DuPont Tyvek HomeWrap and Tyvek DrainWrap have proven themselves time and time again to be the highest quality house wrap available today.
First you will want to understand the reason for placing a house wrap on your home. It has become more important than ever to use a good quality house wrap, With the expanded use of vinyl sidings and fiber cement sidings, both having poor qualities of shedding moisture due to their installation methods.
In modern construction homes are being built for the most part with wood sub sheathing under the exterior wall finish. This will usually be either plywood or OSB (Oriented Strand Board) sheathing. These products will eventually deteriorate or delaminate if left exposed to exterior moisture.
Thus the introduction of house wraps to replace the old practice of building paper or tar paper covers. The house wrap is suppose to allow the walls to breath moisture out to help reduce the chance of mold or mildew build up while limiting the exposure of moisture on the sheathing from the outside.
Most modern house wraps use a similar process of taking a water resistant sheet and perforating its surface to allow moisture in the wall to breath out. The problem with this system is rather obvious, if you poke holes in a surface and then expect it not to leak any water when it gets wet you are going to be disappointed. The rub is that there is an allowable level of permeation or infiltration that these companies comply with that is considered to be good enough.
Here is where both DuPont Tyvek HomeWrap and DrainWrap are very different than any other product. These products are made using a patented process that creates a non-perforated sheet. They actually create an extremely fine, continuous, high-density mesh of fibers that are fused together to form a strong tight web. The microscopic pores this process creates allow moisture trapped in the walls to breath out but at the same time it blocks virtually all moisture from getting back to the sheathing.
Tyvek DrainWrap has the added advantage of having what has been called a vertical grooved crinkled surface which allows any water trapped between the loose siding and the wrap to drain away and is the recommended product to be placed behind all fiber cement siding products.
When properly installed and combined with the recommended flashing system of DuPont FlexWrap and Straight Flash you will have created the most watertight home barrier available today.
Learn more about the proper installation of Tyvek HomeWrap as well as the DuPont Flashing system at my web site listed below.
If you think you have found a better house wrap than Tyvek HomeWrap leave us a comment and tell us about it.
My name is Jim Patrick, and I am an accomplished residential designer with hundreds of families enjoying the fruits of our mutual labor, but I also spend every day selling every aspect of building product to my clients. Visit my Homebuilding Questions Tyvek HomeWrap page for more information including installation details.
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