January 21st, 2008
Brrrrr
It’s nine degrees at BWI airport as I write this. You can really tell how poorly insulated a 1950s brick house is when it gets this cold. The two exterior walls here at Casa del Garrett, front and back, are just radiating coldness. It’s days like this I don’t mind that I didn’t buy an end-of-group unit.
Ironically enough, the previous owners installed really nice double-pane glass windows. The concrete block and brick veneer exterior walls probably loose way more heat then the windows in them do.
January 21st, 2008 at 9:15 pm
You could insulate those two walls. They have this pink, high density Styrofoam stuff that you buy in sheets and can cut to fit. I outfitted my room, and some of my coolers with it. It seems to help, the coolers keep cold stuff longer, and adding it as a layer of insulation in my room has kept my room warmer.
January 21st, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Yeah. I need to build a wall over those walls essentially. The inside is just plaster over the concrete block. That’s how they made them in the 1950s. What I’d need to do is build a stud frame over that, and put insulation between the studs, and then some drywall over that. I’ve been giving it some thought for a while now.
I did look into some schemes I saw for squirting a foam insulation into the holes inside of the concrete blocks. I had a contractor over to discuss it with me. But the more I researched it the less viable it looked. Turns out filling the voids in and between the concrete blocks doesn’t help much at all because the concrete itself conducts heat pretty well. Insulation needs to be between the masonry and the interior of the house to do any good. Squirting insulation into the holes on the inside of the concrete blocks doesn’t help any.