Principle of Avoiding Condensation

Each of us lives in a house or building, and the conditioned environment must keep a comfortable temperature and humidity level. Those conditions create differences of temperatures and relative humidity which generates driving forces for energy flow and air/vapor movement and the premise of having condensation, with the related consequences of mold and degradation.

While the energy flow can be slowed down by adding real insulation value, the condensation phenomenon has had no solution to be avoided (reduced to zero) before the invention of the Principle of Avoiding Condensation.

A New Principle of Technology that enables the design of condensation-free envelope walls.

EIOS offers the world's newest technical principle for constructing enclosures by completely eliminating the condensation phenomenon, the cycles of wetting and drying and the resulting mold and degradation.

When it comes to vapor transfer, condensation, mold, and its consequences, just about every knows - especially people involved in construction - that our actual prescriptive requirements for moisture control depend on the “vapor diffusion paradigm” and not on scientists’ default and reproducible experiments.

The current fundamental principle used to control water in vapor form is to keep it out and to let it back out if it gets in the wall or to encourage drying mechanisms over wetting prevention mechanisms. It gets complicated because sometimes the best strategies to keep water vapor out also traps water vapor in, causing even more complications because of climates and seasons. We need different strategies for different climates. The differences between summer and winter in different climates need to be taken into consideration in the same strategy, which is rather impossible.

All of these thoughts lead to a legitimate question:

Is there a situation, configuration, or assembly that completely avoids condensation despite the climate or season? Can we have a general rule to use as a principle to avoid condensation in building enclosures (and not only)?

The answer is YES, and so enters the new theory of Non-Permissive Insulation. The Principle of Avoiding Condensation can be formulated, understood, and used in the designing and construction of enclosures. The benefits of this principle are obvious. 

As a basic fundamental of science, the Principle of Avoiding Condensation is defined below:

When there is a temperature difference and an enclosure is interposed between the high interior temperature and the low exterior temperature (or vice versa), in order to avoid condensation, the heat flow needs to convert the cold flow (deficit of heat) in a material or in an thermo-insulation assembly without vapor diffusion or any air/vapor flow that carries warm vapor towards cold areas.

The Principle of Avoiding Condensation and the Non-Permissive Method to build is presented by EIOS for the first time. The goal is to be understood and applied so it becomes a universal principle that benefits everyone.

So the philosophy of this new Principle is that heat has to meet the cold in an insulation material or system without the presence (passing through) of any vapors. By achieving this, the warm environment is "stopped" on the warm surface of the insulation, which is a condensation-free plane, because it is in a dew-point free area.  

By applying the Principle of Avoiding Condensation set forth in the Design Technology to Eliminate Condensation, we created EIOS (Exterior Insulation Over-Specified). We offer the world's first highly insulated wall system that dries and stays dry in all environmental situations. This is a beneficial alternative to the breathing, wetting, and energy flow walls.