I Suppose This Isn’t Going To Do My Gas Bill Any Good…
Temperatures going down into the mid 20s tonight…but that’s just for openers. NOAA is calling for temperatures Thursday and Friday evenings down in the single digits. 7 to 12 Thursday night…4 to 9 Friday night.
I’ve taken some extra steps to plug up a few heat leaks this year. Casa del Garrett has a bathroom skylight that’s basically just some glass panes with wire honeycomb between them. It’s at the top of a box that goes through the ceiling and it has a vent in the middle that, though closed, isn’t really tight. So I put up some plastic sheet at the roofline, and another plastic sheet at the ceiling line. I’ve also stretched plastic sheet over the front office windows. They’re double-pane and supposed to be "weather proof" but I’ve noticed some slight leakage around them. The effect has been noticeable. The entire second floor is much warmer in the mornings now then before.
Even so, my front and back walls, which are exposed, get darn cold to the touch when the temperatures dip down. They didn’t build these 1950s rowhouses to hold in heat because energy was cheap then. My front and back walls are brick veneer, concrete block and plaster and that’s it. So I can walk up to one and not even put my hand on it to feel the cold radiating off it. Actually, that’s my heat leaking out. It’s times like this I’m glad I’m not an end of group unit.
What I probably need to do, is build an interior wall out from the front and back walls. Put up some studs and put insulation between them and put drywall over that. It’ll cost me some space and I’ll have to extend my window frames but that’s the only way I can see to keep the heat from leaking out of those walls.
Friday’s my telecommute day, so I won’t have to walk to work in that frigid air. But for kicks and grins I might take a walk out in it anyway. A heavy blanket of frigid air like that changes things outdoors. It’s like everything just…stops. Stiller then when it’s snowing. It’s like death out there…but it isn’t death, life is hunkering down and waiting it out. But everything is so…still. And it’s a different kind of stillness then when it’s snowing. It’s an empty, bottomless stillness. Almost eternal. Life is on hold…the cold winter wind finally has reign. Nothing moves, except the wind…looking for something…anything, that might still be moving…and finding nothing. Until the sun comes out a bit…and the birds…the ones that the hard freeze didn’t kill…start darting about. I’ll need to put out some extra food for them.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Is the word you were fishing for "Cryogenic"?
Theres something I find ironic with both sound and temp insolation" Air is the best insulator for both. However, both rely on air to move. Well, actually heat/cold is slightly different in that it radiates/sucks more easily through solid dense materials, which are the things that actually stop sound.
I’d bet that one of your geek friends, or maybe your job has a thermal imaging camera. Now aside from hunting for ghosts with these, they also have a side use for finding temperature leaks! If you could get your hands on one, without spending $5000 on ebay, you could look at your house from both the outside and the inside and find the cold and hot spots, and focus on fixing those.
I’d bet there is a service or business, probably an insulating or HVAC company that has one and will come out and evaluate your place…..and try to sell you something.
I wouldn’t go building extra interior walls. It sounds like the brick and walls are made of pretty dense materials. Unlike my house made of sticks. If you extend those window frames etc then you pretty much need to put a second pain of glass in them, otherwise you are still losing heat via the radiation of the window surface. But maybe temporary plastic sheets in the cold seasons could deal with that efficiently?
Yeah, it’s really cold here too. The whole "Wind chill factor" thing has always annoyed me. When they say "It’s 30 degrees out, but with the wind it FEELS like it’s 20 degrees". Well, ok, I get it.
This week the "Wind chill factor" has gotten down to -20 degrees. And down here in my dungeon lab, it feels about 35 degrees, but theres no wind.
That spray-foam stuff is a LOT of fun to play with, and it works really well to seal up cracks and leaks. BUT unless you are just a master with the stuff, it can look pretty ugly. Like some sci-fi blob oozing out and through a wall to liquify and devour you with its acid saliva. I should send a picture of one of my windows I sealed up with the stuff……its kind funny. Luckily no one but me see’s it.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am
A thermal imaging camera would be useful now. Especially now when it’s close to single digits out there. You’d just have to be able to see clearly where the heat leaks are in this weather.
I had a guy come out and try to sell me a foam insulation that would go in-between the gaps in the cinderblocks my house is mostly made up of (there is brick veneer on the outside walls). But I did some research and found out that doesn’t do much good since, as you point out, the heat will be wicked right out from the solid masonry. What needs to happen is there has to be a layer of trapped air. That’s what most insulators do. They break up the big convection currents into thousands of tiny much less efficient ones and it takes longer for the heat to get out. It still will eventually, but not in a way that it’s useless to try and keep the house warm.
All the plastic sheeting does is seal the windows from air leaks. It really doesn’t insulate much at all. My skylight was a major air leak…I could feel the drafts coming off it…so the plastic I put up there really killed a lot of the heat leakage on the second floor. The plastic around the windows, not so much, since they are a recent addition by the previous owner, double-pane and seal pretty tight. They make triple pane windows but I don’t know if it’s worthwhile installing them here. I think I have other bigger problems then the windows I have now. A thermal imaging camera would be useful.
