Comment on Siding Rain Screen Detail
OminousOrange@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Firstly, do you live in a warm climate, where walls dry to the inside, or a cool climate, where walls dry to the outside? Given your mention of snow and ice, I’d guess you’re in a cool climate and you’re creating a vapour trap with ice/water shield and insulation on the exterior, with typical poly vapour barrier on the inside.
If this is the case, you’ll want a vapour permeable air-weather barrier rather than ice/water shield (or confirm that it’s vapour permeable) and it would be best to use vapour open insulation, like semi-rigid mineral wool, rather than EPS or XPS.
To answer your question, could you not just have L flashing from behind the furring (not furrowing) and bug screen down onto the shingles?
pdavis@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Thanks for the response. The barrier I choose isn’t permeable. I live in a moderate climate. We do get the occasional snow which melts within a few days. My house is pretty leaky at the moment, so the walls will be able to dry from the inside. I would like to use mineral wool in some areas (like near my grill) but it isn’t available in large sheets in my area and its R value per inch isn’t quite as good as the Poly, so I opted to go with Poly in most areas.
Yes, I could place the L flashing behind the furring strips (mentioned in my previous reply), but my hesitation there is I wanted to have a full shield of layered tape and wrap all the way up the wall and I didn’t really want to put wrap on top of the insulation because I didn’t trust that none of the penetrations I would need to make for the furring strips and siding wouldn’t leak. I saw in one video where they were doing 4" of insulation they put the rain barrier 2" back between the two insulation layers. I think this would be a good solution but the install is a bit more complicated when doing multiple layers of insulation. To do this I could have done two 1" layers instead of just 1 2" layer and put the flashing between the two layers.
OminousOrange@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
The construction of the wall assembly has a much larger impact on the wall’s ability to dry rather than the airtightness of your home. The concern is that moisture from higher humidity air within the wall cavity can condense as the exterior temperature drops and cools the exterior portion of wall. Standard practice is to have one side of the wall assembly be vapour permeable, typically the outside in cool climates. Typically, vapour impermeable poly is on the inside of the walls, just behied the drywall so the moisture of the more humid, warm air inside the home can’t get into the wall. When the outside of the wall is vapour permeable, the wall is free to dry to meet the moisture conditions of the outside air, rather than condensing. But, if you install a system like you’re proposing, you’re trapping moisture and the likelihood of it condensing within the wall is greatly increased, potentially leading to rot issues over the long term.
I’d recommend using a high performance air-weather barrier (AWB) such as tyvek drainwrap, siga majvest, or pro-clima intello with EPS (not XPS) insulation, as its slightly vapour permeable, and don’t tape the seams. Those AWBs are vapour permeable, allowing the wall to dry, but won’t allow any water to penetrate from the outside.
For the bottom joint, properly installed siding will prevent nearly all water from getting behind it. The air gap behind it created by the furring will allow any moisture that does happen to get behind it to dry. The most secure solution would probably be to tape the bottom of the new AWB to the top of the shingle or whatever’s the top layer, then put L flashing over the AWB, under the insulation with the top of the flashing taped to the AWB (with manufacturer recommended tape, Siga Wigluv is a good choice).