NEST

Season's Greetings from NEST

Be well, everyone.

 

 

Insulation Story Part II: Execution

Armed with the list of insulation contractors, I called around and made appointments for estimates with two of them. They visited separately, but had a lot in common. They both knew Cheryl and had worked with her before; I gathered from both guys that their relationship with her involved a fair amount of friendly negotiation.

Both wanted to see the report from Informed Energy, which I showed them each in turn, and we reviewed the insulation recommendations in some detail. Both had the same immediate reaction: insulate the floor, not the roof. It will cost less money and be more effective. I explained that I was planning to renovate the attic, and thought I might as well insulate the whole thing now. They remained unconvinced: how soon are you planning to renovate? Well, I had to admit it was going to be five years anyway before I was likely to raise the kind of credit (let alone cash) necessary to do the renovation, which would be extensive.

Here's the thing: my tall, steep roof naturally has a much greater surface area than the floor; any half-awake high school geometry student can tell you that much. A quick eyeballing leads me to guess that the surface of the roof is three times that of the floor, in which case I could expect to spend three times as much on insulating materials. Furthermore, if I insulate the roof and not the floor, I may be preventing heat from leaving the house but I am still allowing it to escape from my apartment into the attic where, for the time being, no one will benefit except the mice.

It didn't take me long to decide that insulating the floor was the way to go, especially after one of the contractors told me that if I insisted on insulating the roof, he wouldn't take the job, since he knew it would not be effective enough and he couldn't stand behind it.

Without going into excruciating detail about the two estimates, I can say that both contractors A and B seemed quite competent and professional. They proposed similar plans: to blow insulation under the attic floorboards and even, if I were willing to give up my attic storage, ten inches deep on top of the floor for increased R-value.

However, Contractor A seemed much more engaged on the topic of air sealing, pointing out all of the gaps and explaining exactly how he intended to seal them. Contractor B was pretty casual on the subject. Also, Contractor A was a little more convincing when it came to adding up the R-values of the various layers of insulation. And finally, Contractor A said he would perform a blower-door test before and after the installation to measure the effectiveness of their work. That showed me that he really meant business. For these reasons I chose Contractor A, even though his estimate of $3100 was about twice that of Contractor B.

SO, DNR Construction got the job. In the end, Tom, the salesman, convinced me to let him cover the entire floor with an extra ten inches of insulation to attain a resistance value of R49! Readers, that is a full 13 points higher than the most heavy-duty of the plans suggested by Informed Energy. It is par excellence in the home-energy world. And it would cost about half as much. The drawback was that I would no longer be able to walk around or store things in the attic, but the fact is I really do have plenty of room in the basement. And when it came time to renovate (which, given the current economic climate, seems less and less imminent), I could simply remove the extra fill or—Tom's favorite idea—raise the floor by ten inches and simply leave all of the insulation where it was. 

We made a date, and the guys came out a few weeks later. It was super fun. There was a crew of at least six, maybe eight men. They showed up at about 10:00 a.m. First step: blower-door test, which confirmed what Cheryl and Aaron had told me, which was that my house was, in layman's terms, VERY DRAFTY.

Then they set to work on the air sealing. Remember all those gaps around the plumbing chases?

 

And how about the duct openings:

While that was going on, others built a walkway out of foam board and still others pulled up the hoses from the truck.

 

Once the gaps were sealed, the foreman led me around the attic (and basement) to show me their work. They were very thorough.

 

Then came the fluff:

 

Before long, my 90° attic looked like a winter wonderland.

 

There was a pink walkway through the middle of the attic, allowing me to reach the furnace and the front window. Any exposed ductwork, as well as the furnace plenum, was insulated with spray foam. The furnace itself, as well as the exhaust pipe, had to remain clear because they would get too hot. Otherwise, it was all covered up.

 

And out of the covered ground rose my gleaming chimney and toilet stack, looking for all the world like a scene out of Mary Poppins, only in winter:

When all was done, the foreman ran the final blower-door test. In the time it takes to spell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious we determined that my house was (again, in layman's terms) only two-thirds as drafty as before! You may recall from my energy audit that it was initially three times as drafty as it ideally should be; I had improved my home's heating efficiency by 30%. When winter came, my heating bills (assuming similar weather and gas prices) should be 30% less. And my house should become a whole lot more snug.

