Insulation and Some Expensive Discoveries

Hi there! We haven't posted much because we've been so busy doing work (and paying other people to do work) that there hasn't been any time to blog! But rest assured that the next few are pretty exciting and reflect some major changes. Today, I bring you the follow-up to my post on our energy audit. We agreed to most of the recommended updates to the house and had some workmen come fix up our attic (both the knee walls and the actual top of our house) and basement (in the laundry room area as well as the crawl space). Five guys spent almost 8 hours helping us stop air flow into and out of our house. How did they do it? Read on:

First they headed to the knee walls, the storage attics in our upstairs bedroom with the tiny Alice-in-Wonderland-sized doors. Originally, their proposal was to fill the knee walls to thoroughly insulate them, rendering them inaccessible and useless. I requested that they come up with a new idea that would let us keep our storage space. And it was a good thing I did--we had to empty everything so that they could get in and work, and it was amazing how much we've managed to hide in there in just the 18 months that we've lived here.

So they brought in these giant insulating boards (all of these things have R values, i.e. how much energy they save, but those figures escape me). The boards were so huge they had to cut them in half just to get them up the stairs.

Next they drilled tiny holes into our attic floors, spaced so that there was one hole over each joist. Why? Well, that comes later.

Next the shiny boards got installed on all the outer walls. As you can see from the above picture, we had some insulation in there already. So they didn't need to add much into the roof joists before installing the boards. The boards got sealed with foam to further block out air flow. Now our knee walls look like little rocket ships!

(By the way, these guys were really awesome and let me take pictures and always were happy to show me what they were doing. Contact me privately if you want their information.)

Just that step took them a while and there was one guy in each of our knee walls for most of the morning. When they finally finished putting up the wall insulation, it was time to "dense pack" foam into those little holes in the floor. They ran a tube from the insulation truck (yes, there was a truck which has a singular purpose of blowing foam) through our windows and into each little closet, filling the joists up with foam to block air leaking in where the wall and roof meet. They had to be careful not to fill joists that corresponded to our over-sink lamp in the kitchen, because it burns too hot, so there was a lot of measuring to make sure that they only insulated in the right places.

The sound and appearance of the fluff traveling through the hose was really cool, so I tried to get a video for your viewing and listening pleasure (make sure you have your sound on):

(OK, not that exciting I guess. Unfortunately Blogger will only upload it as such a low quality that you can't really see the fluff through the hose. I guess you had to be there. But hey, first posted video! Go me!)

Next they covered up the clothes in our closet and cut what apparently was a man-sized hole in the ceiling to get to our otherwise-inaccessible attic. It was here that we encountered our first snag. Apparently there were some wiring issues up there (not a real surprise, I guess) that actually cause one guy to get a shock! There was a splice or two that needed to be put in a junction box and something up there was shorting out our circuit (thank goodness for circuit breakers). Since insulating up there would make it hard to access these problems and because, in the words of one of the contractors, "the insulation is flame retardant, but I still wouldn't want to put it near a known fire hazard" we had to halt work on the attic.

They installed this lovely "sealed" board that the electrician would be able to easily removed and agreed to come back later once we had the problem fixed. (It has been by now, but that's for a different post.) We still haven't managed to find a time to get the energy guys back out to insulate up there, but I'm sure that will happen soon.

And so it was on to the basement! A team headed downstairs and started insulating our crawl space. They noticed that it was actually possible to see our first floor from up through the boards in the basement and since the crawl space is (was) essentially outside, it's no wonder that the half of the house over the crawl space was always so cold in the winter. So they packed a lot more insulation up between the floor joists and then nailed up panel similar to what they put in our knee walls upstairs. They enclosed the pipes in the insulation too, so theoretically the hot water in the heat system will still be hot by the time it reaches the guest room and office.

This is also where problem two was discovered, though it wasn't something that halted work. One guy noticed that a sewer pipe running down the corner of the crawl space was a little damp. That wasn't good. He deduced from looking at the pipes that the problem was probably in our second-floor bathroom. We immediately stopped using it and started trying to find a plumber (again, already done and the subject of anther post).

In the laundry room, the guys put up some insulation along the outside wall because little bits of sunlight were actually visible. The white puffy insulation was sealed off with more orange stuff and should make the basement a little more pleasant, temperature-wise. There should also be less humidity down there, and in fact we are already noticing that the dehumidifier isn't turning on as often as it was just before we had the basement fixed.

So the final results from all of this work? Well, the guys started and ended the day with another round of blower door tests. Just like back in February when they did the audit, their morning reading was about 7000 cubic feet per minute, which means that a lot of air flows through the house (for reference, new homes are at about 2000 cfm). After all that work, which doesn't even include the attic, we got a reading of 3500 cfm. That was an incredible 50% difference. What this should mean for us is that it will be easier to heat and cool the house and maintain our desired temperature, because we won't be losing our warm/cool air by having it leak through all these cracks. The upstairs should not be as hot in the summer and the half of the house above the crawl space should not be as cold in the winter. So we're keeping our fingers crossed.

What were the cats doing during all this commotion? Well we stuck them in one of the rooms that wouldn't need any work and they spent much of the day trying to escape through the tiny crack under the door: