I believe I'm OK on those points. But I like the idea of snooping around with an incense stick.
This is a single-floor ranch house. But others here may have that problem. Good idea to check it.
Same applies to the space above
I'm going to check that. My guess is the walls are nailed to the slab and I'll bet there is no insulator. So the baseboard and carpet are the only things cutting off that draft source. Good call!
2" insulation inside walls is classic
The furnace and water heater are in a utility room that draws air through vents in the door which opens to the outside.
I have forced hot water. Other readers might have hot air.
Yes. Both hatches are covered with pieces of insulation. Because the garage is unheated, the hatch out there doesn't need to be.
Foundation - any foundation wall
Good idea. I'm in a slab house so I can't use it, but I did consider digging under the slab and pumping in some sort of insulation, a piece at a time.
Either of those is good. I would want to do a little more investigation and see if you have an air leakage problem through the ceiling which may well be. You need to block that if you have it.
Therefore the utility room is outside of the house. Walls and door separating utility room from rest of house must be insulated. Pipes into and out of heater and hot water must be insulated. Insulation around the water heater should be supplemented since water heaters are normally insulated assuming room temperature environments. Meanwhile, what is the vintage of that furnace - a question about its efficiency?
Appreciate the concept. The house must be completely encased in same insulation. Any hole in that insulation negates most all adjacent insulation - which is why so many homes have energy loss where interior walls join to outside walls.
You cannot correct the slab. You cannot dig beneath and maintain a stable house. Homes on slabs (especially with heat in the slab) were a bad idea - from an energy perspective. You could dig outside the foundation up to 3 feet down to place insulation. Then cold does not go under wooden walls to cool the floor.
Appreciate how badly Americans built homes even in the
1970s. Ironic, that a gallon of gas in 1969 (at 2005 prices) was $1.80. Recently people complained when gas went from a ridiculously low $0.85 to a just as low $1.20. Energy was so cheap in 1970s that we only insulated walls in more expensive buildings. We put a hottest part of house - hot air ducts - almost directly in contact with outside cold - and called that high quality construction practices. It suggests how much wealthier Americans were back then - or how much intelligence has finally been grudgingly forced upon an American public.
Why are you really concerned about the price of energy? Because in the 1970s, a gallon of regular gas went from $1.80 to well over $5 per gallon - in 2005 dollars. Good reason to expect history to repeat itself now that less energy is discovered every year compared with what is consumed - meaning we have a severe innovation problem. All factors that contributed to an economically depressed 1970s - including a lying president, inflation, excessive federal government spending, an unjustified war, and increasing energy prices - also characterized the 70s.
History demonstrates that people do not take energy consumption seriously until gallon goes to maybe $7 per gallon
- 2005 dollars. IOW you would be simply getting ready earlier when doing so costs so much less.
No way around an energy inefficient design - a slab. The damage has been done. You must minimize the damage.
The good news - many options exist to improve energy consumption.
I get ice dams also... Then again, my house is very old and I have no insulation on the lower 12 feet of the roof. The upper part of the attic is finished so that was insulated in the 1970's. Darn, I must be losing a lot of heat... :(
That isn't true. Just think about windows. Of course areas of poor insulation lower the total insulation value, but they don't negate the rest of the insulation. If that were true, then there would be no point of putting insulation in the walls of a house with windows, which have very little insulation value. Wall insulation makes a great difference, even with lousy single pain windows.
Your insulation comments may be true where you live (CA?) but are certainly not true of where I live. Many of the houses built here in the 70's, including mine, were built as all electric houses with double pane windows, 3.5" of insulation in the walls and 16 inches in the attic. BTW 3.5" of insulation in the walls of attached garage too. Insulation standards went up in the 70's but insulation of walls and ceilings was pretty standard in house construction and improvement in the 50's.
Get one of those infrared thermometers and point it around the attic if you can move around reasonably in there. I have an Extech IR201 (one of the cheaper ones) but any brand will do.
Mine showed that my efforts to close the gaps around my vent stack penetration were unsuccessful by identifying a warm plume of air coming out around the insulation.
Sounds like an interesting tool. Do you think it's sensitive enough to spot gaps in outer wall insulation, when used outside the house, or is that heat loss too diffuse for such an instrument? Short of ripping out pieces of wall, I'm not sure how to determine what's in those walls.
I downloaded the instructions for the device from the mfr's site, and noticed that the surface temp of the thing you're trying to measure must be over 30 or 32 F. Honestly, I'm thinking about picking up some infrared film instead, and photographing the house from various angles.
Part of my house is a stone foundation and part is brick. It surprised me by showing that the (thicker) stone foundation insulated better than the brick by being 49 degrees (inside the basement) in general rather than 44 for the brick. I guess it makes sense in retrospect.
Red brick may be absorbing more heat from sun; therefore record a warmer temperature. Sunbathing adjacent to a sunny brick wall on a cloud and windless winter day can be warmer for same reasons.
It does run into problems in the areas that the FAQ's on those devices mention. Shiny aluminum, for instance.
Also, in the case of skin temperature or the temperature of furry animals I've noticed it tend to read lower than one would expect perhaps since it just reads the very surface of the object that it hits which can be quite cool.
Not sure if I can answer your question but I wonder if the level of accuracy you're asking for is necessary for pinpointing leak locations.
My question should answer why so much 'leakage' was measured at the pipe. Insulation stopped convention heat transfer. But the pipe was doing radiated heat transfer. Therefore little heat radiated by pipe appeared as much heat on the tester. Instructions for the heat detection device should discuss this if true. Above is a hypothesis that would also explain why fury animals measure lower. Fur convents heat but does not radiate much.
To better understand what I am ask> It does run into problems in the areas that the FAQ's on those devices
Your crystal ball is cracked. The pipe was mostly in the 30 degree range, the attic was in the 20's. The area of insulation in plastic bags I had put around the pipe was in the 50's, air was leaking around it. Not sure how 'radiated heat' could make the pipe cooler than the area it supposedly radiated to rather than equal in temperature. I don't have freon in my vent stack.
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