This month’s experts are PHIL KAPLAN & KAI FAST, Principal Partner and Sustainability Specialist at Kaplan Thompson Architects

Q. Most architectural renovations and remodels start with aesthetic updates or adding new living space. What other changes to a house should homeowners prepare for?

A. Redesigning the look and flow of a home creates the ideal opportunity to improve its comfort and durability, not to mention accelerate a return on investment through reduced operating costs. Once you take the leap to renovate, you can both make a house beautiful and radically improve its energy performance. Don’t be afraid to “look under the hood” with a renovation or remodel; look forward to finding and fixing the things that will increase the happiness and health of your home! 

Q. Can a renovation or remodel introduce new risks to a home’s durability or safety? 

A. It is possible to make things worse when you start changing a building, but an architect experienced with renovations can recommend smart construction assemblies and systems that will improve your air quality, manage moisture inside and out, and increase longevity. 

Most older homes do not have a dedicated fresh-air ventilation system; if you don’t control where fresh air enters your house, it will sneak in through the same cracks and crevices that critters and their accompanying debris use. Fresh air should filter in through clean, managed channels, and homes without proper ventilation may encounter issues with high indoor humidity and stale or polluted air. We add energy recovery ventilation to our renovations to extract heat from conditioned air before exhausting it outside, keeping the warmth in while letting the nasty stuff out.

Q. How do you analyze where a problem already exists and where a new one could arise during a renovation?

A. Some building problems are obvious, like water leaks, the smell of mold or mildew, rot, or inadequate structural design from a previous era. There are also more complex issues that deserve specialized design tools. When detailing a building enclosure, we often use software called THERM to assess the thermal conductivity of a building’s components and model how heat would travel through a structure at different temperatures. The results identify where condensation and mold could form at improperly insulated joints and connections (called thermal bridges) in a building. 

The output of the analysis (refer to the diagram shown) reveals the temperature of each building material via a gradation of colors ranging from red (warm) to violet (cold). A smart design with proper insulation avoids large variances between the temperature of a material and the air surrounding it, ensuring that the dew point (the moment where humid air turns into water when the temperature becomes cold enough) falls outside the protected area of the home’s assembly. A THERM analysis will show as a wide, continuous line of warmth (consistent red color) wrapping the inside of a home. We don’t use this tool on every project, but it is convenient when inserting steel beams and other highly conductive materials into old wood buildings or when managing structural elements that span through the walls to the exterior.