are among the most important weapons in the battle against excessive indoor moisture. Left uncontrolled, moisture inside the home creates health problems for the inhabitants of your home and causes structural damage to your home itself. One of the best ways of using vapor barriers to their full potential is to consider for which parts of the home it is ideal to install a vapor barrier and for which areas it is not beneficial.
Vapor Barriers
To understand whether it is beneficial to install a vapor barrier in your bathroom, it first is necessary to consider the general concept of a vapor barrier. Air always has some amount of moisture in it; this moisture is called water vapor. When air laden with water vapor makes physical contact with a colder surface, the moisture condenses into water. Vapor barriers are not meant to prevent this condensation from forming so much as they are meant to prevent the water vapor that can form condensation from making its way inside the home.
In the Bathroom
For vapor barriers to be effective, they need to be installed in an area where there is an extreme temperature differential between one side of the wall and the other, because it is this temperature differential that actually causes condensation to form. This is why vapor barriers are installed only in exterior walls in the home, because condensation is most likely to form on walls that serve as the barrier between warm air inside the home and colder air outside. Therefore, if your bathroom has exterior walls, it would be wise to install vapor barriers in them. But bathrooms with only interior walls probably would not benefit from the installation of a vapor barrier.
Installation Tips
There is a wide proliferation of materials useful as vapor barriers, including polyethylene film, asphalt-coated or laminated paper, kraft-backed aluminum foil, rigid foam insulation, reinforced plastics, aluminum, stainless steel and many others. To aid consumers in choosing a good vapor barrier material, manufacturers label each material with a "perm value" that indicates its degree of resistance to vapor flow. Any material with a perm value below 1.0 is considered ideal for a vapor barrier. Vapor barriers typically are installed on the inside of the wall between the wall framing and the wall finish.
Other Bathroom Moisture Control Tips
Whether it has an exterior wall or not, the bathroom is one of the areas of the home most prone to moisture problems. Therefore, in addition to installing a vapor barrier inside exterior walls, it is important to use other moisture control strategies in the bathroom, both to augment the effectiveness of your vapor barrier and to control sources of moisture that the vapor barrier cannot control. Installing exhaust fans, sealing the bathroom tightly with weatherstripping or caulk and maintaining insulation in the bathroom can go a long way in keeping moisture levels inside the bathroom at a manageable level.
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