Introduction: Different Ways to Design Your House to Be Energy Efficient

By Senseless Adventures!
About: http://senseless.livejournal.com/ I've been attempting to build a house mostly by myself for the last five years... I finally more or less finished it before the bunker project and after recovering from crus…

This isn't exactly an Instructable on how to put up insulation but when I decided to build my house and do as much of it as I could Solo these are some of the steps I made to keep my heating a cooling costs down.

When I designed this house I had the advantage of living next door for a few years before I started doodling floor plans. I tried the make the house very Energy Efficient starting with designing the house as close to a square as I could which gives you the maximum interior space to exterior wall ratio, and I made them six inches thick instead of four to be able to get a higher R-Value. I had an energy audit of my drawings before I Applied for my permits and they seemed confidant I only needed a 3.5 ton unit for the main floor and a 1.5 for the guest suite since I didn't expect it to get much use and whether hot or cold two hours after you show up on my doorstep unannounced and I run up to kick them on it's pretty cozy up there.
The Attic also in principle has R-60 but its not spread out very well. I couldn't find anyone to help me so I had two huge bundles of the stuff and the blower machine, snuck the hundred foot blower line up there through the eave and then tied it high on the rafters. After a few tries I came up with a system of staring in the far corner blowing in ten bags, the going back up in the attic moving the hose about ten feet and another ten bags and so on until I went through the hundred some bails I bought on sale of course.

This left me with a bunch of mounds and I then went up there with a broom and a mask and spread it all out as even as I could being sure to leave the walkways I have to get around up there uncovered. I insulated under them with fiberglass batts as I went since I didn't want any voids knocking down my R-Value.

Step 1: Blowable Innsulation Is Hard to Do Solo

It was about 24 inches thick but its settled since then and if I can find a helper someday soon while its cool up there, I'll try to get it an even two feet by blowing in another 42 sacks of the stuff or whatever it is they come shrink racked on the pallet. It's made from shredded paper and treated with Borate so it's not flammable. I have a few places I am going to use up some of my surplus batts of insulation like the far side of the computer room ceiling facing west. The chimney passes through there and I boxed it top to bottom to keep the flames contained if the chimney ever caught fire and I even have a simple sprinkler system that will kick in as long as the well has power and flood it and the water will be directed all the way to the bottom floor without causing a flood on the top two. I didn't blow any around there even though the chimney is sealed very well and the shredded paper is supposed to be flame retardant I still didn't want to take a chance of any paper finding its way in there so I meant to do it with fiberglass and either it was too hot to do it then or I just forgot but the back 5 foot has no insulation at all so I will rectify that tomorrow using some of my surplus batts of fiberglass R-19 and R-30...

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Step 2: Collecting the Winter Sunlight But Still Shaded in Summer

The house is also positioned so the west side get full exposure to the sun this time of year, in fact on my birthday it shines in the back window through the house out the front door and you get two columns of light that march to the top of the driveway as the sun sets.

Pyramids have always fascinated me.

Step 3: Whole House Fan and Woodburner

In the summer with its higher arc I over sized my roof eaves so they are 30 inches west side, 18 on the north and south and the front porch has 7 feet of overhang to keep the sun at bay.

I used R-30 between the floor joists of the main floor then sheet rocked the garage workshop and safe room but the crawl space insulation is still exposed. I want a vapor barrier to put over it and I am thinking I will use house wrap to do this since it will not break down and crumble like 6 mil plastic does as the years pass. If I am going to do something I try and make it so it will outlast me cause I'm sure one day I won't have the freedom and ability to climb up a ladder or crawl about down there to fix things but the best laid plans...

I've been doing a study for the last two weeks of the house temp and with highs in the low 80's and lows of 50 or 60 we have had I was able to maintain the houses temperature between 74 and 78 degrees by simply running my whole house fan with the two windows on the top floor opened at night or lighting a fire in the woodburner. If it was supposed to be an especially warm day I'd leave the fan on all day. 78 degrees is roasting in the summer for inside the house but feels so good this time of year and my furnace has not kicked on once during this time nor has my AC unit. The whole house fan is installed in the stairway ceiling so you can't see it since my wife long ago absolutely forbade me from putting such device as this attic fan in because she can't have the windows open cause of allergies or it being to hot or two cold...