The crew was gone by 5:00 p.m. I waved from the porch. It was only September, but I was ready for winter.

Readers, you must be thinking, it's winter now! It's been very cold. HOW'S IT WORKING? It's mean of me, I know, but I'm going to keep you on the edge of your seat for just a bit longer.

Insulation Story Part I: Plan

Readers,
I thank you for your interest in the results of my home energy audit. I know that many of you wondered whether I have followed the suggestions made by the Energy Detectives and whether they were successful. After keeping you in suspense for two whole weeks I am finally here to answer: yes and yes.

Insulation is complicated, readers. So many kinds to choose from! There's fiberglass, cellulose, petroleum- or soy-based spray foam, denim fluff, and mushrooms. A comparison chart rating these options according to price, R-value, and varying shades of green will show you a complicated matrix of pros and cons that could give you a bit of a headache (nothing to do with the formaldehyde). Fiberglass is cheap and easy to install but itchy and not very good for the lungs of the installers, nor is it as effective as, say, cellulose or, better yet, spray foam. The very dense, closed-cell spray foam gives you a lot of bang, but for a considerable buck. Denim is kind of sexy, but what about the mice?

Before I get into the particulars of the plan for my house, let me offer a brief primer on insulation:

R-value: The basic measure of insulation's effectiveness, it indicates resistance to heat flow. A higher R-value means more resistance, i.e. better insulation. It should be noted that every building material has an R-value, but of course 1/4" plywood, with its R-value of .31, is significantly less resistant to heat than, say, [fiberglass batting, which could give you an R-value of 3 or 4 for every inch of thickness.]

Fiberglass (approximately R3 per inch): not the favorite of energy-saving types or the health-concerned. While it's cheap, it doesn't have as much R-value as, say, cellulose or spray-foam. As mentioned above, it is uncomfortable to work with and sends tiny glass particles into the lungs of installers (koff, koff). It was traditionally made with formaldehyde, although this seems to be on the wane.

Apart from the health risks, it seems that fiberglass batting is less effective than other types of insulation. For one thing, when placed inside a wall, it fails to prevent air from moving up or down through the fibers. In a balloon-frame house (like mine), the base of a wall is open, as is the top. If you are going to install fiberglass batting inside such a wall, it's important to seal the wall at the top and bottom so that drafts cannot flow up or down.

Another problem with fiberglass batting as opposed to blown-in cellulose or spray-foam is that it cannot fill a space completely; there will always be gaps in between bats, allowing air to flow where you don't want it to.

Cellulose (R3.5 per inch): Made from recycled paper, this fluffy material is blown in through a large tube that comes out of a big truck. If used to insulate walls, it must be drilled and blown into a closed wall so that it can be contained. It's blown in very densely so that it is tightly packed. If used to insulate a floor, it can be blown into an open space and remain as loose fill. More expensive than fiberglass, less expensive than spray-foam. Requires professional installation.

Spray-foam (R5.9 per inch): Most spray-foam is made of polyurethane, a petroleum product. It is expensive, but has a very high R-value. Non-petroleum alternatives exist, the most common of which is made of soy. Cheryl makes the point that while it's nice that soyfoam is not made of petroleum, it has a lower R-value than the urethane sprayfoam, so if you use the same amount, you will have to use more heat, which will probably come from a fossil fuel. So there's a tradeoff, and Cheryl made the point that no studies have been done comparing the total petroleum cost or carbon emissions of the two types of spray-foam use. She also made the point that urethane foam doesn't use that much petroleum and that, once dried, it is inert, offgassing nothing but nitrogen, which is harmless, and water.

Rigid-foam Board (R7 per inch): Polyisocyanurate board comes in large panels (pink, in my experience) that are maybe the size of a sheet of drywall. Its rigid shape makes it structurally useful and good for retrofitting; this is the stuff you see on the exterior walls of a house being built or resided.

I should note that during my first conversation with Cappy Kidd, president of Informed Energy, he rejected my use of the term "green insulation," making the point that no product is inherently green; it's all a matter of using the right resources in the safest and most efficient manner.

