This podcast series is excerpted from a two-day class called "Building Science Fundamentals" taught by Dr. Joe Lstiburek and Dr. John Straube, both of Building Science Corporation.

For information on attending a live class, go to BuildingScienceSeminars.com

This week, Dr. Joe talks about rain control in well-insulated buildings; specifically, how brick is affected by water, how it used to be installed, how it's installed today, how it should be installed, and why.

Rain Control in Energy-Efficient Buildings

Rain control is really, really, really, really important now that we are going to be doing really, really, really good buildings. Really, really, really good buildings are going to have lots and lots of insulation, therefore they will have really, really, really, really low drying potentials. Therefore rain control is a really big deal.

All of the stuff I’m going to talk about from a rain control perspective has been known for a long time; it’s just that we didn’t have to know it. In other words, we knew stuff, wrote it in books. It’s been known for a long time. It fell into disuse simply because the potentials for drying were so great, we didn’t really have to be good at it—we only had to be adequate. Now we have to be very good.

In order to demonstrate the water holdout capacity of brick, I used an ordinary garden hose. I’ve opened up the back of the wall to see that water passes through the brick in approximately 25 to 30 seconds, so brick is transparent to water. Now, it wasn’t always this way; the performance of brick assemblies has noticeably changed for the worse from a water control perspective. It doesn’t matter now, pretty much because we assume that brick leaks, so we put a water control layer behind it, a drainage planePath that water would take over the building envelope. Concealed drainage-plane materials, such as building paper or housewrap, are designed to shed water that penetrates the building’s cladding. Drainage planes are installed to overlap in shingle fashion (weatherlap) so that water flows downward and away from the building envelope..

What I would like to talk a little bit about is the mechanism of the water penetrating through the brick
Water doesn’t actually pass through the brick. Water doesn’t actually pass through the mortar. Water passes through the connection between the mortar and the brick, and that’s an important thing to appreciate or understand. Water passing through the connection between the mortar and the brick didn’t typically occur until the last half of the last century, meaning that we were pretty good with brick and mortar until relatively recently, and that’s because we stopped letting old people do brick.

Dip your brick before you set it down
Let me explain how brick used to be done. First, you have to understand a little bit about how brick is made. Brick is made in a brick kiln. It is in the kiln for a while at several thousand degrees. So when the brick comes out of the brick kiln where it has been at several thousand degrees, it is really, really dry. It is kiln dried. Its moisture content is unbelievably low, like zero. We take it out of the kiln, we wrap it in plastic, and we ship it out to the job site. What is the likelihood that the brick is going to be dry? One hundred percent.

The old timers, 100 years ago, before they would put the brick on the mortar bed, they would dip the brick in a pan of water so that, when they put the brick on the mortar bed, it wouldn’t desiccate the mortar, wouldn’t suck the water out of it. If it sucked the water out of it, there wouldn’t be a bond between the mortar and the brick. That lack of a bond that we get today allows water to pass through. It doesn’t affect the brick structurally; remember, brick is a big deal from a compression perspective. We didn’t really care much about the tensile strength, so we weren’t really caring about that bond. We now call it a setting bed. What that means is that we have an awful lot more water passing through the first layer of brick.

A little bit of water can really add up
How much water passes through the first layer of brick? Well, around 1% or a little less than 1%. Now that doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is if that water enters directly into the assembly. It’s easily managed if we direct the water down a drainage layer, a drainage plane, to a flashing system that expels it at the bottom of the wall. The typical way of handling that penetrating water through the claddingMaterials used on the roof and walls to enclose a house, providing protection against weather. is by layering tar paper in shingle fashion. We call this the "drainage plane" — we want to drain the 'rain on the plane.'

You don't need much space for drainage
I like the term "drainage plane" because it describes what the layer does — it drains water on a plane. Sometimes we call it a WRB, which, depending on which ASHRAEAmerican Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). International organization dedicated to the advancement of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration through research, standards writing, publishing, and continuing education. Membership is open to anyone in the HVAC&R field; the organization has about 50,000 members. or ASTMAmerican Society for Testing and Materials. Not-for-profit international standards organization that provides a forum for the development and publication of voluntary technical standards for materials, products, systems, and services. Originally the American Society for Testing and Materials. committee you're talking to, might mean "weather-resistant barrier" or might mean "water-resistant barrier." Well, I’m not interested in the barrier; I want drainage to occur. That’s why I like the term drainage plane. I don’t like barriers. I want drainage.

