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everial | 7 years ago

> I've gone through the exercise of retrofitting insulation.

Based on your experiences what do you recommend? (or what sources do you recommend consulting to learn more about retrofitting older buildings?)

discuss

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ip26|7 years ago

finehomebuilding, familyhandyman, and greenbuildingadvisor are all valuable resources with a different bent to each.

Counter-intuitively, air sealing is usually the #1 improvement. A good audit with thermal scans is worthwhile, especially if your muni offers a subsidized audit.

Tough to go into more detail without a little more information.

Gibbon1|7 years ago

> Counter-intuitively, air sealing is usually the #1 improvement.

I think the hard thing for people to think about is that heat transfer is exponential. But we don't measure it that way. In fact R values are really misleading[1].

Meaning transfer coefficients can vary by orders of magnitude. So it's easy for one source like air leakage to totally swamp every other source.

[1] Figure of merit is really 1/R (smaller is better) not R.

everial|7 years ago

Thanks for the recommendations.

> Tough to go into more detail without a little more information.

Have a ~1800 square foot single family Colonial located in Northeast USA built around 1910. It was partially renovated ~2000 but most of it's still uninsulated (afaict, still very new to this!).