When devising my insulation plan, Cheryl Pomeroy and Aaron Lund, the energy auditors, took into account my plans to renovate the attic at some point. Currently an empty, unconditioned space, my attic housed nothing but a furnace, a lot of ductwork, and a beautiful two-year-old chimney (it's amazing what $4000 can buy).

The furnace would soon need replacing and it was my plan to put the new one off to the side or out in the enclosed back porch and run new ductwork under the floor, leaving the floor open and ready for renovation, whenever I could afford to get around to it. Given these plans, Cheryl and Aaron thought it would make the most sense for me to insulate the underside of the roof, even knowing that I would eventually be cutting it open to build dormers. Better, they reasoned, to condition the attic space, which I would have to do anyway once I remodeled, and keep the floors clear: any heavy-duty insulation of the floor would probably end up covering the floor, making it unwalkable. Also, it is always good to keep your furnace inside a conditioned space so that the heat it generates does not escape to the outside.

Having established that, Cheryl drew up four plans:

Option 1: Add rafter baffles for ventilation between soffit (eaves) and roof ridge (this is to prevent the gathering of any moisture, which could turn to ice in winter and damage your roof). Add 1" rigid foam board to underside of rafters. Aaron explained that it's important to cover the rafters because, being made of wood, they conduct heat, acting as a thermal bridge. In other words, they will let heat out or in, probably whenever you least want it. Drill and blow in cellulose. Est. R-value: R18

Option 2: Spray-foam entire rafter cavity (spray-foam is entirely airtight and allows no condensation; therefore, no baffles are necessary). Then hang 1" rigid-foam board across the rafters.  Est. R-value: R30

Option 3: Cut and friction-fit unfaced polyiso board between the rafters; carefully seal gaps and joints with spray foam so that the entire system is air tight. Then add another layer of foam board across the entire system, covering the joists. Est. R-value: R29 with 1" board; R36 with 2" board

Option 4: To be honest, I did not entirely understand Option 4, but it basically involved sistering out the joists (extending them) by attaching 2x2 boards to the existing 2x4s. This would then create more room between the joists, into which you could fit more insulation. I suppose one advantage of Option 4 is that it would allow you to increase the R-value of Option 1 by using a greater volume of cellulose, which is cheaper than spray foam. Option 4 seemed a little overly complicated, so I did not consider it for long. Est. R-value: R28

This entire project would not be cheap, especially if I went with spray foam, which is quite expensive. As with so many things, you tend to get what you pay for: the most energy-efficient solution would probably end up costing me the most money. Cheryl guessed off the top of her head that Option 2, which would give me the greatest R-value, could cost as much as $6000; Option 1 would probably cost about one-third as much.

Cheryl and Aaron left me with a list of insulation contractors that they had worked with before, complete with notes about the particular expertise as well as strengths and weakensses of each company. They both made the point very strongly that air sealing would be every bit as important as insulation, and that any contractor I hired should take this seriously.

Finally, they urged me to call with any questions once I started the job.

Next up: Insulation Story Part II: Execution.

From Couch to Cuttlefish: Examining the Feedback Loop

My friend Julia is a conservation biologist who is constantly dismayed at the spoilage we humans wreak on the Earth, our home. “I don’t get it, Angie,” she said. “All other animals know not to soil their nests. Why should humans be different?”

Well, we don’t soil our nests, I said. Our houses are clean.

In fact, we go to terrific lengths to make sure that we have the cleanest, shiniest, newest-looking houses possible. Not only that, we spare no expense to ensure that our houses are as warm or cool, wired, well-plumbed and well-lit as we could wish. They are big. They have beautiful lawns; no bugs; paved driveways. We take great care of our nests. In fact, our nests are the envy of the animal kingdom; why do think all those mice and bugs are always trying to come inside? (Nice try, mice. Build your own.)

But when Julia says nest, she's not referring to our houses. She means the planet, or at least the parts of the planet that we inhabit. There are quite a few ways to consider that:

• house

• city lot

• block

• neighborhood

• city

• county

• state

• watershed

• power grid

• agricultural region

• food distribution network

• climate zone

• tectonic plate

• country

• continent

• trade route

• global supply chain

• planet

• solar system

and so on. The difference between the mouse and me is that the actions I take to build and tend to my nest reach far beyond the four walls of my house and wherever in my next-door neighbor's yard I pick up some couch stuffing.

