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Re: [Strawbale] Moisture monitor, logger and alarm
On Fri, 21 May 2010 04:23:42 -0300, equilibre <sven@equilibre...> wrote:
I live in my Reedbale house for 2 years now and I'm also monitoring
Relative humidity and temperature inside the rooms, inside the wall and
outside. For the room I have right now digital measuring tool - Velleman
datalogger.
For me it would be interesting, as to Eddy, to know what is the
functionality and price?
I'm wondering if the European baleheads are familiar with the efforts by
senior researcher Don Fugler at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp (
www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca ) back in the mid-late 1990's to develop reliable /
effective /inexpensive means for SB homeowners to monitor the moisture
scenario inside their bale walls ?
Basically, the outcome of that initiative was a moisture sensor that was
cheap like borscht -- consisting of a short length of plastic water supply
line (ie PEX) about the size of two segments of your index finger into
which is inserted, a small wooden block with two screws connected to a
couple of wires from telephone cable.
The above sensor is planted into the bales and the two wires run out to
two screws mounted in a small coin-sized scrap of Lexan or PlexiGlas which
serves as the reading station.
From the above description, it should be apparent that a homeowner could
make a few dozen of the above sensors and reading terminals for less than
the cost of a cup of storebought coffee.
The report with instructions for fabricating the sensors should still be
available at the CMHC website and instructions for making variations on
the original design (provided by Habib Gonzalez and Rob Jolly, two
baleheads who made a bunch, planted them into SB houses in British
Columbia and Alberta and then collected the monitoring data into two
reports which they wrote for CMHC) are stored in the FILES section at the
SB-r-Us Yahoogroup.
Since the hygrothermal activity inside of properly designed/built
plastered SB walls should be minimal, the monitoring data collected over
the course of a month or two would be about as interesting as watching
hair growing or paint drying .
Seasonal readings should suffice to alert the homeowner to any potential
moisture problems that may need attention.
Those seasonal readings can be obtained with something as simple as a wood
moisture meter .
http://www.leevalley.com/en/wood/page.aspx?c=&p=32548&cat=1,43513,45788
It should be apparent that the biggest cost for this "system" is the wood
moisture meter.
That cost can be minimised simply by sharing the meter amongst a group of
SB homeowners, if desired.
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot c a >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "Reply")
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