For drainage to occur, you actually need a gap between the cladding and the drainage plane. If you smush the brick so that it is in direct contact with the drainage plane, drainage can’t occur because the water will be held there by capillaryForces that lift water or pull it through porous materials, such as concrete. The tendency of a material to wick water due to the surface tension of the water molecules. forces. You need some type of a gap. A traditional gap — and I use the term "traditional" for a reason, because it is based on tradition, go figure — is around 25 mm or 1 in. All you need is about 3/16 in. for drainage; you don’t need an inch. Why and where do we get the inch from? Well, the inch comes from the typical thickness of a mason’s knuckles and fingers. It’s a historical artifact. If attorneys laid brick, it’d be a 1/4 in.

Now does that imply that I don’t need an inch for drainage? I’m not implying it at all, I’m saying it. I don’t need a 1-in. gap for drainage. In fact, I don’t need much of a gap at all; 3/16 in. will give me drainage.

Mortar droppings are part of the problem
So what’s the big deal about mortar droppings? Mortar droppings don’t affect drainage very much. But what mortar droppings do affect is ventilation, and we have to understand that sometimes we may want to ventilate a cladding as well as drain the cladding. So it’s getting important to the design of building enclosures to actually decide whether we want to drain and ventilate or just to drain. If you want to ventilate, you’re going to need an air inlet, an air outlet, and a clear pathway connecting the inlet and the outlet. That means no mortar droppings. So mortar droppings dramatically affect ventilating a cladding, but they don’t dramatically affect drainage.

Why ventilate a cladding?
What happens if a wall cladding is able to store a lot of water? It would be a reservoir. We would call such a cladding a "reservoir cladding." We could probably describe brick as a reservoir cladding, and this reservoir would be charged during a rain event.

So it rains on the brick, the brick gets wet, there is a lot of water stored on the surfaces of the brick. It is not drained because it is stored. It is like a sponge: You fill up the sponge with water, and then, once the sponge is filled, only then if you add more water does water drain out. In other words, if you add water to a brick wall, water doesn’t come out of the bottom; it keeps building up until you can’t store any more water, and then the water drains out. The reservoir is charged. Think of this as a water source.

Next, the sun comes out and beats down on the brick. What happens to the temperature of the water in the brick when the sun beats down on it? It gets higher. Now there is hot water on the outside of the wall. So moisture flow is going to go from where? Warm to cold. Think of the water as splitting—some of it is going to evaporate to the outside, and some of it is going to evaporate to the inside. The concentration of water in the brick is greater than the concentration of water in the outside air but also the water in the air behind the brick. Moisture is going to go from a higher concentration to a lower concentration. Remember, we will follow the thermal gradient and the concentration gradient.

A whole bunch of moisture is going to end up on the back of the brick
What we want is a moving stream of air to intercept that inwardly driven moisture and flush it out the top of the wall. So we want to back-ventilate reservoir claddings to uncouple or disconnect the reservoir cladding from the rest of the assembly. Everybody got a handle on the language here? Uncouple, disconnect, back-ventilate, reservoir claddings. This is just the language that we are going to be using to describe these phenomena.

Goose is not a vapor barrier
If there are mortar droppings behind the brick, we don’t get effective back ventilation, and the reservoir cladding isn’t really disconnected from the wall. Let’s say that the WRB (whatever that is) is Tyvek. Tyvek is a fantastic plastic WRB. It’s very good at handling liquid-phase water. It’s extremely vapor open, so Tyvek would not be a vapor barrier. In fact it’s around 50 perms. Commercial Tyvek is around 20 perms; the residential is around 50 perms. So we would say that water would blow through the Tyvek in the vapor form like shit through a goose.

