The following article was posted in Buildingscience.com By Joseph Lstiburek.
The perfect wall is an environmental separator—it has to keep the outside out and the inside in. In order to do this the wall assembly has to control rain, air, vapor and heat. In the old days we had one material to do this: rocks. We would pile a bunch or rocks up and have the rocks do it all. But over time rocks lost their appeal. They were heavy and fell down a lot. Heavy means expensive and falling down is annoying. So construction evolved. Today walls need four principal control layers—especially if we don’t build out of rocks. They are presented in order of importance:
- a rain control layer
- an air control layer
- a vapor control layer
- a thermal control layer
A point to this importance thing here, if you can’t keep the rain out don’t waste your time on the air. If you can’t keep the air out don’t waste your time on the vapor.
The best place for the control layers is to locate them on the outside of the structure in order to protect the structure. When we built out of rocks the rocks didn’t need much protection. When we build out of steel and wood we need to protect the steel and wood. And since most of the bad stuff comes from outside the best place to control the bad stuff is on the outside of the structure before it gets to the structure.
Also, after generations of building out of rocks folks somehow got the idea that they wanted to be comfortable—and they figured out that rocks were not the best insulation. I mean rocks are not that bad compared to windows—memo to architects: you can’t build an energy efficient green building out of glass, but you can get design awards and we all know which is more important. Back to rocks, they are heavy and you need a lot of them to make the wall have any decent thermal resistance so we invented thermal insulation.
But where to put the insulation? If we put the insulation on the inside of the structure the insulation does not protect the structure from heat and cold. Remember we really do want to protect that darn structure—especially for the sake of making the structural engineers life more happy. Expansion, contraction, corrosion, decay, ultra violet radiation, and almost all bad things all are functions of temperature. So all the control layers go on the outside. Keep the structure from going through temperature extremes and protect it from water in its various forms and ultra violet radiation and life is good.
Read the rest of the article: https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-the-perfect-wall