How does Aeroseal revolutionize airtightness and energy efficiency?
Bob Deeks, President of Airtight Solutions Inc., answers the most common questions about Aeroseal and AeroBarrier.
Watch the video below to learn how you can can save time and costs while improving building performance!
Hi everyone. My name is Bob Deeks. I am the president of Airtight Solutions and RDC Fine Homes.
I have been in the business of building and renovating houses for over 30 years. RDC was started in around 1993, and we got involved with Aeroseal in and around 2019, I believe.
My background really is in building and renovating high-performance houses. I’ve been involved with the Home Building Association. I was the president of our local association here, CHBA sea, the Sky, CHBA, stands for Canadian Home Builders Association. I was also the president of the Provincial Association and sat on the executive board for CHBA National for a number of years.
I have spent a certain amount of time working with Codes Canada most recently on the standing committee for energy efficiency, where I chaired a number of task groups, specifically two new changes coming in the building code for energy efficiency requirements, one of which was some new standards that you will see coming out in the next year or so from Codes Canada around energy efficiency requirements for renovations, which will I think be a great step forward for us in terms of just bringing more consistency in terms of how we interpret energy requirements for the renovation industry.
I’ve also spent a certain amount of time working with the home builders on technical issues, being the chair of the technical research committee nationally and also on high-performance houses.
I was one of the founding members for CHBA’s Net Zero Council and was chair in the late 2010s of that Net Zero Council.
Yeah, moving forward to 2019, we picked up an Aeroseal dealership. We, of course, have been in the business of building high-performance houses since the mid 2000s, and with the advent of the BC Energy Step Code where compliance was really becoming something to focus on, I really saw a great advantage in bringing in this technology to bring surety and cost-effective strategies to creating airtight houses, both for new construction and renovations.
So Aeroseal has two purposes that we use.
One is for envelope sealing. So of course we need to seal the outside of our houses to one comply for the labeling that we use to certify or validate our Net Zero standard for all the houses that we build. And of course, BC Energy Step Code requires airtightness testing, which really is determining how tight is your house from air leakage.
And then of course, we can also use it for renovations. So one part of the technology that you might hear refer to as AeroBarrier is for envelope sealing. And then Aeroseal can also be used for sealing the duct work in your houses, whether that’s for your heating and cooling system or your ventilation system or combined heating and cooling and ventilation systems.
We have discovered over the years that while we require that at the original install of duct work, when we’re building or renovating a house, we want that ducting to be sealed.
A lot of times they’re not super successful at sealing it.
And you might ask, why would I seal all the duct work in my house? All that air is going into the house anyway.
Does it really matter if it’s leaking while those ducts are in my walls?
Well, I think everybody, if they really considered their house, would identify at least one room in the house that was not evenly warm or evenly cooled.
So I always ask people, is there a room in your house that’s uncomfortable? And why? You might ask, is that room uncomfortable?
Well, there’s a strong likelihood that the conditioned air that’s coming from your furnace is actually not making its way to that specific room because all that conditioned air is leaking out of the ducts before it gets there.
And so what Aeroseal duct work can do is it seals the ducts to make sure that the air is delivered to the rooms it’s intended to go to, thereby making sure that every room in your house is as comfortable as it can be.
I get asked why did we pick up an Aeroseal dealership?
One of the things that I’ve been very focused with in building my construction business was to try and not to be distracted by getting involved in other things.
In fact, in the late 90s and early 2000s, we actually picked up a dealership to do granite countertops. I thought we’re doing a lot of granite countertops. This would be a great partnership opportunity with us. We do our own countertops, we save some money for our clients, and then we have a side business where we do countertops for other people.
It was incredibly distracting, and I quickly determined that it was more of a liability than it was a benefit either to RDC or to our clients.
But when I came across Aeroseal, and I think it was in 2017, I was at the International Builders Show and was introduced to this technology, it really opened my eyes to what a great opportunity this was.
I very quickly reached out to Aeroseal to find out if there was a dealer in our area because I really wanted to test this out. The response I got was, no, there’s nobody in your area, but we’d be happy to sell you the equipment. So move forward a year back at the International Builder Show, again, looking at this understanding that we still weren’t able to access the technology.
And then by pure coincidence on my way back from the International Builder Show in Las Vegas, a colleague of mine in Vancouver called me and said, Hey, have you heard about this new technology Aeroseal?
I said, funnily enough, I was just talking to the Aeroseal guys. He said, we need to buy this technology. And so we very quickly combined our resources and that was Joe Geluch with Naikoon Construction, and we went out and we got hold of a dealership.
