Warm and toasty

At least that’s how I hope my house will feel after today. About a month ago, we signed a contract to have insulation installed in our 1929 house. At the moment we are completely broke, Christmas is looking a little dim, and it appears that I may have to get a part-time job. How then, can we afford insulation? This is when I say Buddha, baby Jesus, Mohammed, and Yahweh praise socialism.

Living in Canada, we pay higher taxes. Often, I can see the benefits in these higher tax rates in real programs. Socialized medicine is one example. Another is the ecoENERGY Retrofit grant.This grant comes from both the federal and provincial governments. Anyone in the country is eligible for up to $5,000 dollars in grant money for improving the energy efficiency of his/her home.

The first step was to commission an Energy Efficiency Evaluation Report to determine the current efficiency rating. This was a sad bit of information to us; on a scale of 0-100, our house rated a whopping 36 on the efficiency scale. Our furnace is about 20 years old. It turns out that, essentially, we had no insulation in the house. That’s zip, zero, nada. Also, all of our very old windows are very leaky. As a matter of fact, the test to determine how much air leaks out of the house was a very cool test.

The certified energy advisor opened the front screen door and installed a nylon screen with a large circular hole at the bottom. In that hole, he put a fan and then connected the fan to a monitor. When he turned on the fan, he basically activated every draft part of the house. He and I ran around and found which windows leaked the most profusely. He also showed me spots in the basement that leaked air, usually right at the spot where the foundation and the ground met. We could even see daylight through those spots. He gave me a lot of cheap, quick fixes we could implement, like sprayable expanding foam for those parts in the basement.

At 7:00 on the dot this morning, the installation crew showed up. Since then, there has been the constant din of drills and foam being sprayed into the walls from the outside. Later this afternoon, someone will have to crawl into a closet upstairs to drill a hole to finish the job. The temperature is going up to 40 today, but I’m actually looking forward to the next cold day to feel if there is a difference in the house.