Well, we're back here. Fourth Annual Symposium Dr Bales Doesn't need any introduction. anybody in the street knows him, but I will still let you introduce yourself and what you're doing here and why you came out to, uh, help to this event and support us and so go ahead. Yeah sure.

um yeah, my name is Allison Bales and I have a company called Energy Vanguard I we do third party HVAC Design so we're heavily involved in the mechanical side of things, but we also promote General good building science practices and I've written a book about that. All right. So tell me about your book. So the book is called a House Needs to Breathe or Does It and it covers a lot of the basic building signs.

So it's not just about this, this question. that's um, where there's a lot of debate and a lot of misunderstanding about a house needing to breathe. Yeah, um, that's that's one part of the book. An important part of the book because air leakage causes lots of problems and we don't want leaky houses.

We've got airtight houses. and the reason for the title is that the I've talked to a lot of Builders who have told me oh, we shouldn't seal up a house too tight. The house needs to breathe and that just drives me crazy every time. because no, we want airtight houses because if you leave the house leaky, you're letting air in through random leaks in the building enclosure.

Are you really getting good air, right? That air coming from The Moldy crawl space is not the kind of air you want to be breathing. That air coming from the garage with the gasoline and the pesticides and the exhaust fumes. It's not the air you want in the house. So go through a wall Channel where you have insulation and anything else that was used to build a house? Yeah, yeah, we want to.

We want to have an airtight house because there's bad stuff outside the living space that we don't want in the air in the house. So we want airtight. So a house does not need to breathe in that way. And um, I And you know I don't make a secret of the answer to that question.

I I Think that's page 23 that I provide the answer. Okay, no, a house doesn't need to breathe. Page 23. people need to breathe and there's a great um uh saying A guy in New Zealand told me this once and I Love it.

If you find yourself inside something that's breathing, get out. You've been eaten. I Love that. Yeah, So yeah, you don't want to be inside something that's breathing.

That's great. Oh um yeah, that's so. then. the concern of an airtight house is is my air going to get stale? Or is there going to be unhealthy things that develop from the inside of that house? Like what's the solution? So it goes back to your talk that you just gave.

the talk I gave yesterday was about ventilation solving the ventilation puzzle but I started off talking about indoor air quality because ventilation is just one piece. okay of the of solving that puzzle and the the real answer is I mean you know air tightness. We want airtight houses to keep the bad stuff from from the buffer spaces and from the outdoors out of the indoor air. and then we want Source control.

Okay, because you know you bring stuff into the house a lot of times. you use materials in the house, adhesives and sealants and you install carpet and all these things off gas and put bad stuff in the air. Well if you be a little more careful about what you bring in, that's source. that would help too.

Yeah, there's a great quote for that from a German guy from the 19th century. He said something like if you have a pile of manure in your building, don't try to ventilate to solve the problem, just remove the pile of manure. That's good. That's Source control.

Yeah and so you got air tightness Source Control and moisture control when you in? Florida Yeah! Southeast And we're really right now in a humid climate. You definitely need lots of source control not moisture control and even in dry climbing. So you need moisture control because it rains, it snows, and that liquid water can cause more problems than than human humidity cans. A lot of times you got to solve that.

So air tightness Source control moisture control, then filtration. Okay, we want Merv 13 filtration and you can do that with low pressure drop. By you know we do it in our designs that we provide to people. I've done it in my house, we've done in our office.

You can get Merv 13 filtration with with 0.05.06 inch of water column pressure drop. We do it all the time. It's in my house and you have to just size it properly. Yeah, two square feet per tenants are rule, but that's that's the fourth piece of this layered approach to indoor air quality.

Air tightness Source Control Moisture Control filtration and then ventilation I Said ventilation is the last one because you got to do these other things first if you want. But if you have an airtight house, you gotta, you gotta have whole house mechanical ventilations. Okay, all right, a lot of different ways to do that. and I Talked about some of those yesterday.

Yeah, and so a lot of the I mean all of these we're doing on some level already and we're trying to solve these problems already. but it's the intentionality of like we're building houses Tighter and Tighter now. which is good. Finally, yeah people are actually starting to do this and I'm I'm crawling into crawls and addicts now that have had actually foam sprayed and and I'm happy I'm working in a space that it's actually conditioned.

Yeah, yep, but uh yes. then what? We still have all of our basic problems that you talked about there with uh humidity with Source control with filtration and I like that you say that you line it up the way you do like these things are. First, don't just try to jump to that fancy ventilation machinery and expect it to solve all the other problems that you've already already have to deal with. So good.

All right. So uh, how's the event been so far? that's been great man. Brian Um and you guys at Kalos do a fantastic job putting this together, bringing in you know a lot of the really best people in the industry and and getting people who are out in the field every day. Yeah to come here and and learn new stuff and and take it back and put it into practice.

So yeah. Wonderful wonderful event! So I I'm asking a lot of people speaking here uh to give some top uh tips that you have for technicians. we have technicians are going to be watching this that aren't here. That should definitely be here next year and so um just wanted to hear what are some top tips that on the Fly that come to mind for for technicians? Um well so number one I would say don't believe everything that you're told you know people will get told.

Oh you can't ever put a Mirv 13 filter in because that's you know it's going to use too much energy. the pressure drop's going to be too high. You're going to it's hard on your AC it's going to work too hard. Yeah right.

No you can. You can put in Merv 13 and get low pressure drop and everything will work great and you'll get cleaner air. But you have to size it properly so you gotta. You gotta consider the bigger picture that know your surface.

You just enlarge your surface space with the filter. Exactly yeah. you want you want low face velocity across that filter and then you can you can you know, have a smaller duct behind it and then that increases the speed. But um, yeah.

so don't believe everything you're told. There's a lot of stuff out there that you know gets passed down from you know, one tag generation to the next. Yes, and you know a lot of it's based on on things that aren't true and some sometimes they never were true. Yeah, so it's good.

that would be one of them. Um, another one. Keep learning. There's a lot of good information out there.

Things are changing quickly. Houses are changing. As you mentioned, you know we have more airtight houses now. Codes in a lot of places requires blower door testing.

Yeah, and you have to meet this threshold. You have to be. you know a certain level of air tightness. So keep learning and um, and come back next year.

Come back next year. I Love it. Great Yeah well appreciate you coming here and supporting us. It's an honor just to have you at the event.

And I hope you get to have some good conversations and you get good feedback here. I Mean this is the place to hear from people like and solid conversations, solid debates. It's already been happening out here. I've been loving it so yeah, yeah, appreciate it.

Thanks for coming out. Thanks Bert Yeah thanks for watching our video if you enjoyed it and got something out of it. If you wouldn't mind hitting the thumbs up button to like the video, subscribe to the channel and click the notifications Bell to be notified when new videos come out. HVAC School is far more than a YouTube channel.

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