My couch stuffing—let's say the cotton part—could very well come from Georgia or New Zealand or India. And the nature of industrialization, and even more the nature of global industrialization, is that I don't have to make the couch or worry about where the stuffing comes from.

If the mouse uses up all of the couch stuffing (fat chance), she'll see it with her own eyes and she will immediately feel its lack. That's what we call a feedback loop, and hers is very short. We have a feedback loop too, but ours is LONG. If I use up all the cotton—well, I'm never going to use up all the cotton, because I'm just one person. But let's say the entire couch-buying public uses up all the cotton. Or better yet, let's say, the couch-buying public creates such a demand for cheap cotton that Georgia and New Zealand and India use all kinds of pesticides to make it quicker and easier to grow lots of cotton.

This pesticide might degrade the soil in these places and run off into the groundwater, which could eventually make it to the ocean, where it might cause all of a certain species of fish to be born without a left fin. Then entire schools of fish, instead of swimming in straight lines, would start swimming in clockwise circles and interfering with the ocean currents. Eventually, some very observant meteorologist would notice that the typhoons off New Zealand are spinning backwards and the story would be picked up by the Chicago Tribune. A group of eager meteorology students from Northwestern would take a class trip to New Zealand, where one of them would pick up a local ichthyologist in a bar. After a weeklong romance, the ichthyologist would wake up one morning and say "Remind me again what you're doing here?" and he would tell her, and she would say, "Funny, that reminds me of this weird thing that's been happening with the cuttlefish in the last few years . . . "

For the sake of keeping this short I will say that her cousin is a cotton farmer whose child also happened to be born without a left arm, and they finally put two and two together.

Eventually, the New Zealand EPA outlaws pesticide use in cotton farming, raising the price of New Zealand cotton. The couch manufacturers then start buying their cotton from India, where the meteorologists have other things to worry about during typhoon season, but after a generation or so they too catch on and eventually the American couch-buying public is astonished to learn that couches have become more expensive, and they start buying used couches off of Craigslist.

Ahem. This is obviously a fictional scenario; in real life it would never happen so quickly. But you get the idea: the feedback loop is long and winding and subject to the caprices of fate.

The moral of the story is this: if we as a species think it in our best interests to behave as the animals do and keep our nest clean, we should not go to Crate and Barrel and buy a new couch when we need one. Better to simply go next door and rescue the couch in the back yard before it starts to rain.

Julia Frost Nerbonne, this is for you.

What to Expect from a Home Energy Audit

When I bought a Victorian two-flat in 2006, I was charmed by its oak trim, tall ceilings, bay windows, and classic Chicago shotgun-style layout. I shrugged at the ancient furnaces and drafty windows—feh! These windows are original, baby! 

After two frigid winters, however, I could no longer ignore the fact that I was paying almost $300 a month to keep my charming vintage apartment at a drafty, uneven 63°. And my tenants, though I bought them a brand-new, high-efficiency furnace, still paid over $200 to keep their place only slightly warmer.

I was determined to address the problem, but where to begin? The place had 100-year-old windows, no insulation, leaky ductwork, and a drafty attic. New windows seemed an obvious but outrageously expensive step. I suspected that insulating the attic would help, but how? Should I pour loose fill under the floor? Staple fiberglass batting to the roof? I had visions of struggling with enormous bats of itchy pink fiberglass in a sweltering attic only to find that I’d done it wrong. And what if the furnace broke down in January? Was I really prepared to make the best choice in replacing it? I was reluctant to spend so money and effort without being sure that I was doing the right thing.

I decided to make an appointment with the aforementioned Informed Energy Decisions, a home energy auditor. I spoke with Cappy Kidd, the owner, who promised to investigate the place from top to bottom and provide me with detailed recommendations, listed in order of importance. By the end, he said, I’d have a long-term energy-reduction plan to undertake step-by-step as I could afford to do it. I was psyched.

Based on the square footage of my home and the fact that I have two furnaces (one for me and one for the tenants), they charged me $750. With just one furnace it would have been $600; an audit for a single-family house runs somewhat less, depending on the size.

