to get at is where did you come up with the idea for this HVAC system that has been installed?

Not, "Well, where did that "come from?

"What is this supposed to do?"

So instead, it's trying to kind of get at how did he come to this conclusion and finding out eventually that he came from an industrial engineering background.

Was like ding, okay.

You designed this house like a factory would have been designed.

That makes perfect sense.

Now I get it.

Now we can have a conversation.

Tell us about the pool, if you would.

>> So, my wife asked me quite a few times to put a pool in-in the yard.

And I just -- I grew up with a pool in the yard.

My job after coming home from school was to skim the twigs and the leaves out of it all the time.

And here, in the woods that we live in, I figured it'd be twigs, leaves, snakes, and frogs, and-- >> Sure.

>> working hard everyday I didn't want to come home to do that.

So I said, "Listen, if you want a pool, "it's got to be indoors."

And she bit.

>> I think one of the most interesting things about this home was Matt's wife wanted a pool.

Matt wanted an indoor space and he created this amazing indoor pool that's kind of attached to the house, but not really attached to the house.

>> And also any indoor pool or giant body of water or exposed dirt crawl space raises real alarm bells for a home performance professional because that's where you get a lot of moisture issues that can lead to air quality issues.

>> So Corbett has now found his favorite room.

Corbett, what are you seeing up there?

>> So, I am in an attic right now and I am surrounded by belongings.

This is important because if you're gonna store stuff in your attic, it means that you have to have a floor on the attic.

And if you're gonna have a floor on the attic, that means that you can only have a little bit of insulation which is really what we have here.

So when you get up into your attic, and I highly recommend that you do this, take a look at one side or the other of you and you will find a top plate.

So, right next to the attic hatch is some insulation.

And you're gonna pull this up and find what is called a top plate.

Every wall in most houses is made of studs which are wooden slats with space in between.

Along the top of every one of those walls, to hold the studs together, is what's called a top plate.

It's just another stud that all of these are connected into.

That top plate, when they install the drywall, they're gonna slide it right up to the top plate.

It does not overlap.

And so there is a seam there where two things come together.

We know that when two things come together, there's an opportunity for air leakage, and insulation deficiency.

>> This is the top of the wall.

It's a stud that is connecting to all the other studs in the wall and this is the drywall that makes up the ceiling.

This crack right here is actually a huge deal.

You can see how big a deal it is because all of this is black.

This insulation used to be pink and the reason it's black is because it's a filter for air because air moves through insulation.

So, air's been coming up out of the house carrying all these contaminants and filtering all of this blackness out, so that the air that comes up into the attic is the cleanest in the entire house.

Isn't that wonderful?

No, it's something that we want to fix.

So we're gonna figure out how to do that.

And now we come to the dwarf doors.

We have this one that opens up on a room that totally seems to be inside space.

We have drywall on the walls, we have flooring, we have a ceiling, all that makes sense.

It seems like this room is inside the house.

This one, however, what is this space exactly?

So we've got a floor on it.

The insulation is in the floor, that would indicate that it's supposed to be an outside space, but we want to find out for sure.

>> When we went down into the basement, we were blown away.

>> And here we are, the basement.

>> This is one of the two additions that were made onto this house.

And the homeowner designed a pretty serious mechanical system.

>> The HVAC system is incredibly complex because all of a sudden there's all this piping and tubing and systems that we had never seen before.

>> His background is in industrial design.

So he thought that it was a great idea to have a centralized heating plant.

So he's got one boiler and it serves everything that they need.

The pool heater, the hot water, and also the space heating.

This basement is connected to the crawl spaces that we have looked at outside and is also connected to the house, which is right above us.

So this is all kind of an interesting set up.

And we're gonna wanna, again, find out for sure, get proof of what is going on with this room.

Whether it's inside the house or outside the house.

One similarity between Matt's house and the Tiny Lab is that Matt and I are both kind of engineers.

And we're both kind of submarine captains now.

We both have to really keep an eye on our home.

>> And in Matt's house, and just like the Tiny Lab, he's created a system that you got to keep an eye on.

And that's something he's gonna have to consider when and if he decides to sell his house.

>> In here, you will find our central nervous system.

Every house has one.

We have water heater, we have a power system.

This is gonna take stale air out of my house, provide fresh air to the house, in equal measure, and then also inside of this box there's a magical heat exchanger that is trying to make those two streams of air the same temperature and humidity level.

