HOuses are teh Sucks!

The more I learn about houses, the more I am convinced we live in nothing but mud huts.
Hell, wattle and daub would be an improvement over what we are currently using in many cases.

As you may know, we in Maison de Hannan have been battling one form of air quality issue after another. Our current adversary is CO2.

We’ve had the mold folks in and they’ve opened a $1200 hole in the wall only to find dry blown-in insulation and sound sheathing. We’ve spoken to just about every HVAC company in RI and nearby MA to see about getting through-wall ERVs installed, but the technology is just too new and no one is really aware of them. They all assume we are talking about the big old ERVs that you place in the middle of your ducted system. Nope. THROUGH-WALL, ductless.

This past week, we were to have a ceiling fan installed between the two bedrooms at the top of the stairs. The fan we selected is a big jobber that could vent more than our square footage per hour. It was also, like so many things these days, WeeFee-enabled…and someone had already hacked it into Home Assistant. While these units are usually used to vent out heat, I was going to set up an automation based on CO2 levels. So we had the electrician out. It would be about $700 to install an outlet in the very top “attic” (aka “The Devil’s Triangle”). This is the space above the flat ceiling on the second floor of a Cape. There is about 24″ of space up there, from the ceiling below to the peak of the roof above: not a lot of space, but enough. $700 seems steep, but it is what it is. Let’s move forward.

We then had the guy from the handyman division out to work out the access to said attic. He agreed with me that punching a hole in the ceiling of Herself’s closet (her closet is in our bedroom) was the best route, but he took the time to listen and understand the problem and the proposed solution (the mondo fan) and he wasn’t convinced that this was what we needed. He was going to go talk to the HVAC engineers to explain to them the issue and dispatch them if they thought that we needed to get something right-sized for us. But he also thought that the issue might be elsewhere and he suspected it was the soffits.

I am still struggling to figure out how he came to this. The soffits and crawlspaces and the ridge vent are all outside “the envelope” of conditioned air. How this is causing a build up of CO2 INSIDE the envelope is just, seriously, beyond my understanding. Anyway, he popped his head inside the crawlspace and saw the nearest soffits stuffed with blown-in insulation and no daylight showing, so he assumed that all of the soffits were in the same state. On my list of things that I have absolutely no interest in doing but must be done is to climb in the crawlspaces and clear the soffits to allow the circulation to take place. We were also thinking that we might need those soffit vent plugs installed. Jenny rightly thought that getting a soffit team involved might be a better and quicker way to go, so she started calling around.

The details on this are hazy, but it was done as part of the sale agreement when we found the roof had actual moss growing on the nails inside the crawlspaces as part of the crawlspaces being over-insulated (blocking the soffit to ridge vent circulation)…and that there were three layers of roof on the place! The assumption was that by popping in these additional vents, we would get lateral airflow going in the crawlspaces, thereby solving…the moss? Like I said, details are hazy at this point. Soon after we bought the house and moved in, we found that this wasn’t solving jack, so we had all of the layers of the roof removed and the discovered mold on the rafters cleaned and encapsulated. That was in early 2017 or 2018. I forget when we moved in here, but it was January of whichever year. Ever since then, it has been one battle with air quality after another.

She found a local roofing company with glowing reviews. When they heard we have air quality issues, they rescheduled a lower priority job and sent us their most knowledgeable guy. He came out, looked at the soffits, listened to our tale of woe, CLIMBED into both crawlspaces and found that it was just these easily seen soffits, right near the access panel, that were filled in, so he scooped them out. He reported that he could feel the air coming through on all of the soffits that he checked.

He then climbed up on the roof to check the ridge vent and he again found that it is venting air. While he was up there, he looked around at the other similar houses and noticed that they all only have the gable vents at the very peak, in that Devil’s Triangle area. We have those vents, plus one on each end of the two crawlspaces.

Currently, in each of the major rooms, we have a mini-split head-end unit equipt with allergen filters and the air purifier add-on, a standalone air cleaner, and a dehumidifier. In. Each Room.

So when the roofer came back down to the ground, he explained what he found, and what he noticed about the other exact same houses around us and their use of only the Satanic gable vents, and what is different with us. He thinks that these crawlspace vents are the issue; that they are impeding (but not stopping) the soffit to ridge vent circulation enough to screw with the air flow through the whole rest of the house. I’m still not sold on this whole outside the envelope air flow being an impact on the inside the envelope air quality*, but today’s adventure will see me climbing the ladder to block the crawlspace vents with some of that thick plastic sheeting and Gorilla tape. This will be a science experiment for about a month, so I hope that the tape is good and my install is sound. I am already drafting mental plans for boxing up the vents from the inside. Also, if I am going to have to crawl all the way through one of the spaces. I am dragging a couple runs of Ethernet cabling with me, in case we ever get to the point where we want/need security cameras installed.

* If anyone can explain this to me, I would be grateful.