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Moisture control design has to respond to all relevant hygrothermal loads

Hartwig Kuenzel, Mark Dewsbury (2021)

Moisture related damage is still a formidable cost factor in the building sector. Besides installation deficiencies, moisture control design failures are the most frequent reasons for moisture problems. Therefore, adequate moisture control analysis has become the key for sustainable buildings. However, by focusing on vapour diffusion only other important moisture loads such as driving rain, construction moisture or air infiltration are mostly neglected. Therefore, international moisture control standards often refer to simulation models for more realistic analysis, leaving many practitioners wondering how to handle these tools. To overcome this dilemma, the updated German moisture control standard has introduced a three-pathway approach for design evaluation: 1 st deemed to satisfy list, 2 nd restricted Glaser calculation and 3 rd fully fledged hygrothermal simulation. The third pathway includes the option to account for small leaks or imperfections in building envelope components. Guidelines in other countries are also embracing similar moisture control approaches which gives hope for more durable and sustainable building design. To reach this aim, moisture control should also become an integral part of the design process instead of a secondary chore.

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DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-ARCH.ADCI9V.v1.RBQJHU

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This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.

ScienceOpen disciplines: Architecture

Keywords: Built environment,Sustainable development,Moisture control design standard; hygrothermal simulation; vapour diffusion calculation; deemed to satisfy; component leaks;

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A few specific comments are presented below:

This is an excellent paper
The paper looks at the importance of considering all moisture loads in a building when assessing the design and moisture risk.
The authors clearly described the different water sources that may affect or create risk conditions within the building, which should be adequately assessed.
It is excellent to see the links between the different sources of water, the issues that they may generate and how they are currently assessed.
In this way, it is also very interesting to see the limitation of the different and available tools highlighting what we could be missing.
The authors also provide several solutions for specific details and construction circumstances when discussing common issues.
Also great to see discussion on what is the current limitation of some of the tools but also an indication of what aspects of the current way of assessing moisture risk needs further work sample more grow sensitivity
Even though I could understand them, some figures need a bit of work and probably more explanation of what precisely the reader should look at. For example, in Figure 4, what is the relationship between the diagram and the picture; in Figure 5, the quality of the photo is not the best, so the staining on the render is not evident as it should be. The simulations shown in Figure 9 are unreadable, so unclear what is being presented