Cool Whip !!

First it's gophers, and now it looks like someone came and blasted the inside of our house with Cool Whip! The kids, and Karen would like that, but actually it is our new icynene foam insulation. This was not the way we had planned to go with insulating the house originally, but after I had our Energy Star home rater take a pre-insulation look at the house, he thought it was the way to go to seal of any and all exterior penetrations.

In a rather unconventional approach here in the South, but not unheard of, and perhaps the "wave of the future," our attic and roof will not be ventilated. We have insulated and sealed off the entire exterior envelop of the house including the soffits and attic. Our attic will be be semi conditioned and the temperature there should be within about 10 degrees of the inside house temperature most of the time. This is a big advantage as we have almost all of our duct work running through the attic. So when the HVAC system is not running the duct work will not excessively heat up or cool down. That should prevent that initial blast of hot or cold air we had in our last house. I had some concerns about the asphalt shingles overheating with an unvented roof system, but studies have actually shown that such roofs only get about 10 degrees hotter then a vented roof. Our shingles are a light color and will still be covered under usual 30yr. warranty.

We had essentially every crack in the interior framing caulked to prevent any air leakage. The foam insulation goes in as a liquid and quickly expands to 100x its original thickness to fill in all of the cracks and voids that conventional FG insulation could not.( There are some pretty neat demo videos on line if you Google icynene videos , if your interested in seeing how they install it) Since the house is now so tightly sealed we were also told that we needed to install a ventilator system to exhaust some internal air from the house and bring in fresh air. So we installed a small unit called an ERV(Energy Recovery Ventilator) It will be set to run 20 minutes or so out of every hour. During that time it will exhaust air over an energy recovery core and preheat/cool the fresh incoming air(passively) and add to/remove moisture based on the time of year. Otherwise we would have no air exchange inside the house except for when we went in and outside. The fireplace does have it's own air intake duct from the outside so that will not be an issue. So, again, if all goes as planned we should see very reasonable heating and cooling costs and recover our investment in all of this technology in about 50 years! Ha! Not really that long, and to be honest it is more the thought of being proactive in reducing our energy consumption then recouping our costs. I would estimate that our annual heating/cooling/electric costs combined will be about what we just paid for natural gas only in our current rental house for just the past TWO months.

This week the house should be drywalled, at least the initial phase of hanging it. We still need to have our well drilled and septic system installed.

Otherwise we have ordered our meaties (50- late March arrival) and turkeys(15- late April arrival), a true sign that spring is just around the corner!!