Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Energuide Followup

We're getting close to the deadline for our Energuide Followup. The program has been cancelled, and we only have a few weeks to finish repairs. We had the house tested before we replaced our furnace, since having a new furnace made it worthwhile on it's own. We still have a lot to do, we have to seal all 3 attic hatches upstairs. We have to caulk some of the leaky beadboard on the ceiling in Seth's room. The seal on the front door, and the bottom seal on the basement need to be fixed. The insulation in the basement needs to be finished. There's only one wall left to go in the basement, I started working on the hallway again, so the basement was put on hold. I need to get the door I'm refinishing out of the workshop, so I have room to work down there. I need more foam insulation for the concrete walls as well. I think I need to take a week off work, which is a possibility.

3 comments:

Mark said...

It is so worthwhile. As well either I was dreaming or I heard they were going to reinstall the program. We can attest to the value of all the hard work you will do. We were able to keep our house heated with an electric fireplace well into December. We never turned the fireplace on once till the first week of November. Our neighbors all had theirs on several weeks ahead of us. Our house just stayed warm. The most we did was to light candles if there was a chill in the house. Now we are able to heat the house with the recent gas fireplace I installed. It runs between 10000-20000 btu. We have yet to use our furnace and it is minus 16 right now. That all said our house is only 1100 sq feet. The point is though that for the rebate we got all the extra effort on tightening up the air leaks in the house got us a maximum return. About $2350. Keep at it every little bit will help, but make sure you get it in ASAP.

Derek said...

Wow Mark, that's an impressive return. We're hoping to get around $1000, since replacing the windows isn't in the budget yet. The cost of running the new high efficiency furnace, cost us about half of what the oil furnace cost us. We do plan on tightening stuff up as we go, even after we finish our evaluation.

Mark said...

it truly is amazing how many little places have air leakage when yo get down to it. Not that you get near the cold as we do but one way to find the leaks is when there is a greater difference in temp between outdoors and indoors. One night it was really cold out and I discovered a major amount of air leakage at our baseboards in our living room. Amazing how it looks with a little wood filler afterwards and just how much warmer the room is now.

Thing that gets me is the colder it is the more material contracts and the more places form for air leakage.