Whenever the cold here starts irritating me I think of how bad your folks must have it on the plains every winter. I think I’d rather live in a Hobbit Hole out on the plains then in a regular house, and not just for the tornadoes.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
You can go to Home Despot and buy these big 4X8 sheets of styrofoam. There are a couple of different thicknesses. Get the blue stuff. Maybe the 1" thickness. You can then line the inner sides of your front and back walls with it. Its really easy tocut and work with…..maybe a guy who’s built little houses of foam-board with an exacto knife could do it. Cut out the window and door, and electrical socket etc places. Then put it up on the walls. I wouldnt glue it or use any hardcore construction adhesive. Maybe velcrow? Seal up the seams between peices of board with duct tape, or packing tape, or whatever 2" tape. And then hang big maps, posters, maybe even wallpaper (If it’ll stick to the foam) Or maybe even do a big cartoon mural on it….just to decorate it…..Unless you WANT a blue wall that GOD will tell you is yellow.
(Some inks will react with the foam, "eating" it like an acid, this can create some really cool effects or 3D textures to any drawing)
Foam is good insulation because it has millions of little air cells within it. You COULD find a way, using slats/lathe of wood on the walls to bring it out an inch or two from the wall. But that might be unnecisary considering that the foam already has the air in it.
THEN, when the cold season is over, you can carefully take the foam down and store the peices somewhere in your basement, or under the porch, or wherever you might have room. Save it for next year.
The stuff isn’t really cheap, but it’s not entirely expensive. Not nearly as expensive as building "room within a room" extra walls. And if you can save it for the next year, then I’m sure that the costs of heating are most definately over-ballanced by the costs of the foam and an afternoons worth of work.
Use the peices that you have cut out for windows, and maybe use them as ‘inserts’ in your skylight? That is if the trade-off for loosing that light by blocking it is worth the extra insulation?
You’re lucky that you only have two walls to really worry about. Mostly, snow on the roof is actually pretty good insulation. The only problem being that the white snow reflects light away rather then warming the roof. But maybe the trade-off there is well worth it. (As if you were going to climb up on the roof and shovel it anyway!?)
Does your furnace has a humidifier on it? Its the cold DRY air that messes with your nose and breathing, and the convection of the heat.
I have toyed with the idea of investing in a thermal imaging camera by renting me ad the camera out to do insulation/heat loss consultations. Maybe people would pay me $50 bucks to come out and tell them where their big leaks are. And that might pay off the cost of the device so I can use it for the fun stuff: Ghost hunting!
January 17th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Actually, as a model-maker and an artist I have worked with that blue sheet foam quite a lot.
While model-making I used it to create the topographies the buildings sat on. That was actually as important to my customers as the buildings. The models not only showed them what the buildings looked like but also how they related to their surroundings. So I had to make sure that all the hills and dips and curves of the surrounding landscape were accurately represented. You’d start by getting a topographic map of the site printed to scale. The models all sat in wooden bases that I would make first. I’d trace the lines of elevation into the bottom of the base and start making my terrain.
In architectural models, at least they way it was done in the 1980s when I did it, there were two kinds of terrains you made. The first was a "topo" or stepped terrain that represented the changes in elevation simply and abstractly as a series of steps that followed literally the topographic map. They look odd, but some architects and site engineers like them because they’re make the 2-D topographic map 3-D. Those I cut out of any board or material that scaled correctly in thickness to the changes in elevation. I would simply trace the lines of elevation onto the material and then cut it. When I was done I simply stacked them all up.
The second kind of terrain was a natural or "raised relief" terrain. To make those I cut a series of ribs out of that blue Styrofoam to scale height for the elevation changes in the model and glued them strategically along the elevation lines I’d traced in the bottom of the model base. Then I’d glue and nail a thin layer of board over the ribs. I experimented with many different kinds of board and techniques for getting it to drape smoothly over the foam ribs and discovered (and here I’m giving away a trade secret of mine but I don’t do this work anymore so I don’t care..) that surprisingly it was the cheapest sheet cardboard you could buy that worked the best. The same cardboard they put into new shirts and collars so they keep their shape in the package. It glued tight to the foam with Elmer’s and when you painted over it, it would warp while it was wet, but then shrink a tad as it dried, which made it taut like a drum over the foam ribs. That gave me a terrain that was super easy to cut into for the building and other structures, and trees and landscaping and such, yet accurately modeled the area around my buildings.
The other way I used that foam was as material for simulating things…mostly stone and concrete. And not always for models. Just a few years ago, a co-worker who does dinner theater stage props as a hobby, asked me if I was interested in helping out on a play he was working on. He needed a stone garden wall as a prop. I built him one out of plywood with pieces of blue foam I’d cut into random stone shapes, glued on and spray painted the way I used to when simulating surfaces for my models.
It’s neat stuff, and not just for insulation. But I was thinking of just cutting some panels of it out and putting them up on the inside of one exterior wall as an experiment, probably with double-sided tape, to see what the effect is before I try something major. At least I could see if it’s worth the effort of building the interior walls out.
Yes, the furnace has a humidifier. Trust me, once you have one of those in your central air system you never want to go back. It’s really nice in here with that now. When I lived in apartments I used to buy little stand alone humidifiers. There was a kind that looked like a great big puck and used a spinning disk inside with a tube in the middle that dipped down into a water reservoir. The tube would draw up water onto the top of the disk and as the whole thing was spinning, shoot it out via centrifical force into a comb that broke it up into a mist and shot it out into the air. A really simple mechanism. But it never got the humidity right. It was always either too humid or not humid enough. And you were always re-filling it. Having a humidifier right in the central air system is much better. It makes the entire house comfortable.