Solving My Heating Problem

I mentioned the other day that I'd gone through a panic awhile after we moved in, about the cost of heating. When I budgeted for the new house when we were deciding whether to buy it and how much to offer, I did take into consideration that all the utilities here would be varying degrees higher than at our former house (especially the gas bill). It was all good.

But once I moved in, and we had a particularly cold snap where the furnace was running a lot, yet several areas of the house (the Imaginarium, the kitchen and the dining room) were still really cold, I began to get worried that I hadn't budgeted enough for the heating bill, that I'd highly underestimated the cost in a house this size.

So I got really concerned about what to do about the heating issue. I wasn't willing to accept that several months a year we were just going to have to pay through the nose to keep warm, and I had no choice in the matter. Even being on the budget (which we are) doesn't actually lower the cost of winter heating, it just spreads it out so that you're paying higher bills all year long. Still not the solution I was looking for.

Sure, I'd love nothing better than to have all solar power, or a nice geothermal system. But the cost of those systems is out of our range at the moment.

But after a few days of panic, I decided I wasn't going to roll over and give up on this. I decided that I was damned well going to be able to enjoy my house, all of my house, all year long, without going broke. There must be something else I could do.

Well, necessity is the mother of regression. I hit upon the perfect solution - something that will help, and something that's very affordable (and has been around forever). We're diving wholeheartedly into an energy efficiency and conservation mindset. And I began to do a ton of research, both online and around the home.

What I've discovered is very encouraging. There are so many things one can do in the efficiency and conservation department to cut energy consumption, many of which are relatively simple and inexpensive, that I believe will in fact make a big difference. This is a case of, the worse things are, the more room for improvement there is. I discovered several major problems in this house contributing to heat loss, but they're all relatively easy to fix, and once fixed, considering how bad they started out, the improvement ought to be significant and noticeable.

The first thing I discovered is this. Remember this picture from the other day of the pipes? Well, revisit it, but look at the walls.


These are the walls of the 'cubby' attic spaces surrounding the Imaginarium. And you'll notice there is no insulation on them at all. Instead, the roof itself is insulated.

This is probably one of the biggest insulation mistakes people make, and in fact I had no idea this was the wrong approach myself, until our favorite home inspector pointed it out to us both at this house and at my old house (where it was done the same way), and then I did more reading up on this topic online.

Here's the deal. You want to keep warmed air from the furnace in the living space. If you insulate the 'attic' ceiling, but not the walls, you're trying to heat your attic. It is the nature of air of different temperatures to want to swap spaces, to move towards each other. It is true that hot air rises and cold air sinks, but it's also true that cold air will try to move to areas where the ambient temperature is warmer, displacing the warm air into the formerly cold-air space.

I never realized how much air a simple wall will let through, although I guess it shouldn't have been such a surprise - why else would people insulate at all? So when you insulate the attic ceiling but not the walls between the attic and the living space, all the heat you're trying to pump into the living space is going to be seeping through the wall, and tiny spaces between the walls and floors and ceilngs, into the cold attic space - sending all that cold attic air into your living space.

Most people - myself included! - thought that you are supposed to insulate the attic ceiling to 'keep cold air out of the attic.' In fact, just the opposite is true. Your attic should be the same temperature as the outside in the wintertime. So your goal shouldn't be to keep cold air out of your attic, but to keep the cold air in your attic (unless you're trying to heat it for some reason, in which case none of this matters; I'm not, so it matters).

As a side note, improper attic insulation is a prime cause of ice damming, which this house also had an issue with this winter. When there is heavy snow, and you have insulation on your attic roof but not the walls or floors between the attic and heated living space, the attic heats up, which heats the underside of the roof, melting the underlayer of snow. (It doesn't have to be "warm" in the attic for this to happen; just the average attic temperature achieved by insulating the roof and heat loss through the living spaces will do it; if the outside temperature is 10 degrees, but you've got your attic insulated the way most people do, it'll probably be 20 to 30 degrees warmer in your attic - still cold to you, but warm enough to melt the roof snow).

It then liquefies and begins running down the roof to the gutters, where - because it's so cold outside - it refreezes, causing an ice dam. That's an oversimplified explanation, but mechanically that's how it happens. If your attic is as cold as it's supposed to be, and you're reducing heat escaping into your attic from your living spaces, the snow on your roof will stay right there until it begins to melt naturally from the outside, due to the sun's warmth and ambient air temperature - then it will melt and run into and down your gutters like it's supposed to, instead of re-freezing at the roofline and causing damage.

But I digress. To get back to the point ... insulation on the attic roof by itself isn't enough to keep that area truly warm. So it's cold in there. Next, no insulation on the walls between the upstairs living space and the attic causes exchange between the two areas - the heat I'm trying to pump into the living space is seeping out into the attic, to be replaced with the cold air in the attic coming into the room.

It's no wonder the Imaginarium was so cold!