The audit took place on a hot day in August. Inspectors Cheryl Pomeroy and Aaron Lund showed up at 10:00 a.m. with a carload of equipment. They loaded everything in and sat down with me at the dining room table to find out my concerns and describe their process. After chatting for awhile, they got to work.

Step 1: The Heat-Seeking Camera
The infrared camera (which looks like a television camera) can detect the difference between heat and cold; it is used to look for insulation gaps in walls. This test is actually much more useful in wintertime when the contrast between outside and inside temperatures is pronounced; the camera can see the gap in the insulation because that is where the temperature of the wall is much lower. In summertime, you can’t see much because the walls are pretty uniformly warm. However, you can see the heat left by your hand after you touch the wall, which is kind of cool.

For me this test was a moot point, since I don’t have any insulation except in my kitchen and bedroom, where I insulated the outside walls with fiberglass during a renovation.

Step 2: The Blower-Door Test
Cheryl and I went around the house and closed all of the doors and windows in both apartments, including the storms. The idea is to replicate wintertime conditions, when you seal the house as tightly as possible. In the mean time, Aaron set about installing a tremendous contraption in the front door involving a large fan, red canvas, some thin plastic tubing and a digital meter called a manometer, which measures pressure. The contraption is called a blower-door; it sucks air out of the house and measures the rate at which the air leaves. The higher the air flow, the draftier your house.

After we had the place closed up, Aaron turned on the fan (it was loud) and took the reading. Cheryl performed a set of calculations and told me that under average conditions (i.e., not unusually windy), my house exchanges 100% of its air every hour. That means that the furnace has to heat the entire house all over again every 60 minutes. Was that a lot? Ideally, she said, it should take three hours for a complete air exchange. In other words, my house is three times as drafty as it should be.

I wasn’t surprised.

Step 3: The Smoking Gun
It took a lot of imagination to think that six months from now these drafts, so welcome in August, would be turning my toes numb. So it goes. As I walked through the house, I found powerful drafts in some unexpected places. By the windows, no surprise. From my back door, which opened to a three-season porch (let's say two-and-half), I felt a wind that practically knocked me down. I knew the kitchen was drafty, but jeez. I'd had no idea. But strangest of all was the breeze that emanated from around my dishwasher. After scratching my head a minute I realized that when installing the dishwasher, my carpenter had probably not closed up the drywall behind it, leaving a hole wide open into the plumbing chases and creating a huge draft from the attic and basement. Who knew?

Cheryl pulled out a smoke wand (available at your neighborhood magic shop) and held it up to every place likely to reveal a draft. Some of the worst culprits were the heating vents. Before you think, "duh, of course there's air coming through the vents!" realize that this is not the air that's supposed to be coming through the vents, but the air that leaks through the rough openings where the ducts are hooked up to the floor or ceiling. In winter, this would not be the warm air from the furnace, but the cold air from the attic or basement, getting sucked in through the gaps.

We cased the entire building this way, leaving a piece of blue masking tape to indicate each of the drafts so that I could go back later to seal them up. Other problem spots: windows (naturally), the bases of walls (along the quarter-round), electrical outlets and the bases of light fixtures. The first- and second-floor apartments yielded similar results. The basement showed a few holes to the outside, large but easily filled, as well as extra vents cut into the ductwork, suggesting that someone had once lived in the basement and diverted some of the heat from the first floor. That explained a lot: my tenants were heating the basement as well as their own apartment!

(Another odd thing in the basement was that the main heating duct was covered with aluminum foil. What the heck??? Aaron was very diplomatic: "Ahm, just so you know, foil is a poor insulator.")

Troublesome as these discoveries were, they were few enough and easily remedied. The attic, on the other hand, was a bit of a mess. Holes, gaps everywhere! The balloon frame, shown at right, left an open channel in the walls from top to bottom, so that any crack in a wall downstairs would open into the walls and up into the frosty attic. Even the two walls with fiberglass batting were unsealed, since the open fibers allow air to travel vertically.

The attic floor was full of holes, as was the ductwork. And the plumbing chases were wide open. It was suddenly clear to me that all that air around the dishwasher was being sucked from a big hole in the attic floor, as shown below. (This also gave me some insight into how rodents travel through a building.)

