Why A Building Enclosure Blog?

Summary: This post introduces you to the building enclosure blog and describes the reasons for the existence of this blog. We want to make you a better Enclosurist by giving you the information you need in a format you want to build on the experience you have.

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A Close Call

“I found myself, drowning in the alphabet soup. Unable to take a breath as the letters mercilessly broke over my face. I was being dragged deeper and deeper into a dark ocean of confusion and self-doubt. Wave after wave crashed over me, EPDM, PolyISO,  ASTM, BECxP, ASHRAE, XPS (or was it EPS…?) I was unable to breathe. What is this?!

I was trying to figure out what language they were speaking while pretending to follow what they said, nodding while frantically writing down as much of the confusion as I could. I was hoping to Google it later that night, or at least save the sheet for when I tell the grandkids about the day grandpa tried to be an Enclosurist and barely escaped…”

Sounds Familiar?

My experience was not unique. For many people moving into the highly technical field of building enclosures, the learning curve is steep.

It seems like this is true whether you’ve just started your career, or whether you’ve been active in an associated field for many years. The difficulty is partly due to three reasons.

• There is a lot to learn
• No easy way to learn it
• Getting it wrong is very, very bad

Firstly, the building enclosure consists of multiple systems that need to work together to perform correctly.

These systems consist of countless building products that can be combined in an infinite number of ways.

In addition to existing products, not a day goes by where there is not a new, practically unpronounceable material that comes onto the market. So, there is a lot to know.   

Secondly, in this rapidly changing field there is no easy or fast way to learn what you need to know.

In addition to the normal demands of design practice it can take years to become familiar with the different enclosure systems and products out there.

There is nobody out there that can take you by the hand and teach you everything you need to know about building enclosures in a few days or even months.

It is up to you to develop your expertise through experience and personal study. So, there is no easy way to learn it all. 

Thirdly, performance requirements are more stringent today than they have ever been.

We are asking our enclosures to do more than ever before. Keeping in more heat and air also means keeping in moisture. This makes the proper material selection and correct detailing crucial.

Not getting it right in the past may have caused a building to use too much energy. Not getting it right today may lead to premature failure and expensive repairs. The room for error has decreased, and this risk turns many people off from doing this work. Getting it wrong is not good. It is very, very bad.

So, in short, there is a lot to learn, no easy way to learn it, and getting it wrong is very, very bad.

Why am I telling you all this?

Not long ago I took the plunge and moved from traditional architectural practice into the field of enclosure design and consulting. The learning curve was steep, to say the least, but the more I learned, the more I realized three things.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that made it very difficult to know where to start learning.

Once I realized what I didn’t know, I didn’t know where to find the information I wanted to know.

Once I found the information, I struggled to develop a comprehensive understanding of the field and the most important issues without spending hours sifting through material that was not relevant to my work.

At times I felt like all I needed was somebody to help me with a simple framework of the field and a basic overview of the essential concepts and principles so I can then continue to learn the rest on my own. And that is why I started this website.

Our Goal

We want to give you the information you need in a format you want to build on the experience you have.

Over time, we want to build this building enclosure blog as a resource that does three things:

• Give you an overview of the building enclosure field
• Help you understand critical concepts and principles
• Point you in the direction of useful resources (and people more experienced than ourselves) to help you learn on your own.

The Building Enclosure Blog, we hope, is the place you can learn something tonight that will help you better design, build, evaluate, or manage a building enclosure tomorrow.

There are thousands of people who know more about building enclosures than I do, but there are millions who know less.

Our goal is to make the millions the thousands.