How energetic is your home? Ours isn't. Ours is old. Nearing the century mark, this year's extreme winter did quite the number on our exterior. One hundred plus inches of snow will do that. You may be familiar with ice dams. Well...there's ice dams, and there's there's gutter busters. We had a gutter buster:
I found that walking home from a long week of work on a Friday night. Guh. Shortly thereafter, we noticed water damage to the walls in the closet directly under the roof with the now defunct gutter. I carefully peeled some pieces of plaster off, and saw the sun! Yup, no insulation whatsoever in the closet. More plaster started to fall away on its own.
I was comparing energy consumption with friends who noted that their bills were half of ours with twice the house. Hmmm...something's not right here. So I took the last years worth of our energy bills and compared them to the national average. We scored a 2.8 out of 10. Ouch. I followed some links and found a home energy efficiency inspector. We met this morning and talked about all sorts of issues with our house. He had two tools that were quite revealing.
The first was a thermal imaging camera. The results were like results promised by X-ray goggles promised in kids' comic books. We could see studs, beams, and the immense lack of insulation in our second floor. The only way you can see the beams is b/c they are a different temperature than the insulation between them. On our second floor, our beams were lost, and the lathe behind the plaster showed through. Meaning: No Insulation Whatsoever. Ugh.
His second tool was a big blower that he put in our front door. He used that to put a 50 Pa pressure difference between the inside and the outside. At that pressure difference, every minute there was 3800 cubic feet of air blowing out of our house. With all that air blowing out, laws of physics say there has to be air to replace it. With the fan on, air was streaming into our house through "thousands" of holes. We could feel drafts throughout the whole house; windows, doors, wall outlets, and the gaping hole in our closet. Turns out, the target for a house is to get lower than 1000 cfm. A recent award winning house in Wisconsin reached less than 300 cfm. We've got a long way to go.
So now we turn to removing the old siding, blowing in insulation upstairs, and then layering more insulation to the outside and reside the house. Throw in a new porch at the same time and it'll be a busy summer. Looks the like reroofing project is on hold.
Bottom line, when purchasing an older home, get a home inspection that includes thermal imaging. It may cost a bit more, but worth it.