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Ted's Energy Tips 
I have a tongue and groove ceiling in a log cabin that is built exactly as you described in the article. Rigid foam insulation jammed in between with no air gap. I have an ice and water shield on the plywood deck and metal roofing on top of that. This is the first summer. I have had this constructed this way as we replaced the roof last summer. Starting to have moisture problems as of the other day and heavy dripping. What is the best way to fix this without removing the roof?
What’s the weather and temperature been like recently? Day and night. Where I am, this time of year is tough. Lots of things are still holding cold, then the morning hits and it might be much warmer and foggy. That immediately condenses on the cold surfaces and they sweat. Dripping wet. Is this the kind of thing that you might be experiencing?
it’s been the standard Pacific Northwest weather ha ha which means 75 in the day and sometimes down to 45 at night. But the day it started dripping was actually the first really warm day. I also own a roofing company and have seen this happen when moisture builds up in a space and when it gets really warm, it tries to evaporate, but instead comes back down. My main concern is I just bought this house and put a 50 year metal roof on it, now I feel like it’s going to rot from the inside out.
Well, I tried to reply but it seems like it deleted it. The conditions you describe sound like the same ones. When it gets warm, the air holds a lot more moisture and that will easily condense on any cool surface and then come dripping down. It sounds like the air is getting underneath the metal roof, which means it can also get out and evaporate. My main concern is whether it be dripping down into other building materials and soaking in there as liquid water and building up and causing rot in those materials.
Ted,
Happy Spring finally, hope you’re well! Along the back of my house my floor joists cantilever 2′ out from the basement wall. Currently I have the cantilever blocked off and air-sealed from the interior basement. Within the cantilevered bays, I have 2″ rigid foam sealed up against the underside of the floor, then R-30 fiberglass insulation, then plywood on the bottom of the floor joists, enclosing the bays. I thought I had it insulated pretty well, but I noticed a discernible difference in the temperate of the floor over the basement as compared to over the cantilever this winter. Would it be better to use rigid foam on the bottom of the floor joist cantilever, to separate from the outside, and remove the blocking to open the bays to the interior of the basement, so heat from the basement could flow into the cantilever, helping to keep the floor warm from underneath? Or will it be colder regardless of what I do, simply due to the nature of it being a cantilever?
It was a long, cold winter!
The short reply is put insulation right up tight against the subfloor.
I have a 5’ overhang like that and had them try to blow in insulation when they were doing the walls. That was a failure is it all fell to the lower surface where it was useless! So now we have cold feet all winter. If I was able, I’d redo it.
You could use a couple inches of XPS then pack in fiberglass under it. Don’t bother opening the bays to the warmer sections, that’ll just waste the energy.
Whatever you do, do it tight because you’ll be fighting gravity and any air gap will mean cold floors again.
Cheers