Ep. 5 - Why you NEED to be building mock-ups.

This episode we discuss mock-ups and why every project should make them, and lament the reasons why so many don't.

Transcript

Dave Penington: Welcome to Pro Talks, the podcast where we take a deep dive into a topic in the construction industry. I'm Dave Pennington, building envelope business unit leader at PROSOCO, and today I'm joined by the members of our technical team to discuss fluid applied air and water barriers and mockups. So I'd like to let my panel introduce themselves. And we'll start with Guy Long.

Guy Long: My name is Guy Long. I am a former building envelope consultant that brings a number of years out in the field and supporting the architectural community. I also provide assistance with CAD and blue beam markups and that's one of the functions that I do, along with plan, review and looking at how we can incorporate our system into someone's design. That's what I do. What about you, Pat?

Pat Downey: I'm pat downey. I cover the Western US. From Denver to Hawaii, the Mexican border through Canada, and my background is in windows and doors, retrofit new construction. I come out and do trainings on job sites, presentations and support the project. I like to really be involved with the projects throughout the Western US. And been doing this since 2008 with this group and windows since the early 90s. Paul, what about you?

Paul Grahovac: I'm Paul GrahovaC. I'm manager of Coach Standards and field support out of the corporate office.

Chris Tobias: And I'm Chris Tobias, I'm the newest member of the team. I joined PROSOCO in January and 20 years in the commercial roofing segment of construction. And I work in the upper Midwest from Minnesota over to western PA. I work with contractors and architects, specifiers and consultants like to get on the projects, work with contractors, learning how to install the project and troubleshoot those odd details.

Dave Penington: Awesome. Thank you guys. Alright, today we're going to talk about mockups. Something we've noticed that the industry has kind of moved away from them a little bit and they are so important, important to understanding compatibility of products and defining what's performing and what's not performing. And our group today has a lot of opinions about that. So let's talk about mockups, guys.

Guy Long: That's a good idea. Let me collaborate with my colleague here, Paul Grehovak. We worked on a project in Kansas City. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it, Paul.

Paul Grahovac: It's known as Second and Delaware. It's the largest passive house apartment building in the world. I believe it's 376 units. And it has some huge passive house, triple pane heavy windows that were going to be installed and ultimately were. And you know, we said, hey, we've got some test chambers, maybe you ought to give some thought to using them so that you get the best result.

Guy Long: Well, I think one of the first things we did is in design development, in our meetings, we had the ability to tell them that we had those testing chambers and it facilitated the concrete casting contractor to say, well, why don't we put together this mockup cast? The window opening at this point, let's get with the window manufacturer and let's put this all together and kind of test it based on what the actual construction is going to be like. And we proceeded with that thought process. The concrete contractor cast this huge wall that we had to bring it in on an 18 wheeler and have a significant weighted crane to pick it up and get it into our chamber area, of which then we hooked up our chamber. We then proceeded to follow the instructions from the window manufacturer on how to put his two part window assembly that incorporated not only the fenestration of the window, but also the sill, which was not part of the entire window. It was a separate element. And when we followed the instructions from the contractor or from the window manufacturer, we found that the weakness occurred where that interface between the two windows came. The manufacturer of the window assembly insisted on that. This is the way it had to be. Well, perhaps maybe in Ireland, where they originally developed it, it worked. In fact, some of the testing that was done, unlike what they do here in the United States, was they put the pressure from the outside. It was from the inside. So everything pressed against the wall. Well, in our American type testing that we do, we do the pressure from the outside because that's really where the pressure is coming, which showed the vulnerability of that interface between the seal and that window fenestration. And as a result of that, we had to go back. We had to isolate the window frame and actually insert it into the opening and seal the fenestration extrusion to the rough opening totally. And once we did that, we found that we had a very effective and very stout seal from the intrusion of air and the intrusion of water.

Paul Grahovac: So we dispensed with the cell piece altogether.

Guy Long: Correct? We did. And it was quite unusual. At least the manufacturer from Ireland was looking at it and totally agreed with our solution. At this point in time, of course, we used our proprietary material to seal that window off. But as a result, they found the ability to maintain that air and water tightness that they were looking for to provide the air tightness for passive house certification.

Dave Penington: What was the outcome of finding the best path forward? I mean, what did this job? This job was very successful. Largest passive house in North America. Right?

Pat Downey: Yes.

Paul Grahovac: Apartment building, right?

Dave Penington: Yeah. That's fantastic. And it really lends itself to the value of a mockup and studying the details and making sure it performs before you build the structure. Right?

Guy Long: No question. And again, it's got to be part of the specification. It's got to be part of the design, detailed drawings to understand how these things come together. Another one comes to mind with regards to working at the University of Tennessee. In this particular case, they had a situation in which it was a two story mockup of this particular wall assembly and roof transition and below grade because of the terrain in which the building was being built. So not only did we have interface with below grade, but we had curtain wall, we had roofing interface, we had all kinds of different interfaces that required the need to build a two story mockup. And the curiosity about the whole testing of the mockup and getting it ready to be tested was the fact that it happened to be in a season in Tennessee where it rained almost every day, and we had our material that can be used when the products or the substrates are wet. And we were able to demonstrate the hardiness of the STP technology in which we applied the material in the rain. The Observers were out there in their umbrellas and rain jackets watching how things were being done. And as a result of that, once that was all finished, cured and ready for air testing, when they did air test it, they found that, again, the usefulness of the mockup was such that we were able to overcome all of the different interface concerns and intricacies that typically come up when you put a mock up together as that size. And what we ended up doing was performing as expected, airtight, watertight. And we have since then been involved with multiple projects there at the University of Tennessee in doing most of all of their new construction. Every time we do something like that, we do a mockup and test it.

