Author Description

Building in BC's coastal climate has special challenges -- and this 265 page guide is the most up-to-date, authorative information available to help meet those challenges. This guide provides the most comprehensive technical information on how to build to withstand the conditions of BC's coastal climate. The guide is intended to provide guidance, primarily to designers, for the design of the building envelopes of multi-unit wood-frame buildings in the coastal climate zone of British Columbia. The guide should also be useful to the construction industry in general, encouraging an understanding of the behavior and performance of building envelope assemblies. Much of the material in the guide may also be applicable to other climate zones and building types. Although the guide is intended to reflect good practice in general, its primary focus is on the management of moisture, since moisture-related performance problems prompted this initiative. The guide therefore does not deal specifically with structural, acoustic or fire and safety issues that may also have an impact on the design of the building envelope. The information in the guide includes behaviour of wood in construction, moisture source control strategies, heat flow mechanisms, typical envelope assembly characteristics, and materials for inclusion in specifications, quality assurance strategies, maintenance and renewal strategies and more than 53 state-of-the-art CAD details showing several air barrier strategies, all included on th.