Let’s say that there’s plywood sheathingMaterial, usually plywood or oriented strand board (OSB), but sometimes wooden boards, installed on the exterior of wall studs, rafters, or roof trusses; siding or roofing installed on the sheathing—sometimes over strapping to create a rainscreen. on the wall. Is plywood a vapor barrier? No, it’s not. As the moisture is driven in through the Tyvek, it will increase the moisture content of the plywood. The plywood will breathe, and then the moisture will end up where? In the wall cavity. So the more vapor-open the sheathing-building paperTypically referring to Grade D building paper, this product is an asphalt-impregnated kraft paper that looks a lot like a lightweight asphalt felt. The Grade D designation has come to mean that the building paper passes ASTM D779 (minimum 10-minute rating with the “boat test”) and different products are called out as “30-minute” or even “60-minute” based on D779 results. At times confused with roofing felt, roofing felts and building paper differ in two ways: felts are made of recycled-content paper, building papers of virgin paper; felts are made of a heavier stock paper; building papers a lighter stock. See also roofing felt. complex, the more likely that moisture will blow through that assembly.

What if instead of plywood I had Dens-Glass Gold? Let’s say that this is a commercial building. Dens-Glass Gold is probably the single most common commercial sheathing. It’s around 30 perms, so it breathes. So moisture is going to blow through the Tyvek and the Dens-Glass Gold like a hot knife through butter. Is the fiberglass insulation going to stop it? Fiberglass is very, very vapor open. It’s going to be around 150 perms for three inches, so it really breathes. So where is the water going to end up? Well, if there is polyethylene in the wall, it is going to condense on the poly and run down and corrode the metal track or rot the bottom plate. If there isn’t poly in the wall, if it’s gypsum board, it’s going to blow through the gypsum board until it hits the vinylCommon term for polyvinyl chloride (PVC). In chemistry, vinyl refers to a carbon-and-hydrogen group (H2C=CH–) that attaches to another functional group, such as chlorine (vinyl chloride) or acetate (vinyl acetate). wallpaper. So a really, really bad scenario would be metal studs with gypsum board on the inside with vinyl wallpaper, with Dens-Glass Gold on the outside, Tyvek, a brick veneer and mortar droppings. We would call that a hotel.

Bad decisions lead to mold and rot
So it rains on the brick, the brick gets wet, the sun blows the whole darn thing through, and you are going to end up with an awful lot of mold at the interface of the vinyl and the gypsum board. Now I don’t really care because it’s trapped between the vinyl and the gypsum board. It’s in the wall, but I’m not breathing it, so it’s not an issue. But the moisture is going to pick up and increase until I’m beginning to actually grow mold on the backside of the gypsum board. Now it’s in the cavity, it’s no longer at the interface between the vinyl and the gypsum board. It’s actually in the cavity, on the cavity side where it intersects the fiberglass. Again, I don’t have much of a problem if it stays there.

Well, if I have a dropped-ceiling return plenum which is at a negative pressure and it is now connected to my exterior wall, if you pop your ceiling tile, what’s the likelihood that that interior gypsum board is airtight? Zero. You are going to shovel in a little bit of mineral wool? Yeah, give me a break, a lousy filter. So I’m going to actually suck the mold out of the wall and inject it into the breathing zone of the occupied space. Now, that would be a problem. That would be like having mold on your surface and you would go with your nose and suck it in. That’s a health effect.

The point here is that we usually have a whole series of things happening
If there weren’t mortar droppings in the wall cavity and the cladding were back-ventilated, there wouldn’t be any inwardly driven moisture, and I could probably (and the operative word here is probably) get away with vinyl wallpaper in places like Chicago. On the other hand, even with no mortar droppings and back-ventilated cladding, I could never get away with the vinyl wallpaper in a place like Atlanta — the operative phrase is "get away with." If I didn’t have the vinyl wallpaper at all, I could probably not have to worry about too much of an issue with mortar droppings with my brick veneer from a ventilation perspective as long as I had my flashings done right. The liquid water would drain away. I could live with the reservoir because the moisture driven in would actually blow all the way through the assembly and life would be pretty reasonable.

So if you have a reservoir cladding, you need drainage. We don’t need much of a gap for drainage, but we need a lot for back ventilation. How much do we need for back ventilation? The answer is: It depends. It depends on what the reservoir is. You could get away with as low as 3 or 4 mm, or 6 mm, or sometimes 9 mm; sometimes you are going to need 25 mm. When you aren’t sure, you basically ask for as much as you can get.

It’s a pretty reasonable way of doing things in life: You err on the side of caution.