My house is freezing!

[jen0610]

I don't doubt it. This house is OLD...like built in 19-diggity-two old. Down in the cellar, you can see the load bearing tree. It's a large tree that they shaved the limbs off of and is used to hold up the house.

I need Mike Holmes!

I think you would send Mike over the edge if he came in and saw a tree holding up your house.

But I do agree, Mike would get you all fixed up.

 

[FlightlessDuck]

We have the same problem. Electric baseboards, no fireplace. Downstairs is cold, upstairs is warm. I know the insulation under the floor (between the 1st floor and the basement) has fallen down, and that's probably part of the problem. But we haven't really found any drafts.

 

[luvmy3jewels]

Our local electric company provided us a free energy audit, so you may want to call yours and ask them if they provide that service. I've heard if you pay for them through a private provider they can cost up to $300.

We have a fairly new house, and it was very frustrating to learn that a lot of our problems with heat/cooling loss could have been addressed during construction. Once the house it built, it is very hard to go back and correct a lot of things. However, your house is old so there may be additional things you could do that would help.

Has your dh checked your duct work to make sure that it doesn't have any holes? Our former house (in the country) had mice living below the first floor and they ate holes through our ducts which allowed a lot of heat and air conditioning to escape. Once we realized what had happened, and replaced the soft duct with hard duct, the house became a lot more energy efficient.

 

[Jennasis]

Ah, much love for the load-bearing tree. Funny thing is, we had the SAME thing in our house back on Long Island. Real old house, and the main support for it in the basement was a tree (bigger than a telephone pole).

Yeah, my house would probably put Mike Holmes into a state of catatonic shock....but we'd have fun "makin' it right."

Will definitely put a duct-work inspection on the list. It looked all right to my very untrained eye when i went down there to save DH who was screaming bloody murder cause he'd gotten stuck in the crawl space. I need a very small child...like a toddler, to fit under there!

 

[mrsv98]

Have you tried closing all the registers upstairs? They don't need to be open and it will help keep the heat on the main floor.

 

[Jennasis]

Have you tried closing all the registers upstairs? They don't need to be open and it will help keep the heat on the main floor.

I...I don't think we have! 'Scuse me....be right back.

 

[Hannathy]

1. Yes close the upstairs vents because heat goes up and you don't need the bedrooms as warm, and again heat RISES.

2. Get a little space heater, much more efficient than turning your furnace up and it puts the heat right where you need it.

3. Third boil a pot of water on the stove. If you raise the humidity in your house you will feel warmer. Think Florida in the summer, how it feels warmer than other places, it is because of the humidity.

4. If you have high ceilings get a ceiling fan and use it in the winter with the blades adjusted to blow down. Because again heat rises and all that warmth is just sitting up in those tall ceilings that you paid for and can't enjoy, so make it come down to you.


You can start with boiling the water now. I have had a pot on all morning and it really does make a difference and it was -5 this morning with a much worse wind chill.

 

[jen0610]

14. If you have high ceilings get a ceiling fan and use it in the winter with the blades adjusted to blow down. Because again heat rises and all that warmth is just sitting up in those tall ceilings that you paid for and can't enjoy, so make it come down to you.

My girlfriend bemoans her 12 ft ceilings every sping and fall. They have to remember to switch over their ceiling fans. She about tossed her cookies, when she found out how much the 8ft ladder was going to cost.

 

[malibuconlee]

Call a couple of contractors and ask for a quote on blown in insulation, especially for the wall you can feel the cold coming in. Wouldn't hurt to get quotes on fixing the door frames either. We had one tell us that it wasn't as expensive as we thought it would be. We sold the house (1890 Victorian), but had we stayed it would have been a for sure thing we would have had done.

Agree with adjusting the vents upstairs.

In this house we also have the high ceiling in the entry/living area and the back of the house is always hotter in summer and cooler in winter than we would like because of that.

