Non-linear heatloss? What am I missing?

Harvey Ramer

@icesailor What you call novelty siding, I always called German Lap Siding. Looks identical. Google it.

Fred

Paul48 said:

It was the tapered strips of wood they would nail under the courses of cedar shingle to nail asphalt shingles over them. I only saw them as a kid, working for some Cannuck roofers. We ripped a lot of them off.

Never saw any of those used.

Fred

KC_Jones said:

Fred what about painted PVC trim boards like Azek for corner boards? Personally I try and get rid of the wood on the outside as much as possible without changing the look. I re did both porch floors with a product called Tendura (now Correct Porch I believe) that is a man made T&G decking specifically for covered porch floors. Great stuff hold paint fantastic! The old dead guys did some interesting stuff on houses. For example I have ship lap type siding and they used that siding (with a bead detail added) as baseboard trim throughout the house as well. They simply added a base cap on top of it and it looks great. How did I figure that out? On the bottom of the baseboard there is a rabbet on the back that fits the top perfectly...no other reason for it to be there. Interesting stuff.

We are starting to allow some composite type materials (No PVC, for sure). They have made some great strides in the use of composites for porch/deck flooring and even for porch railings/balustrades. The main problem historically is that those materials don't have the same mass/architectural look as the real thing and really look fake. We haven't seen anything in PVC that we have approved yet. Every once and a while we will have someone bring a case before us for a PVC fence. looks terrible and that case usually get nasty, especially if they did it without approval and we issue a stop work order or order them to remove it.

BobC

@icesailor On the south shore we call that siding Drop Siding, My garage is sided with it and is about 90 years old - old growth hemlock and tough as nails.

http://www.southernwoodspecialties.com/drop-siding.html

Bob

Jamie Hall

The place I care for is interesting -- it has the regular (for this area) clapboard siding (3 inch exposure) over 1" pine sheathing. The dependent buildings are still that way. The main house, though, was resided with asbestos cement shingles back in about 1930, without taking the clapboards off. The advantage is very very simple -- they don't need paint, and last forever unless they get hit (they are brittle). They also keep down the real estate tax -- "fair market value", and between the encapsulated asbestos on the steam pipes all over the basement and the asbestos cement siding, it's not hard to get the "fair market value" down remarkably low...

Fred

Some day somebody will want to take those shingles off of there (at great expense) and return the original siding to it original glory. Makes such a difference and adds immensly to the on-going maintainence but well worth it!

ChrisJ

Jamie Hall said:

The place I care for is interesting -- it has the regular (for this area) clapboard siding (3 inch exposure) over 1" pine sheathing. The dependent buildings are still that way. The main house, though, was resided with asbestos cement shingles back in about 1930, without taking the clapboards off. The advantage is very very simple -- they don't need paint, and last forever unless they get hit (they are brittle). They also keep down the real estate tax -- "fair market value", and between the encapsulated asbestos on the steam pipes all over the basement and the asbestos cement siding, it's not hard to get the "fair market value" down remarkably low...

Interesting,
The house I grew up in had asbestos cement siding from the late 1950s and my dad always said they were excellent as long as you kept them painted?

Maybe the paint was moot? I remember him getting pissed off at the cable guys in 1984 for shooting a nail into one instead of going into a crack between two and they cracked it. When I put a roof antenna up for my FM tuner he made me bolt it into where a gable vent was so I didn't have to drill or damage the shingles. He was very protective of them and it had nothing to do with dust, he just wanted them to stay like new.

He built his own house in 2006 and used hardie board because he felt it was very similar to the asbestos. When we calculated his fuel usage for the winter it came up to around 4 BTUs/HDD/Sq.Ft. so I guess he did good in the insulation department and thats with a 90% AFUE forced air furnace I begged him NOT to get. I pushed so hard for radiant and got ignored because he wanted simple.

SWEI

We had a 1945 bungalow with original asbestos cement shingles in Reno. I can recall at least five well-meaning people who suggested we tear them off. After examining the condition of the shingles more carefully, we realized they were actually in far better shape than the rest of the house was, so we decided to leave them alone. As one of my mentors back in the mid-80s once told me "As long as you don't hit it with a die grinder and inhale, you'll be just fine."

ChrisJ

I just checked my house against our last gas bill and got 14.47 BTUs/HDD/Sq.Ft.

That's only 3.6 times worse than my dad's house.

How bad is 14.47 BTUs/HDD/Sq.Ft. compared to other homes out there both old and new? Horrible? Typical?

MarkS

There were some numbers posted on this quite a while back. IIRC under 5 is the Holy Grail, 5 to 10 is good, 10 to 15 is fair, over 15 is poor.

icesailor

Harvey Ramer said:

@icesailor What you call novelty siding, I always called German Lap Siding. Looks identical. Google it.

There was a definition I posted that said that "Novelty Siding" was a generic term for any unusual shaped siding that came in vogue when they developed better milling machines. They basically said that a specific siding could have any name someone wanted to give it, but as a generic group if sidings, they were "Novelty" sidings. Under those definitions, unusual sidewall shingle installations could be considered novelty sidings. Like equal width saw tooth patterns or any other unusual patterns seen on shingle style houses.

icesailor

Jamie Hall said:

The place I care for is interesting -- it has the regular (for this area) clapboard siding (3 inch exposure) over 1" pine sheathing. The dependent buildings are still that way. The main house, though, was resided with asbestos cement shingles back in about 1930, without taking the clapboards off. The advantage is very very simple -- they don't need paint, and last forever unless they get hit (they are brittle). They also keep down the real estate tax -- "fair market value", and between the encapsulated asbestos on the steam pipes all over the basement and the asbestos cement siding, it's not hard to get the "fair market value" down remarkably low...

There's an upside to those AC shingles. They were almost always nailed on with copper roofing nails. Before I was plumbing, I worked carpentering. I worked for this guy and we stripped a Asbestos roof. I saved all the nails I could and had 25# of copper nails. Back when scrap copper was probably $.25 a pound.

KC_Jones

Those asbestos shingles are pretty incredible. My grandfathers condo building (4 unit) has them and the paint holds up fantastic. Even with sitting on the beach and get blasted with salt sand etc. They only paint about every 5 years and that is only because the side facing the ocean gets sand blasted so bad. Other than that the paint just never fails on those shingles. We have recently had to do some repairs and what my father did what get some of the Hardie planks cut them to length to make a "shingle" and the repair is pretty seamless. Chris your dad's instincts are good that stuff wears pretty similar to the asbestos, we have a side by side comparison and there is no difference.

Gordy

If you really want to nail your envelope performance get a thermostat that logs hours of heat call daily, and season total. Then use your btu output boiler rating, and calculate based on HDD. So long as the boilers actual output matches its rating. This substantially drops the Btus SF hdd number. Plus takes the other fuel burning appliances out of the equation.

Jamie Hall

MarkS said:

There were some numbers posted on this quite a while back. IIRC under 5 is the Holy Grail, 5 to 10 is good, 10 to 15 is fair, over 15 is poor.

This place is about 8. Guess it's not so bad after all...