Buried sensors
I am a builder in South Dakota building a very cool home for great clients. This home has an 11 inch thick wall. The inner wall is 2×4 with zip sheathing, then a 1.5 inch gap and a 2×6 wall. They will both be filled with blown American RockWool insulation. I am looking at putting sensors in the walls to see what happens after the owners move in. My question is; is OmniSense the only player in the game? If so, that is fine. Their website is not currently working so I am on a tangent.
Also, I am planning on sensors on the north wall inside and outside of the zip between where there are windows 10 feet apart. 1 straight below the outside one at the rim, just above the double sill plate. 1 in the attic of the vault vented attic. 1 in the standard attic above the kitchen. 1 each side of the zip on a south facing wall between a window and door about 8 feet apart. And finally, 1 in and out of the zip in the basement walkout wall that is south facing but the inner of the zip part is 9 inches due to a partial height foundation.
Any advice out there?
PS… I am new to the advanced building performance.
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Replies
Hi woodbutcherer,
I recently used omnisense and was happy with the products, service and ongoing tracking. They are the only ones I could find as well. My only advise would be to add some sensors inside the living area, so you can understand what the occupants are doing to effect the house. On the same note, I put some sensors outside as well to have a comparison with the in wall and in roof sensors. Good luck!
Is this the house that Steven Baczek designed ?
I use Accurite sensors located in the crawl space, garage attic, and house attic and on the attic roof to track dewpoint and temperature. I check them daily then read my daily GBA. The house attic relative humidity was above 60 - so I added a dessicant dehumidifier. That brought the humidity down to a steady 40 percent. The garage attic has a permeated barrier and performs almost as good as the house attic with an active dehumidifier.
The house attic has 2-inches ccSPF due to the ductwork placed in the attic space. Oh the mistakes we made in the 80s.
Accurite is available on their website or on Amazon.
The Airthings sensors also work quite well, but they're a lot more expensive than the Accurite stuff. Airthings can watch more parameters indoors though, such as CO2 and Radon levels (depending on the sensors you get). I run both systems here, and I use the Accurite stuff for the outdoor weather station and temperature/humidity sensors around the house, then three Airthings monitors in the basement and crawlspace areas (those can do radon, temperature, and humidity), and one of the "big" Accurite monitors on the main level that can do CO2 and particulate levels, along with a bunch of other stuff. It's always better to know than to guess when you're trying to optimize things.
Bill
Thanks everyone. I am looking to collect data and analyze it later as this is a client home. Can you do that with the Airthings and accurite monitors?
Depends how much detail you want. Airthings and Accurite both use cloud stuff to store the data, and I'm not sure either provides access to the raw data, at least not easily. You do get plots that let you track trends over time, but "analyze" to me means getting something like a comma delimited file with the data so that you can process it in Excel or some other software. I'm not sure that's possible with either system. Both systems are setup more for end users to easily see stuff, not so much as scientific research platforms.
Bill
I’ve been using a variety of sensors connected to a Hubitat hub, which is likely not ideal for your scenario. The “Shelly Plus Uni” though can stand alone via a WIFI connection (it does need power) and has free cloud access as well, with history etc. It supports a single DHT22 (humidity or up to five DS18B20 (temp) sensors. The temp sensors are all of $4-5 each.
https://kb.shelly.cloud/knowledge-base/shelly-plus-uni
I’m just powering it via a 12V DC wall wart. It’s all low voltage so safe to use in a wall etc.