 

[tvguy]

Most utilities will do an energy audit for free. Many will offer zero or low cost financing for upgrades.

HOWEVER, really look at the cost-benefit of each individual upgrade. My mom had an audit done. She had $500 of insulation blown into the attic, cut about $25 a month off her heating and a/c bill, so will take 20 months to recoup the cost. But switching to dual pane windows would have cost $16,000 installed, with a projected savings of $5 a month....yup, would have taken 266 years to recoup that.

 

[Jennasis]

Great suggestions. The upstairs vents have been shut since I posted earlier. The house temp seems to be sticking at 62 degrees...and improvement over the 54-57 yesterday. It feels a bit warmer now since I was boiling pasta and making dinner (baked macaroni..Alton Brown's recipe...magnificent!), and the oven is on.

I remember doing the boiling water trick as a kid. If the pipes froze or we ran out of heating oil, mom had many tricks for keeping us warm. Then we had a big put belly stove in our living room that heated the whole house...ahhhh warmth! That was back on Long Island...don't see many pot belly stoves these days.

 

[manning]

For starters, it's an old house. 1800 square ft. Only one bedroom and a bathroom upstairs, and two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen/livingroom, dining room downstairs. Our heating bills are outrageous...we are hemorrhaging heat! The upstairs is hot as Hades but downstairs it's 57 degrees with the heat set at 70 and running constantly!

I think we narrowed the cause down to one wall in our living room. I can feel cold air coming through the light sockets in the wall (it's an exterior wall)! If you place your hand on the wall itself it feels cold. We think there is little ir possibly NO insulation in that wall. The wall also house a "bay" window with an exterior door. The house is so old that the door frame has shifted and settled and is no longer square. At the very bottom of the door, you can see light. Iknow it isn't sealing properly.

DH bought those foam insulators for the outlets and is installing them today. Also got weatherstripping to try to seal up any leaks in the window/door. The living room is on a slab. Someday I want too pull up the carpet and put down radiant heat and hardwood.

Anyway. Has anyone ever had an energy audit done? How much did it cost? Did it help (the info you got)? I can't sit in a cold house all winter while I am paying for heat!!

Seeing daylight isn't good. You are losihg a lot there.

Use shrink wrap weatherizing. Something like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft33T82ud8o&NR=1&feature=fvwp

You can get the kits at Home dept, Ace, etc.

Odds are if you have an old house you may not have insulation.

 

[golfgal]

Our second house was built in 1920 and it was pretty drafty. We put the 3M plastic on most of the windows, put rolled up towels at the base of all the outside doors (now you can get "draft dodgers" at Walgreens, etc.). We put the foam things in all the light sockets. It is odd that your upstairs is warm and your main floor is cold. Usually it is the other way around. I wonder if you have dampers in your vents and they are closed. They would be in the ducts themselves-your hubby might have to crawl under the house again and look. They often come with a little lever or a wire whisk looking lever. Do you feel warm air coming out of the vents in the lower level?

 

[ameraumi]

I don't doubt it. This house is OLD...like built in 19-diggity-two old. Down in the cellar, you can see the load bearing tree. It's a large tree that they shaved the limbs off of and is used to hold up the house.

Hopefully once we get the audit done, we can get to work on making fixes. DH and I are both handy and able to do pretty much everything ourselves.

I laughed because we have the same thing in our house! It was built in 1900. I freaked the first time I saw the tree "stump" and all of the logs being used as supports.

We have one room that is colder than the others on the main floor. We used the 3M plastic wrap on the windows and the leak guard things on the door. I also used the foam weatherizing things for the outlets. It has helped some but not a lot. I know these old windows need to be replaced, but for now we will keep maintaining them. Caulk and expanding foam spray are great investments.

 

[Jennasis]

Seeing daylight isn't good. You are losihg a lot there.

Use shrink wrap weatherizing. Something like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft33T82ud8o&NR=1&feature=fvwp

You can get the kits at Home dept, Ace, etc.

