Brutally Cold
It’s 14 degrees outside as I write this, and I can see a lot more clearly how the house is loosing heat now. The problem spots aren’t all what I thought they were. The exterior walls are worse then I thought, while the attic insulation is doing much better then I’d thought it did.
The house is maintaining temperature but the exterior walls are so cold it’s making the floors cold. Basically, air against the exterior walls is getting chilled and then sinking down to the floor and spreading out. So my feet are cold as ice as I walk around the house but my upper body, and everything a couple feet above floor level here at Casa del Garrett, is staying nice and warm.
The walls are, I kid you not, much, Much colder then the windows and the window frames. The windows here, which are new double pane windows installed by the previous owner, are really showing their insulating ability now. They’re staying warm to the touch nicely. The walls themselves are showing their 1950s housing code genetics. They are brutally cold to the touch. And being all masonry and plaster, they’ll retain their chill even as the outside air starts climbing back out of the single digits. Any inside air that hangs against them is being chilled to refrigerator temperatures. Then it slides off and spreads across the floor.
Meanwhile the second floor ceiling is warm to the touch. That old shredded paper insulation in the attic crawl space is better at keeping the heat in then I’d thought. And with the air leak in the bathroom skylight sealed up now, the second floor is staying much warmer now then it ever did in the winter. The chill here is all below knee level. It’s really weird.
So I’m going out to the hardware store in a bit to buy some of that blue foam sheet insulation and do a wee experiment. I’m going to put it up against the exterior bedroom wall with double sided tape and see what that does. For various reasons that’s an easy interior wall to do an insulation experiment on, and a good test case because facing the back of the house, which is the north face, that wall doesn’t even get any warmth from the sun hitting it. I’ll just cut some foam pieces with a utility knife and one of my big metal straight-edges so they fit snugly. Then I’ll tack them in place with some double-sided tape and see what effect it has. It doesn’t have to look good, just be a proof-of-concept. If it works well enough then I’ll start making plans to build out that wall, and the other exterior walls here at Casa del Garrett.
The days when you could just burn gas heat like it didn’t cost anything are long, long gone…
January 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
How are you going to get those big peices of foam into your car? Or will they deliver? Cutting them into littler peices to fit into your car creates that much more work.
Be sure to run a strip of tape along the top and bottom (Especially the bottom) of the foam where it joins the floor. You want to seal that up or the cold air will just leak leak out and across your floor.
Let us know what thickness you go with. 1/2, 1", or whatever. I’ve seen some that was 1/2 inch and folded. That might be more managable, but I’d go with the 1".
I hope your double-sided tape is fairly robust stuff. Seems like the cold temp and possible condensation might not work well with the tape. But trial and error.
When touring with one of my most favorite employers, I got the name of "Styrofoam Artist". It was because the boxes that the books I sold as merch had 1′ X 10" peices of 1/2 inch foam as packing material. One night during a show I was at the merch stand with no customers (Because the show was going on) So I took a peice of this foam and was using it to calculate figures on (Because I couldnt find any scratch paper) I quickly discovered that my sharpie ink reacted in a cool way with the foam. So I took one of the books, and the photo of the author on the back, and started doing this sort of pointillist reproduction of that picture, fascinated my the way the ink made this somewhat 3-D effect. I got one done, and decided I could do better, and did another. By then the concert let out and the crowd came streaming out to my merch table, rabid fans wanting to BUY BUY BUY! A couple of the fans spotted my "portrates" and asked how much they were. I tried explaining that those were just something I doodled around on and they really had nothing to do with the performer. They didn’t care! They WANTED them, and they demanded a price. So I shot them a price of $40 bucks, thinking that would scare them away from those, and towards buying the actual book at half that cost….which was autographed. No deal, they wanted the scrap peice of styrofoam AND the book! But the customer is always right, so I sold the two "portraits" for $40 each, kinda snickering about it, but also worried that I was being bad. Once those two were sold, a lot of other people started demanding them. And getting really disapointed and even nasty that I was out of them.
So after all was said and done, I packed up my merch table and did my accounting, and headed back stage. I found the tour manager and the performer, and explained what I had done, and gave her the $80 bucks. She stared at the money kind of blankly while the tour manager stared at me incredulously (Seems like every day I did something that made him look at me like that) He said "Wait, now your selling your OWN merch?" "No, it was an accident….the people demanded this silly thing". The performer was actually a little impressed, and handed me the $80 bucks back and said "Its your artwork, you keep them money".
So I made a little cash on the side for the rest of the tour. But I also created some other things out of styrofoam, like packing peices to hold peices of fragile equipment securely in its cases. So I got dubbed "The styrofoam artist".
I like making stuff.
Let us know how the blue foam works out, and how you manage to get it from the store to your place.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
They were 2×8 sheets and I just cut them in half. There aren’t any spaces on the back wall longer then 4 feet I want to cover. Traveler’s back seat folds down nicely so transporting 2×4 sheets of anything inside of it isn’t difficult.
The double sided tape I’m going to use is sticky foam core mounting tape. I use it to put up artwork here and there in the house. It’s pricier, but strong, and it will seal the edges around the foam sheets nicely.
Not sure how I’m going to handle the area around the floor molding yet.
This is my project this afternoon. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes.