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.\n<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The days when you could just burn gas heat like it didn’t cost anything are long, long gone…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[83],"class_list":["post-2870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-adventures-in-home-ownership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}