Step 4: The Prescription

After leaving bits of blue tape all over the house, Cheryl and Aaron returned to the dining room to write up their findings and recommendations. It took at least an hour, which is to say they were very thorough. They filled out a Window Survey, an Air Sealing Survey, an Energy Condition Summary and then a two-page Action Plan, which listed three major priorities:

1. Air-seal and insulate attic.

2. Insulate outside walls.

3. After house is fully sealed and insulated, replace worst windows as budget permits with double- or triple-pane thermal windows.

Beyond that was a list of smaller projects including tankless water heaters, weather stripping, etc.

Imagine my delight at being told that I did not have to run out and spend $20,000 on new windows!  Cheryl was quite emphatic that the windows were far from my biggest problem: my attic was performing like a great big chimney, creating a draft through which all of my warm, expensive, fossil-fuel-burning and carbon-dioxide–producing air was flying into the sky. If I covered my windows with plastic like I do every winter, they'd do a perfectly good job until I could afford to replace them.

When I expressed my gratitude at this news, Aaron nodded and said, "If we save you from buying one window you don't need, you've paid for the audit right there."

We spent quite awhile talking about strategies for insulating the attic, which I will discuss in further posts. Finally, they packed their gear into their little four-door sedan (without an inch to spare) and were off on their way.

I ran back upstairs and pored over the literature they had left me and the reports they had prepared in such loving detail. I couldn't wait to call the insulators.

 

Grab for the Low-Hanging Fruit: Get a Home Energy Audit

People are getting pretty fancy when it comes to sustainable building. These days you can get your heat from a geothermal pump under your house. You can plant a garden on your roof or tile it with hundreds of photovoltaic panels. You can install light fixtures that will automatically dim as the sun gets brighter, or even hook up your child's television to a stationary bicycle. It's amazing what's out there, and I promise you, it will pay off in the long run!

But what if you aren't building a new house? Or what if, no matter how much you care about the environment, and no matter how splendidly it will pay off in the long run, you just plain don't have $30,000 to spend on solar panels right now? And you don't have good Southern exposure anyway?

If you live in the Midwest, or the Northeast, or the South, or the Great Plains, or the Northwest, or any place where you have to heat and/or cool your home, odds are good that you can do quite a lot to decrease your home energy use by tightening up your house.

Cheryl Pomeroy of Chicago's Informed Energy Decisions, a residential and commercial energy auditor, calls insulation and air-sealing the "low-hanging fruit" of energy conservation.

"If you really only have a certain amount of money, it makes me sad to see people spending it all on solar power if they still have a leaky house." Solar makes sense, she says, once you've tightened and insulated your house.

Informed Energy typically has two types of residential customers: owners of drafty old houses with no insulation who are tired of freezing their booties off, and owners of newly-built or renovated homes who suffer some sort of catastrophe, such as a bad HVAC system or a collapsed ceiling.  Although principles of energy-efficient construction have been established for awhile—at least 1978, when energy-conscious California passed a new set of building regulations—many builders are not familiar with them.

"They have the skill, but not the knowledge," says Pomeroy.

The company will sometimes be called in to remediate a bad job of new furnaces and ductwork, for example. If the furnace is in "unconditioned" or uninsulated space, "It's disheartening to tell someone who's just been through an expensive remodel that it's been done all wrong," she says. "It's hard for us to say, and hard for them to hear."

Founded in 2003 by John Porterfield and Cappy Kidd, Informed Energy Decisions has a snappy website at www.energydetectives.com (which does cause one to wonder why on earth they chose such a supremely forgettable, if accurate, name for their company if they had the good sense to choose such a catchy web address?). More and more, builders and architects are calling Informed Energy in early in the game, to get things right the first time. In addition to performing energy audits and consulting on major design and renovation projects, the company also recently certified the Energy Star rating of Chicago's Intercontinental Hotel.

The company has seen quite a rise in their business since the beginning of the year, when every newspaper and magazine seemed to pronounce 2008 the Year of Green. Since then, Pomeroy says, people seem to be concerned not only about cost, but also about lowering their carbon footprint: "People are saying, 'I want to do the right thing; I'm concerned about the future. I want to lower my footprint.''"

"It's a craze," she says, "The tipping point has happened."