Odds are if you have an old house you may not have insulation.

In our old house on Long Island, the walls were insulated with HAY.


We're pretty sure that the wall in question isn't fully insulated.

Our second house was built in 1920 and it was pretty drafty. We put the 3M plastic on most of the windows, put rolled up towels at the base of all the outside doors (now you can get "draft dodgers" at Walgreens, etc.). We put the foam things in all the light sockets. It is odd that your upstairs is warm and your main floor is cold. Usually it is the other way around. I wonder if you have dampers in your vents and they are closed. They would be in the ducts themselves-your hubby might have to crawl under the house again and look. They often come with a little lever or a wire whisk looking lever. Do you feel warm air coming out of the vents in the lower level?

Yep. Warm air coming through the ducts.

 

[kelleyrn2000]

We used to live in an old house with the same problem, where the front living room was icy cold, and most of the house was warm.

We used the shrink wrap over the windows in the winter. DH blew the cellulose insulation in himself (I think he rented the blower). We did notice a difference, but I cannot remember how much it affected our heating bills. Those old houses are so drafty...and rarely insulated.

We actually had bats (I assume they were bats) nest in one of our outside walls every winter. Same spot every year...eeek!!! Gotta love those old houses!

 

[snarlingcoyote]

I used to live in a 200 year old house in MA. The previous owners had blown in insulation and it was still COLD all winter.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned that worked well for us was to hang up two sets of thick, insulated curtains in the windows. We got thick carpet bag material type curtain with liner and then doubled 'em over the windows. You can do the same thing with cold wall by hanging quilts -that's what a lot of people used to do back in the day - they didn't hang quilts on the wall for purty!

For homemade draft dodgers that will work better than a towel without sewing, get a towel or a cloth and make a tube out of it as long as the opening. Hot iron the seam with no-sew hem tape or hot glue or whatever you have around. Fill 'em up with rice, tie off the ends. (You could also fill a couple of tube socks. . .)

Don't neglect the floors, even if you have carpet - we used to throw down a big old fake persian rug from 1980's Sears that was wool. I got it for $5 at an auction, and it really did keep the floor drafts at bay.

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

we have the same issues. Our house was built in 1938, Sears catalog house. The insulation has settled and all the walls are cold to the touch. We are doing a major add on so we will insulate from the outside in. We have gypsum board and plaster walls that we don't want to drill through.

My brother had the holes drilled into the walls and had new insulation blown in. Then had the holes patched and repainted the walls (they were doing that anyway). they had fairly new siding and plaster walls so the didn't want to mess either of those up.


Now my mom's house. OY! 1730 cape. Insulation was newspaper wrapped around the framing. We wanted to salvage the horsehair plaster walls so we insulated from the outside in.

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned that worked well for us was to hang up two sets of thick, insulated curtains in the windows. We got thick carpet bag material type curtain with liner and then doubled 'em over the windows. You can do the same thing with cold wall by hanging quilts -that's what a lot of people used to do back in the day - they didn't hang quilts on the wall for purty!

yep!!! mom has heavy lined drapes for every room.

 

[Daisy14'sDH]

I havent read the whole thread but here are a couple of possible solutions.

Try to remove any cover plates around the light switches and outlets, look carefully (you can enlarge the hole a little to the size of the plate) and look inside the wall for any insulation. If you dont see any or it is too sparse or thin...

A) Tear out all the drywall and plaster and insulate everything up to todays specs. If you want to go over board scab the walls out an extra 2 inches (May be worth it) so you can get even more insulation in there, doing this insures outlets are WELL insulated with no hassles. Or use what you have and get the wall proffessionally sprayfoamed. You will get a higher R value per inch.

B) Consider doing the repair from the outside, there are systems available now that will allow you to do a "Stucco" wall. Basically they secure High density foam board to the exterior of your home and give it a pretty finish. But this system still has its drawbacks...

Good luck with your project!