Moved forward about 18 months, Joe decided that he was too busy doing other things, and so I took over the dealership and in around 2021, we really started to kick this off as a serious business and have grown it from there.
And it really proved right out of the gate that this was a great compliment to what RDC was doing in terms of building their high-performance houses. And also very quickly identified that this truly was the most cost effective way for us to bring certainty to that final blower door test that we needed not only for our Net Zero projects, but also really needed to comply for the BC Energy Step Code.
How do I use Aeroseal in my house?
And so Aeroseal, if we look at envelope first, Aeroseal absolutely in my opinion, is your best solution for ensuring airtightness in a new build.
Typically, it would get sprayed either just before insulation if you’re using an exterior air barrier, or it would be sprayed after drywall.
If you’re using a more traditional strategy, whether that’s spray foam in your walls or it’s simply loose fill insulation like fiberglass or cellulose with a plastic air and vapor barrier, 6 mil poly. And at that time, you’re going to see a real time result as they go. So you know when the spray is finished, what your result was, is, as long as people don’t go and poke a whole bunch of holes after that, you have a great deal of certainty that that will be your final result.
Aeroseal is also great if you’re doing a renovation. So older houses are very, very leaky, and so if somebody’s doing a significant renovation, this can be a great compliment to that. You come in and spray at a strategic time to improve the overall performance of that house because of course, airtightness not only saves on energy, but it will reduce the drafts we have in many of the older houses.
It will make the house quieter because sound travels in the same pathway as air, it makes the indoor air quality a lot better. We’ve seen a lot of smoke in past summers, and so the only way to keep the smoke out of your house is to have a well-sealed house.
So there’s all those other benefits, whether we’re complying for Step Code or Net Zero standards, or whether we simply want to improve the overall performance of the house. So new old, we also do a certain amount of work. When people have tried their best to achieve the airtightness target that they need, particularly for Step Code, they go to get their final blower door test and they can’t achieve the number that’s required as per the building permit that was issued.
And so, Aeroseal can be a great solution to bring in to save that house or rescue it to make sure that you can comply with the BC Energy Step Code requirements and get your final occupancy.
While this isn’t ideal, it can be sort of the last resort to come in very, very effectively, spray the house and get you to where you need to be. And then of course we have Aeroseal duct, one of the, well, the duct spray is an awesome solution for new builds.
Recognizing that there is time taken to seal the duct work when it’s installed, it can be time consuming and difficult to guarantee the final result. The best way to ensure that your ductwork is going to deliver that even comfort in every room in the house is to make sure that the ducts are sealed. The only way you know for sure that the ducts are sealed is to test it. And in the same way that when we spray for envelope, we see real-time results. When we spray for ducts, we see real-time results. And so at new construction, you know when the Aeroseal duct has been installed, exactly how tight those ducts are, and we want to reduce that air leakage well down below 10%.
And the only way you can guarantee this is to use Aeroseal duct. And then of course, the other huge benefit of this is in existing houses, this is a noninvasive way to come in very quickly. The sealant is sprayed under pressure into your duct system, and then you get a result at the end that tells you we went from 40, 50, 60% leakage all the way down to under 10%, particularly on the supply side where the air is getting delivered.
So very, very effective. Improving the comfort and quality of your house both on the new side and on the retrofit side.
Is AeroBarrier simply a strategy for residential houses?
What type of residential houses or can it be also used on commercial buildings? Whether you are spraying for your house or your office or any type of industrial commercial consideration, comfort, air quality, whenever you have buildings with people in them, those things apply.
And so Aeroseal, both on the duct side and on the envelope side, can be used for single family residential houses. It can be used for multifamily residential houses, whether that’s a duplex, a quad townhouses or condos. We can spray up to six story wood buildings and we are just in the process of starting to promote Aeroseal envelope for high-rise as well, because while high-rise buildings inherently are airtight on the envelope side because of the construction strategies where Aeroseal envelope can be enormously impactful, is making sure that each individual unit is separated from its neighbour.
Because while it’s less about energy in terms of separating one unit from the other, it can really impact the overall quality of people’s experience living in those units because when you seal them unit to unit, you are reducing noise transmission, you are reducing smells, whether that smell is people smoking or people cooking very aromatic food, it creates that privacy and separation unit to unit.
And we are seeing significant interest from the high high-rise marketplace in being more effective in creating that separation because that can be a great marketing strategy as they go to sell those condos that not only are they providing a very, very comfortable living space, they are creating that privacy and separation unit to unit.