Dave Penington: That's great stuff. Those are good, positive examples. The other side of that is, how much does it cost you if you put this off? Or I see in new construction, a lot of the time, people wait until the job is finished just as a punch list thing to finish the mock up because it's in the spec. That doesn't tell you anything about performance. The building is already enclosed and everything.

Guy Long: It really doesn't. What happens is, the fact is that we don't look at all of those intricacies until we're on the job site. The contractors out there, the subs are out there, and all of a sudden we see these things don't come together the way we thought they were going to come together. And what happens is now the job stops. We go back into the drawing or drafting room and try to figure out how these things go together. And when you do that, that's where the cost goes. It skyrockets in terms of trying to maintain budgets from the get go. If you don't do that, and you don't take the time up front during design, during the detail washing out or making sure that things are done appropriately, that's where it really starts to cost money. And unfortunately, the people that do not do mock ups are the ones that suffer that consequence. When it comes down to it, again, we always insist upon doing mockups because that's where you find out where the problems occur, not when you're on the job site putting everything together that cost big money to fix.

Dave Penington: Sure. I know that there's some good examples that Pat and Chris have talked about in the past. If you guys maybe share a bad job that could have been solved with a mock up.

Pat Downey: Yeah, I had one in Seattle where they didn't do mockups. They had great ideas. They had a product that was relatively new and basically they put it on and within two years, the seating had molded and they actually had to strip everything off. And of course, the insurance is only going to pay for like materials, but everything was out of sequence. People weren't trained properly where you can train on mockups as well. And so now in this project, we've gone in and we've done a mockup. We're mocking up the windows, the sequencing, who's going to be where it brings all of that out. So it went from no mockup, very expensive to fix it, and now we're motoring through. And the mockup is also the example of how this product is going to look. And if you bring new people on applicators, you can bring them down to the mockup. This is how the rough opening looks. This is how the air barrier looks. This is how you detail around through all penetrations. It's something that you can go through, especially if you have some people where there's a language barrier. This helps them out. You got a visual. And then you can also do we're doing adhesion tests, various products what are lapping on to each other. And so mock ups are extremely important to get everybody on the same page.

Dave Penington: Yeah. Chris, do you have them? That's great. Chris, do you have any thoughts on mockups?

Guy Long: I don't know that I can add.

Chris Tobias: Much more than what Pat said. We had a project up in Chicago. It was a veterinarian hospital and no mockup. The Mason came in, built a CMU backup wall. They looked at the windows. The windows were going to be set out from the CMU and they looked and they thought that the windows were going to be set on the insulation. So they just go ahead and return the CMU at the rough opening and return that out. So now we have half blocks that are irregular and no real way to flash and install the air barrier. In lieu of just having a mock up. We could have said, hey, let's put some wood blocking out there and put some bucks on the exterior and hang the window appropriately. So now we have a very odd orientation and holes all throughout the CMU block that we have to work around. And at the same time, the contractor really wasn't fully trained on what products to use. And it would have been a great opportunity to work that through on the mockup versus on the finished product.

Dave Penington: Yeah.

Guy Long: The other thing Dave, that we need to consider is that the design professionals are accustomed to dealing with mockups from a visual perspective. They're wanting to see how this color or how much shading or all that other stuff. Again, there's two types of mock up. One is from an aesthetic perspective where they stand back so far, they look at it and say oh, that's what I perceive it to do. But from our perspective we want a functioning machine that has the ability to be tested for air and water tightness. That's where what Pat had talked about, specifically about it, field, adhesion testing, all of that can be done without having to wait until we now start to construct it and we find oh my goodness, this sealant will not help us bond to a perimeter condition or an interface between a penetration. Those are the things that come back to haunt us and it's much easier to deal with it on the front end than it is during construction. Always cost a fortune to fix. Always.

Dave Penington: Absolutely. And you touched on something that Pat touched on as well and that's adhesion testing and being present, that's a big part of what we do. Guys know that being on the job and providing that service is something we've always felt is our duty as the manufacturer. And really I think that when you're building a building you need to have the product manufacturer there to make sure that your materials are going in properly. You just don't want to get a product off the shelf and go figure it out. You need direction sometimes with job specific details and involvement in the mockup or the job start and training of the contractor. So you know to have the manufacturer on your team is critical. Have that mockup can save you a lot of heartburn and money and it also can bring you some hugely successful projects that people just don't forget. You know, that service is addictive for specifiers and that's always been our path forward as manufacturers. So I think it's very clear that mockups are important and as much as construction teams might want to move through that really quickly or value engineer it out of a job, it is really important to make sure that that happens.

Guy Long: It's a recipe for disaster.

Dave Penington: Absolutely.

Chris Tobias: You talk about compatibility testing. A lot of that compatibility testing is done in the lab and mockups do a really good job of answering that question of whether we're going to have compatibility or not on site. Right. So you're being asked so often is this compatible, is this work? Does this work? But if you use it on a mock up now you can really evaluate in that environment and how those products are installed and allow those, observe them and then do some testing on them and we really know that they're compatible on that project.

Dave Penington: Absolutely. Job site is always better than a lab because it's the real condition the products being used in. Great.

Chris Tobias: One other point I would just like to mention. I was listening to someone talk about this, and I think I think it's really important is mockups are great, but it doesn't do you a lot of good if you take your best guys who are on another project, bring them over, install the product on the mockup, and then walk off the job. I think it's pretty essential to make sure that the crews that are going to be installing the products are the ones also erecting and putting your products on that mockup.

Guy Long: Good point.

Dave Penington: That is a great point, Chris. Thank you. Yeah, well, good stuff, guys. Anybody have anything else to add about mockups? I think we all agree that they're critically important. All right, well, thank you guys for contributing today. And I think it was another successful protalk.