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1955 tells me very poor insulation in the walls and attic, old leaking windows.
No air sealing in the attic or basement or crawl space.
All just guesses based on what I have seen to many times before.
Please go back and add your location to your profile.
1955 tells me very poor insulation in the walls and attic, old leaking windows.
No air sealing in the attic or basement or crawl space.
All just guesses based on what I have seen to many times before.
From what I've seen, our basement has no insulation at all - windows are small and single pane. The main level has double-pane windows that are nice and only a few years old. The attic has loose insulation - I'm sure we need more of it. I just figured we'd burn a lot of oil this winter - I was surprised that the boiler only runs for so long regardless of the difference between the thermostat setting and the temperature.
Had a contractor come through today - he estimates our attic insulation to be a laughable R-5. I'm not sure how the previous owners, who were here since 1960, lived with that.
I'd air seal that whole attic, add foam or plastic baffles in the soffit area and go get some more insulation to blow in. If you buy 10 bags Lowes or HD will let you use the blower for free.
I like to insert a 3" PVC pipe into there hose and duct tape it. By adding the soild extention I can shoot all the way to the outsides with out leaveing the middle where I have more head roof.
Going to take two people, one to load the hopper and one to blow it in the attic.
Get some goggles and dust masks. It's not hard to do just a nasty dirty job.
I lay a tarp out in the area where the hopper is to catch the excess.
I'd air seal that whole attic, add foam or plastic baffles in the soffit area and go get some more insulation to blow in. If you buy 10 bags Lowes or HD will let you use the blower for free.
I like to insert a 3" PVC pipe into there hose and duct tape it. By adding the soild extention I can shoot all the way to the outsides with out leaveing the middle where I have more head roof.
Going to take two people, one to load the hopper and one to blow it in the attic.
Get some goggles and dust masks. It's not hard to do just a nasty dirty job.
I lay a tarp out in the area where the hopper is to catch the excess.
Thank you. I'm weighing the options of prepping to do it myself vs. paying - estimate today was $1.25/sq ft to bring it to R38 with the mostly-recycled stuff, spray foam around fixture openings, baffles, and stair cap.
Either way, I need to do a little work up there first - I've got a bathroom vent that doesn't quite go outside and a fan that needs a new temp gauge/needs to be hard-wired.
Went with R-38 worth of blown-in cellulose - which "bought" us about ten degrees vs. where we were at before
But, when temps dropped into the teens, the house temperature fell again. When outside hit 10 degrees, the temperature inside hit 58.
An inspector found that our thermostat is entirely decorative - the control board on the boiler is partially broken - we've just been manually controlling it from the board and the heat is fine. The inspector also drained a lot of water out of the system - which was black - to clean that up.
Of course, we're still running with a 34yr old boiler and, come summer, an 18yr old A/C - exploring geothermal costs since both the boiler and the A/C could easily die this year.
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