People are curious about when should you reach out to Airtight Solutions around the Aeroseal technology, whether it’s ductwork or whether it’s for envelope.
And so we would encourage people to consider the Aeroseal technology when they’re designing the building. There are lots of different ways where you can achieve airtightness.
Some of them are relatively straightforward and others are more complicated.
I would identify that using Aeroseal is the only way where you have cost certainty and you have certainty around the final result. While we can use caulking, acoustical caulking to seal plastic inside the building to the walls, we can do an exterior application where we are using either a self-sealing membrane or we’re using something typical like Tyvek, which I’m sure everybody is familiar with.
You can tape the Tyvek. You can make sure that that Tyvek is connected to your foundation assemblies through your roof assemblies.
All of these strategies are time consuming. The materials sometimes can be very expensive, whether you’re using a self-sealing breathable exterior membrane product or whether you’re using expensive acrylic tapes, they’re labour intensive materials expensive. And you can put all this effort in and you actually will never know what your final result is until you get to that final blower door test.
And so there’s a big investment in time and money, and then there’s certain amount of uncertainty unless your team is highly trained and has demonstrated a really great track record.
But I can say from RDC’s experience with a highly trained team with a really good track record, we have had projects where we have been surprised at that final blower door test and we haven’t achieved the standard that we were looking for.
With Aeroseal on the envelope side, you get a validated result when the spray is complete—because you see that—because we’re using the same blower door technology to pressurize the house as your energy advisor is when they come in to do that final test. And so you have validation that we have created a complying building, understanding that if people damage the envelope during construction after we’ve left, we can’t control that.
But what we can guarantee is that when we spray, you comply. And so you get that certainty. And if somebody does a little bit of damage to the envelope, generally we find we’re always available.
We’ll come back if you failed your final blower test, and I think almost a hundred percent of the time we’re able to help you find those places where there may be some additional air leakage. Of course, one of the places that we do find is the ductwork.
And so ducting, depending on where it’s routed through the house, can actually contribute also to envelope leakage. And so sometimes a combination of doing duct sealing and envelope sealing is the best way to ensure that you get that final result to comply with Step Code in the end.
We get resistance from whether it’s building officials or envelope consultants or builders that feel that using Aeroseal is cheating in a way that it’s a temporary solution just to get past the pass for that final blower door test.
It is a strategy in the same way that using acrylic tape or self-sealing membranes is a strategy or using acoustical sealant and tuck tape and plastic. It’s just another tool in your toolbox. There has been significant testing to determine how durable is this. All that age testing has proved that this is a very, very durable solution.
It’s just as effective as using any of those other materials. And as I said before, in my mind, this is your most cost-effective way to achieve that standard that you need.
The best way that builders and developers can partner with Airtight Solutions for the Aeroseal technology, both on the duct side and the envelope side, is to engage us early in the process.
Ideally, you anticipate using this technology before you break ground. Our team can help builders and developers with their overall airtightness strategy.
Understanding that Aeroseal is a compliment to your primary envelope strategies for airtightness. It’s not the only solution that you need. You’re going to need either that taped exterior envelope, using poly, taped and sealed in an appropriate way. And traditional strategies will easily get you down below 3.5 air changes, and in certain instances can easily get you down to 2.5.
But in today’s world with Step Code, we see a lot of people that are trying to get a better result than 2.5 or getting down to Net Zero or Passive House standards, which gets us to 1.5 or below one.
So anticipating using Aeroseal at the beginning of your project identifies that you just need to do a decent job on your primary system. You bring in Aeroseal at that strategic time in your construction schedule, whether that’s at framing when you’re using an exterior air barrier strategy or bringing us in at drywall. If you’re using an interior air barrier strategy, you bring cost certainty to your project.
You’re not doing multiple blower door tests failing and then having staff running around with caulking and tape trying to create some compliance at your mid-construction blower door test.
So it’s saving you time, it’s saving you money, and it’s saving you peace of mind.
We get resistance from, whether it’s, building officials or envelope consultants or builders that feel that using Aeroseal is cheating in a way that it’s a temporary solution just to get past the pass for that final blower door test.
It is a strategy in the same way that using acrylic tape or self-sealing membranes is a strategy or using acoustical sealant and tuck tape and plastic. It’s just another tool in your toolbox.
There has been significant testing to determine how durable is this. All that age testing has proved that this is a very, very durable solution.
It’s just as effective as using any of those other materials. And as I said before, in my mind, this is your most cost-effective way to achieve that standard that you need.
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