That's very important because it's now a buffer, kind of a battery, that's storing the temperature and humidity, so that I don't have to replace all of it.

>> There are two cells in this closet.

The lower cell has all of the stuff that would be combustible.

Propane actually sinks.

It's heavier than air.

So we've got vents in the floor of this lower cell that's gonna allow that propane to escape.

Upstairs is all of the stuff that might create a spark and we want these two things to be separated for safety because safety is of penultimate importance when you're talking about home performance.

I also have a water heater.

This is a tankless water heater.

I did not choose a tankless water heater because it is always better.

That's a myth.

So, what we did was analyzed what we want out of our house.

It needs to be lightweight, and I want it to not draw a lot of electricity.

Electricity with this renewable energy system, it's gonna be really hard to maintain if I'm using electric elements to heat things like a toaster does.

So what we're doing instead is using propane where we can.

>> Now this mechanical closet is not a part of my enclosure.

It is a shed that happens to be touching my house but it's not connected in any way air-wise with the rest of my living space.

That's very important.

>> Here we are in the garage which we're gonna talk a lot more about later.

>> Right now, you can see that there are some obvious air leakage pathways between the house and the garage.

We're gonna test all that stuff, really, really critical.

>> And... >> There is a whole second garage.

So we have an exhaust fan which is interesting.

They installed it because there were fuel-burning appliances.

And so we're gonna want to absolutely know what's going on in here so that we can help our homeowner move forward.

>> One of the easiest ways to take out contaminants from your home is with a fan.

You just plug in an exhaust fan and it takes the contaminants out of your house to outside.

We have a lot of them.

One in every bathroom, they are all super noisy.

>> An exhaust fan.

>> An exhaust fan.

>> An exhaust fan.

>> An exhaust fan.

There are literally fans throughout this house.

And the pool.

With an exhaust fan.

>> The placement of an exhaust fan is incredibly important.

You want it to catch the moisture in the room.

It's not for getting rid of toilet smells although that is incidental.

The placement here is gonna catch neither because air will come in under the door when it's closed and it will go straight up and out and it won't catch anything that's going on over here or anything that's going on in here and this is a much bigger deal.

The shower is really where you want the exhaust fan located.

>> Corbett, I want a pool.

>> I know.

So what do all these exhaust fans do to the house when they run?

Are they moving air?

>> Are they not moving air?

>> What exactly is happening?

We can find out.

>> Separate from the blower door and zonal pressure testing, there's another air path that's moving around that you can check with a flow hood or a flow meter.

>> And this is all of the exhaust fans.

>> This fan says it's supposed to move 50 CFM.

And as you can see it's coming in at 30.

So that means you're only getting about 60% of what you are paying for.

>> And on this fan, we're only getting 50%.

>> So we've got all of these complicated pathways that could be existing.

What is happening inside the house?

Which engines are actually starting to detrimentally affect the home's performance?

This fan is rated for 70 CFM and you can hear because we know that that's a really nice fan.

That should be perfectly quiet.

You should not be able to hear it.

We know that it's gonna be low.

So we've got about 45 CFM.

Now let's find out why.

>> In Matt's house, all of the fans were incredibly loud.

>> They make fans nowadays, modern fans, that are perfectly quiet in the box when you install them.

And if they suddenly get loud, it means that they weren't ducted properly.

>> And while not necessarily 100% of the time, the louder a bathroom fan, the less effective it's going to be.

>> So, the cause of the noise is very simple.

It is the other part of your exhaust fan.

This is the duct.

And, as you can see, it's nice and floppy.

That creates a lot of back pressure on the fan, and that creates the noisiness that you're hearing.

Easy, easy to fix.

>> When we see an indoor pool we often think, "Uh-oh, this could be a source "of a lot of problems."

>> Yeah, this could be a red flag, and that's because a pool is gonna result in really high humidity.

The pool has a fan in it which was originally designed for-- >> A chicken coop.

>> What is the connection of the pool room to the rest of the house?

And is it gonna have a detrimental effect?

>> So when we hook up a pressure gauge to this cavernous pool room and kick on the fan-- Go ahead, Grace.

>> All right.

>> You can see that we go from pressure equalization to half of a blower door test, with just that one fan.

This has huge impacts on this room.

And if the pool room is part of the house, then it's gonna have a huge impact on the house, as well.

Maybe not one that we've anticipated.

>> When we walked into Matt's house, we immediately identified things that we wanted to test further.

>> And we had fans throughout the house that were trying to deal with different moisture issues.

>> And we want to know whether those fans now are pressurizing or depressurizing the house, because all of that imbalance can start to affect the tuning of the home's performance.

>> Now when we turn on all the exhaust fans in the house with all the doors and windows closed.

We went from zero to negative one and a half, which is a pretty minimal effect right now before we start changing things in the house.

So we want to know where we're starting, so that we can know where we want to end up.

And we like that minimal effect, that's good.

>> So, we've done a calculation on the size of this five bedroom five bath house.

And we know that we're shooting for an air tightness number around three.

>> And we want that three air changes per hour for this house, because it will allow us to control the moisture, comfort, and heat bleed, plus future-proof this house against building codes years in the future.

[fan running] >> So, we had an assumption that this house was going to be leaky because of the inspection that we did.

And we found out that it's over three times leakier than we were aiming for it to be.

So now our job is to go around and find out where the leakages are.

>> So, right now we have the blower door running.

And Corbett's using the infrared thermography camera to identify where the leakage is happening.

>> So, when we use the infrared thermal camera, we can find all of the places where heat bleed is happening through insulation and through air leakage.

And a lot of it is the top plate that we saw earlier in the attic, and also any of the fixtures in the ceiling which include these can lights.

>> So, for a can light, you can use a pressure pan to identify if the can is outside or inside the house.

This is going up to almost 50, so it's outside the house.

Yet it's in your bedroom.

With a pressure pan, you can also test the wall capping.

Right here, we have a light switch.

And is this light switch inside or outside?

It's 30.

More than 50% outside your house, but again, it's in your bedroom.

>> You can see the little side attic in the dwarf door that we were talking about is actually a pretty big deal.

And you can see how cold it is inside the side attic there.

There's storage space in here, there's also a lot of air leakage through those same penetrations.

The blower door showed us that the house was leaking.

It was leakier than we expected it to be.

It was leakier than it should be.

But that is a good thing for these exhaust fans because the exhaust fan interaction now is when something turns on, it's not gonna depressurize the entire house because the whole house is so leaky that you could turn on the biggest fan in the world and it wouldn't matter to this house.

In fact, that's what we did with the blower door, essentially.

>> So we want to be able to find out exactly how the garage is performing.

We want it to be an outside space.

It's a shed, that happens to be attached to the house.

So, let's find out right now.

We can run the blower door just like we did and watch on our pressure gauge what happens to the garage.

Right now the garage is being dragged down.

And it's actually more connected to the house than it is connected to outside.

It's right on the line but, essentially, you can see that it's not very well airtight to outside.

And it's equally not very airtight to the house.

>> This house is a perfect example of how to turn housing into sports.

People love stats when they're presented in the right context.

And in this case, what we've got is a whole bunch of stats that we can get about this house that are amazingly cool and interesting, if you know what they mean.

>> So now that we have actual data about what is happening in the performance of this house, we are in the play land of opportunity for improvement, the attic.

And I am here with the big guns.

Uh, this is Ed Ryan.

He's the President of Green Life Energy Solutions, who is a contractor who knows how to look at the system of home performance and apply the improvements.

>> When working with Matt, we worked with a professional in the area named Ed Ryan from Green Life.

>> He's a home performance contractor who has lots of crews and in fact he owns a ton of blower doors.

And that, to me, is the mark of somebody who takes testing really seriously.

>> So, if you were to get a call from somebody about their air conditioner not working, where is the -- do you guys come to the attic?

>> Oh, absolutely.

We're looking at duct work.

Sometimes you have duct work that may have become disconnected.

Um, that-- we see that all the time.

>> Yep-- So because this house is in a moist climate there in Atlantic City, it's got a lot of rain.

Also we've got a lot of shade from the trees.

And inside the house, we've got the pool, we've got all of these, uh, moisture sources, like aquariums.

And so this house became very complex inside and out.

>> The worst case scenario in this moisture buildup problem is that we get mold or mildew forming inside of cavities like walls, floor systems, inside the attic.

That's bad because now it has a chance to reverse it's direction, come back at us inside the house where we're breathing.

>> So what Ed's company, Green Life Energy Solutions, is gonna be able to come along and do is, number one, air seal underneath all the insulation.

What's the biggest mistake people generally make with insulation?

