Careful, while it is an interesting industry, homes are already expensive. People have a hard enough time affording them without using additional advanced materials and labor. Also the general public can't tell you what kind of sheathing their new home is being built with but can give you detailed specifics on the countertops they've ordered. There's only so many successful doctors and businessmen who want well built homes.

A lot of builders want to build better homes but are limited by the relatively few that care enough to spend more or spend less in other areas. A good way to go broke for a spec home builder is to build high-performance homes that cost 10% more than the spec homes down the street. Those homes will be sitting on the market for a long time until the few people that care about home performance show up. Thankfully people are getting more educated and builders like Matt Risinger are really helping push it. But if you've watched any of Matt's videos, he's building multi-million dollar homes--not homes for nurses and insurance salesmen.

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Posted by dragginass

Member since Jan 2013

2785 posts

Posted on 7/21/23 at 10:47 am to Turnblad85

Agree 100%. I think it has to be "sold" from the durability angle. That said, I think some of the coming code changes requiring blower door testing will force some changes. No doubt most builders will still cut corners, but it's a nice thought that better materials like zip might get more common.

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Posted by AyyyBaw

Member since Jan 2020

1076 posts

Posted on 7/21/23 at 11:08 am to dragginass

I've enjoyed the conversation in this thread, and you are 100% right regarding builders not wanting to do things outside of their normal comfort zone. I understand that from a builder's risk perspective. From what I've been able to gather - open cell sprayed at 5" should have a perm rating of approximately 5-10, so 3.5" should be north of 10. Decent air barrier but not a vapor retarder. I can see this becoming an issue in the future for those wanting to closed-cell spray everything without considering vapor perm and moisture accumulation in the home. The CDX was mainly for the higher perm rating when compared to OSB even though I see a ton of homes with OSB all over down here. It sounds like moisture should be able to dry well enough if going by the numbers, but does that correlate to real-world application - not sure. It's so dang hot and humid right now that it had my wheels turning about what is worth the extra cost and at what risk level for failure. Appreciate the input.

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