Building Life Consultancy, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, provided a training workshop for the use of WUFI Pro hygrothermal simulation software on the 14-15th of December. The course was a great success, largely due to the engaged discussion from the 23 participants in attendance.
At the end of the course, we had a number of requests for further practice problems that participants could work on to improve their understanding of the software. We have created a sample problem here for that reason. For participants of the course, or any other WUFI users in Ireland and abroad, please feel free to post comments and questions in this section of the blog to discuss your results or any problems you are having. We will post our results and comments in about a week’s time for comparison and continued discussion.
Practice Problem #1
Consider a flat roof in Dublin built according to the HomeBond detail for a warm deck roof construction (see build-up below). Assume it is a flat roof. The interior is gypsum board taped and skimmed affixed to 150mm joists. The decking is OSB (density 553 kg/m3). The VCL is a generic vapour retarder (mu = 3300 or 1 perm). The existing insulation is 60mm of EPS (density 30 kg/m3), with a generic roof membrane for weatherproofing above. Finally, on the exterior surface there is a finish with an appearance similar to bright limestone.
The client wants to improve the insulation value of this roof and is considering blowing cellulose fibre into the airspace between the joists. Based on your simulation, is this a good idea? Does it make a difference if this roof is over a living room or a shower room?