The good news, there's a relative easy fix for this. Insulate the hell out of the walls, floors, and ceilings of the Imaginarium - but not the roof. This will contain all the heat I'm pumping into the Imaginarium via the furnace, keeping it in the living space where I want it, and out of the attic where I don't. Heat is going to travel to the insulation, then stop (if the insulation is good). So why would I want my heat traveling into the attic and all the way to the roof before it stops? Far more efficient to stop it right at the walls, containing it inside the living space where I want to hang out and be comfortable.

So what do I have to do? First and easiest, rip down all the insulation from the attic roof, and insulate the walls and floors heavily. Also weatherstrip and insulate the three attic access doors in the Imaginarium (areas where you can almost feel a frigid breeze coming through on particularly cold days).

After seeing the serious lack of insulation on those walls, I truly believe that that much insulating alone will go an amazingly long way to warming up the Imaginarium without ever touching the thermostat.

The second phase of this problem is a little trickier. To make this most effective, the sloping ceiling and the center strip of horizontal ceiling should also be insulated. Since the walls weren't, I'm assuming those areas weren't either, and I can't get to them to place regular do-it-yourself insulation in them. So that's the one phase of the project I may have to hire a professional for - we may have no choice but to do blown-in insulation in that section, if I want to complete my plan for the maximum benefit.

And why do it halfway? This is something that, after my research, I believe wholeheartedly will make a significant difference in keeping the Imaginarium much warmer, without wasting heat, turning up the thermostat, or costing us one dime more.

As a bonus, this type of insulation combined with effective roof vents will also help keep hot air out of the living space in the summer. Insulation isn't just for cold. In the summertime at the old house I could barely stand to be upstairs, and candles I had stored up there were known to melt. I assumed this place would be the same way, but we're not at all keen on running central air (or even window air conditioners) - first, because I much prefer to have windows open and enjoy fresh outdoor air, and second because of the high cost of electricity to run them.

Fixing the insulation up there may also keep the Imaginarium much cooler in the summer, containing the heat into the attic, where it can be disbursed by active roof vents instead of seeping into the living space. This might not be so effective if we had no trees, but there are two large trees out front which should shade the south-facing side of the roof all day, which should also make a huge difference in the temperature upstairs.

So ... that's one part of my grand plan to reduce the heating costs in the Big Ass House, without it costing us a fortune to heat the place.

If this is so simple, why don't more people do it? I have a couple of theories on that, from my own experience. First, a lot of people don't know this stuff! Like I said, most people I've talked to believed that you were supposed to insulate the attic ceiling. I too always believed that. I didn't know any different, and not knowing, I would never have questioned it if I hadn't run onto this problem of needing and wanting to significantly reduce my heating costs.

That brings up the second reason. If heating costs (or any other utility) are falling in the affordable range, most people don't question how things are working. They just say "That's what it costs to heat a house," and move on. I have a friend who said that in the winter her heating bills were about $250 a month, and yeah it was a little painful, but they just paid it, and moved on. Her house was also a Cape Cod, and her daughter's bedroom was upstairs, and when it got cold in the winter, they just cranked up the heat, because they 'had to.' But she never checked into ways to reduce the costs, never looked at her insulation (I'd bet a year's heating cost her house was insulated the same as this one - all on the roof, none in the walls upstairs). So many people just don't bother to look for ways to increase their house's energy efficiency if the status quo is acceptable to them.

Third, a lot of people just don't want to hassle with it. I've discovered that home maintenance is an acquired taste. A lot of people who buy homes treat them like apartments - they figure as long as they're paying their mortgage and utilities, they shouldn't have to (or can't afford to, so don't) pay much attention to anything else, except when something goes wrong and they have to (a leak somewhere, furnace breaks, etc.). I can understand this, I did the same thing at my old house. I did nothing in the way of maintenance, energy efficiency or muh of anything else. The bills were cheap, I paid them and cranked up the furnace when it got cold because I could (it was a small house, it wasn't unaffordable to crank up the heat), and did little else.

So there are a lot of reasons why many people don't know about these things and don't bother to find out. My dad was very good at house maintenance, but even he was the type of person who, if it got colder than usual in the winter, would just crank up the furnace rather than look at ways to be more energy efficient - because he could afford it, so why not. And for him that worked fine, because he could afford it. But I'm not paying $500 a month to heat this place in the winter time. I'm not even paying $200 a month.

I have a lofty goal. Actually it has two parts. The first part I came up with was that within five years I wanted to reduce our entire utility consumption to under $100 a month - gas, water, and electric. That's great and I will continue to strive for that, but reality tells me that may not be possible in a house this size - I can reduce electricity and water consumption fairly easily, but the place has to be heated in the winter, and to make that scheme work, our heating bill would have to be about $40 or $50 a month - not something I'm sure is possible with a conventional gas furnace.

So the second half of that goal, being a little more realistic, is to reduce the total utility expense to less than $150 a month. That I think I can do.

I have more to post, later, on other things I found out in my research. We'll see how this utility reduction plan goes over the next year. I consider it an experiment in reducing my expenses to the lowest possible amount, while still keeping the house comfortable and cozy, thereby freeing up more money for the things we actually want to spend money on - like improvements!