Turn Green

Back in January, my wife and I nearly had a heart attack when we received our electric bill, it was around $450-500, and it was almost entirely due to heating the house. During the winter, the house isn’t kept at a tropical 80 degrees, I believe the thermostat is programed for 72 degrees when we are home, when we are gone it’s programmed for 68 degrees. This is when we decided that we had enough of this, and that we needed to do something, but what? Turning down the thermostat didn’t seem to be an option that would save us much. I decided that I would venture up into the attic to take a look.

When our house was built, the builders used blown in insulation to insulate the attic space above the ceilings, and they put just enough in to fill to the top of the rafters, a whole 6-7 inches of insulation. So to figure out the R-value of the insulation I went to the U.S. Department of Energy’s web site, taking the value of 3.6/inch of blown cellulose insulation we had a whopping R-22 up in the attic, the same website says that we should have an R-value between R-30 and R-60. I then called one of the local service companies to get a quote on installing additional insulation in the attic. The person who showed up took some measurements and recommended that we install an additional 8-10 inches of insulation for the 800 sf of accessible attic space, taking us up to at least R-49, recommended for this part of the country. His final quote was $800.00, I almost signed a check right there to have it done, but I held off to do a little research.

Visiting one of the big box home improvement stores websites, I found that they sold bags of cellulose insulation for $6.87/bag, each bag covering 40sf to an R value of 19. Doing the math, I determined that we needed 25 bags of insulation to get to the recommended value. The big box store also rented the blower, however if you purchased 20 bags or more, you got the use of the blower free for 24hrs. The total cost for us to do ourselves was going to be in the neighborhood of $175.

That weekend we made a trip to the store, rented a truck, bought the insulation, got the blower and headed home. Installation was easy, my wife ran the blower and loaded the bags of insulation into it, and I got to crawl around the attic blowing it in. It was messy though, we both wore goggles, face masks and ear plugs. I did need an additional light in the attic as the dust cut visibility down to a couple of feet, and a tape measure to check on the depth in the area I was working in. 5 hours later we had added 10 inches of insulation throughout the entire attic.

We are still waiting to see what kind of energy savings we are going to see, but the way I look at it, adding the insulation didn’t hurt anything, didn’t take a lot of time or money, and it does seem the A/C is running a little less.