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John

Jan 2, 20222 min read

Structural Insulated Panels

Left: SIP Detail; Below: SIP Axon

I am going to use Structural Insulated Panel Systems for my home in the Catskills. The Whole Building Design Guide has a good overall introduction to them. I would like to find a builder with experience with this in the Catskills to work with. Some local SIPS manufacturers and other contacts are:

Foam Laminates of Vermont
- Great PDF of Details!
Build Green SIPS (Cohoes, NY)
Thermal Foams Inc (Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Albany NY and Pittsburgh PA)
EPS Buildings has a New York SIPS Plant
The Structural Insulated Panel Association lists members in New York

The Structural Insulation Panel Association has a series of Best Practice (BP) documents about SIPs that are quite good. The below is from these documents:

Window Details at SIPs (BP-4)

What this means for the design professional is that jamb thicknesses for window and door openings in a SIP wall will need to be nominally 7/16-inch thicker than for a conventionally framed wall. Window and door manufacturers can accommodate this additional thickness of the wall without any issues, but they need to be aware of this condition so they can supply the proper size extension jambs.

Exterior Cladding (BP-8)

A rainscreen system consists of an exterior siding, an air gap created by lumber furring strips (typically 3/4-inch or more in thickness and 3.5 inches or more in width), a water resistive barrier (WRB layer), and the structural sheathing substrate which is OSB for SIPs. The function of the siding is to shed the large majority of the precipitation and to protect the WRB/ substrate from UV degradation. Since the siding will not completely shed external moisture, it is imperative to provide drainage of any moisture that penetrates through the siding. The ventilated air gap made by furring between the siding and WRB in a rainscreen allows the moisture that penetrates or is absorbed by the siding from rain and dew to drain and evaporate quickly.

John

Dec 31, 20212 min read

Our Sustainable Utopia

Updated: Jan 2, 2022

Sustainability and ecological friendliness have always been interests of mine. In High School I wanted to be an architect who designed passive solar homes as a career. Now in my late fifties my family and I are learning to live more fully while minimizing our impact to the planet.

This blog documents that journey, in particular the thinking going into building our country home in the Catskills and the research leading up to it. This introductory post acts as a guide to the blog journey!

It all started with buying a 2017 BMW i3 Electric Hybrid in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic, my first car since 1987. That gave us the freedom to look for property. outside of NYC.

In the fall of 2020 we found an 11 acre undeveloped lot in Sullivan County, NY and closed on the property at the beginning of the New Year of 2021. Code requirements are a major constraint of design so I have set up a blog post to summarize them.

Our original inspiration for the country home was the Daylesford Longhouse (revisited here) which led to a lot of research on prefabricated buildings.

I also have decided to design the house using Passive House principles as promoted by the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS). These principles rely on super-insulating the building, creating an air-tight envelope, and providing mechanical ventilation with ERVs or HRVs. The end result is a building that is so energy efficient that it takes very little to heat or cool it.

Eventually it became clear that a prefabricated metal building approach similar to the Longhouse had a lot of drawbacks in our climate and was contradictory in many ways to the PHIUS objectives so I started looking at Structural Insulated Panels, which are pre-fab panels with structural insulation sandwiched between OSB sheathing and can be used for tilt-up walls, roofs and even floors.