Thursday, October 29, 2009

Warmer?

Somewhere about midsummer we arranged to have new insulation blown into the attic. The crew came yesterday and did the job. It will be interesting to see if the house feels cosier and/or the heating bills go down. (Of course, to really figure the latter we would have to factor in comparative fuel prices and actual outdoor temperatures over the season...). At any rate, I'm hoping to be less of a polluter. I'm also hoping that better attic insulation might reduce the size of the ice dams that form at the edge of the roof. We'll see.

Because the front door had to be open for the the blower hose thingy to snake in and up the stairs, the cats were confined to the kitchen and basement for several hours. Merlin found some relief for his feelings about the situation by jumping to the top of the refrigerator and shredding most of a roll of paper towels.

5 comments:

junior_goddess said...

You'd think the ice dams would reduce. (You watch-you'll have the warmest winter in the past 10!)

Curious to know....

Anonymous said...

It IS supposedly to be a mild winter. But your insulation will be there for the life of the house, so one warm winter just means extra-low heating bills that year. Followed by years and years of less heating oil/natural gas being burned.

Personally, I find shredding a roll of paper towels to be extremely cathartic ;^)

Leslie said...

Tux has become quite fond of shredding the paper towels that are on a holder above the kitchen sink, so much so that the roll now lives on top of the refrigerator, which is pretty well barricaded. I'm just happy he hasn't found the toilet paper (yet).

Someday I'll get a picture of him standing on his hind legs - with his markings he looks like a penguin.

speaking of cats, my code word is purreach -- go figure

magnusmog said...

Our energy bills have almost halved since we got a new heating system and new windows last year. Now we are trying to get it even lower by wearing thermals and not putting the heating on until the last minute!

YarnThrower said...

If you're serious about wanting to compare your energy usage, you may already be aware of this, but if not, it is easier than you think...especially if you are an MGE customer... If not, then you will have to figure out how to get something called "degree days," though I imagine these data are available someplace online. Your MGE bill tells you how many therms of energy you use, as well as the "degree days" (which is a way to "normalize" to account for outside temperature." You are interested in "therms per degree day" before and after your insulation, so divide therms by # of degree days over the same period. MGE has all of the data online for you already. Prior to that, I manually tabulated it for our house after we got a new furnace, and it was a substantial reduction in the amount of energy used.