Step 4: Direct the Air From the Fan in an Efficient Manner

I also used some luan glued and bent to form a gentle sweeping arc so there is no turbulence as the air enters the attic and I have it set to blow across the insulated ceiling and then at the end it's forced up above the plywood radiant heat barrier I put in five feet above the attic floor complete with steps

Step 5: Block Radiant Heat From Reaching Ceilings Below Attic Space

In the summer there is generally a 40 degree temperature difference between air measured 2 feet above the floor and two feet above the radiant barrier which is actually a shear wall on its side since the third level used to sway a bit when Eglin was testing some of the bigger bombs. The next time they announced we'd be getting some heavy test bombing I put a glass of water in the middle of the top floor / guest suite and when the bombing began I ran up there and the sway was completely gone, and the cup of water sitting on the floor didn't make a quiver. It also makes for quite a bit of attic storage space. We've moved so many times some of the stuff up there hadn't been unpacked since before we were married fourteen years ago. I'm sorting everything out reboxing them and labeling them this time, plus I have been placing things I believe to be the step kids in their own spot in case a bus runs over me or their mom so they can readily find their child hood treasures and no I hope its a long time till I die knock on wood but it also occurred to me that with the holidays approaching they are likely to visit and I can let them know where it's at and they might even take then probably not knowing it had been saved for so long. Scotty is off at Tallahassee working on his PhD so he's not in a position to put more stuff in storage but it will make things simpler for them if that bus get's me.

But and this was supposed to be a short post and I am so easily called away for two weeks I have kept the house within a 6 degree range of a comfortable temp using just an attic fan with a half horsepower motor, by getting a good fire going on any night it was expected to be in the 50's then cramming it full of junk mail old newspapers and anything else burnable but destined for the trash. I also flipped the vent redirect thing on the drier exhaust so it sends the warm humid air into the laundry room and then is sent down the hall, and I'm doing the laundry and drying at night to warm the place up.

It's going down to 28 here tonight and I have the furnace turned off manually. I have an electric radiant room heater in the bedroom turned off but if the wife decides at 4 AM she is cold I can fix that by just flipping a switch and shutting the bedroom door since the master bedroom and bath is insulated on all sides in case we have a bad hurricane and lose power for a month a window unit will keep this room cool and I can run it from my 5000 watt generator. If we have a storm then cold weather the computer room can be heated from the wood burner and is actually an emergency extra bedroom where some days if I've been up all night helping wife I have been known to seek sanctuary back there and take a nap during the day when her caregivers are here.

This will be a good test of the insulation hopefully but I won't really know until I wake up tomorrow morning.

Last Monday night the Thermostat read 80 degrees and the thermometer read 78 and we had an expected low, which we reached of 28..

Step 6: Sink or Swim Time

I turned off the furnace completely then lit a full load of oak in the woodburner around 4 pm then around 6 pm I crammed it the rest of the way with old newspapers laid in about a 6 inch thick stack like a very large book. You need to get the firebox very hot by burning a few good pieces of wood, spreading the coals out horizontally and lay the stack of paper on top of it. There is enough heat stored up to essentially cook the paper like charcoal and it will burn for about 14 hours but at a much lower temp than if the paper was shredded and put in loosely. This keeps the airflow up the chimney from getting fast enough to suck ashes up and onto the roof but the next morning if you stir the pile up there are always quite a few hot spots ready to turn into flame if exposed to puff of wind. Since I'm in Florida and the house is built to catch the winter sun I don't need to worry about restoking the fire so I just generally stir up the ashes and by around 4 pm the next day they have pretty much been extinguished so I shovel them out in a steel bucket and scatter the ashes around the fruit trees I have planted in the back yard. The soil in the Panhandle has a pretty low Ph and usually you need to lime around your peach trees otherwise they are very tart. I use the ashes instead since I have to dump them somewhere and each year the fruit is sweeter plus it tends to keep a weed free zone around the trunk so I'm never tempted to get the weed whacker out and possibly bruise the tree.

I haven't lived here long enough yet to compare power bills from last winter but I am betting that it drops by a hundred dollars power being about ten cents a kilowatt compared to the summer power bills.

I am tempted to ask the neighbors to get me a print out of their last years power usage in kilowatts since we built that one and I know how it was insulated. My wife complains the power bill is so high each month and that I promised her an energy efficient house but power has more than doubled here since we sold the house next door. It's about 2800 square feet heated and cooled versus about 5000 square feet heated and cooled in this house plus the pool and I'd be willing to bet our kilowatt usage is just slightly more than theirs is.

The next morning the house was 70 degrees.

Outside it was 28 and the cars had frosted windshields.

Victory is Mine!

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