>> You know they just think, uh, more is better.

And they fail to seal the penetrations and gaps in the framing members, and to have air movement through the insulation really isn't effective.

It's very important to-to air seal it and insulate it as an assembly.

>> Have you had houses that you come to where they've already blown two feet of insulation into the attic?

>> Every time.

>> And that means that now Green Life is gonna have to dig up all that insulation which costs you more money.

So really before you add any insulation you need to get under what is there and air seal everything.

>> Incidentally, if you were to add more insulation to your attic but not air seal it first, you could create this moisture problem that we're talking about, which is that you cool down the surfaces in the attic and now it would be colder and would condense the water that's coming up there in the air that's fine inside your house.

So, this is why we really want to be careful about doing good things to a home's performance without testing.

Right behind this dam, that's the end of our floor, are a couple of things that are magic.

Holy moly.

>> Definitely a major air source leak connecting the house to the attic.

So common we find above shower stalls, we have an open chase way.

>> Ed, would you please be so kind as to grab that exhaust?

That is not allowed in an attic.

This is ridiculously dangerous for moisture collection.

>> This is a bathroom vent that when you take a hot shower ends up dumping the hot, warm, moist air into the attic.

Typically will blow against your roof deck.

When it's cold, you'll have hot, warm air blowing against that cold roof deck, condensating, and dumping moisture all over your fiberglass.

>> It hasn't gotten to the point where it's moldy, but this wood has definitely been getting wet and there's water stains all over it.

>> This house took home performance analysis to a whole new level for us.

>> Yeah, we really got schooled.

There were so many moving parts to figure out.

>> It was also a really interesting lesson in homeowner psychology.

>> Especially with somebody who takes such unorthodox steps.

>> Which just goes to show there's always more to learn about home performance.

>> Are you ready to hear what we have found?

>> Oh, absolutely, I'm excited.

>> So, the good news is that your house, although it's very complicated which, generally, when we see a house that has a lot of complex systems that all would indicate that the system is really out of whack, that it's not tuned very well.

But you happen to be hands on enough and you pay attention enough that actually I can't imagine anybody else care taking a house like this as well as it has.

>> So the goals here, just like Matt asked us to do, was to just find out as much as possible.

>> First of all, we had major moisture issues.

>> Also we've got this very complicated HVAC system that we had to figure out whether it was doing what it was supposed to.

>> And we had fans throughout this house.

And when fans come in, you want to make sure are they pressurizing or depressurizing?

>> So all of that now is part and parcel of the package that we're trying to build for Matt to give him an idea of what is good about the home's performance and what could be improved.

>> The pool is absolutely not connected to the house through air leakage pathways.

The pool that you have, that you designed, as a separate entity is absolutely the way to do it.

So good for you.

>> Good.

>> In home performance there should really be etiquette.

>> A classic thing that a contractor will do when they walk into a home is try to pick on the guy who was there last.

But if the guy who was there last is the guy that you're talking to who owns this house, now you put yourself in a real pickle.

>> Exhaust fan-wise, around the house, because of the humidity issues that you had mentioned, we want to make sure that all of those exhaust fans that are in the bathrooms all go to outside.

So one of the things aside from making sure that the bath fans aren't emptying into the attic, is to make sure that hot, moist air from the house isn't getting up into the attic spaces either.

>> Having this conversation with Matt was just very exciting because he actually got how meaningful all of these little invisible dynamic interactions were.

So the air sealing that Green Life or a company like them can come in and do, very fixable, pretty easy, you do it one time, never have to do it again.

And then lastly the insulation.

Up there and down in the crawl space.

In the crawl space, it tends to be hanging a little low.

All that insulation can be redone or bolstered.

And then in the attic likewise, you've only got about that much.

In general, if we're gonna future proof the house, you want to have the code level of insulation which is about 16 inches at this point.

>> Wow.

>> Also when you do the work, Green Life can test out and show you their numbers against our numbers-- >> Okay.

>> So you can actually see that improvement and know that the work was done right.

Matt does a great job maintaining his complicated home.

If you're like Matt and you enjoy finding creative solutions, that's awesome-- but Matt also created a high maintenance home that requires a lot of time and energy.

If you want a more "set it and forget it" solution, that's where tuning your home with performance testing can really help you.

[music] >> 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 home owners and our Proof Is Possible booklet.

You can find both at homediagnosis.tv.