In November, I attended Walls & Ceilings' Business Solutions Conference, in Myrtle Beach, S.C. It was a great opportunity to meet people in the southeast, especially considering that I had just recently moved from Seattle to Jacksonville, Fla. While at the conference, a lot of people came up to me, I suppose to see what I am really like, having read this Finish Line column for many years. They had a lot of questions and one that kept coming up was that of thermal bridging.
When EIFS is attached using mechanical fasteners, one of the things that sometimes happens is that the fastener's location can be detected by simply looking at the wall. Usually, this takes the form of a dark spot at each fastener location. Building owners and designers can get pretty riled up about this and I am sometimes asked what can be done about it, both to avoid it in the first place, and to stop in from happening if it occurs. This month's column will explain what this phenomenon-called thermal bridging-is about and what can be done about it.