Keeping Your Cool
It’s a tense time in the United States. For one thing, it’s a big election year. It’s also HOT in most of the country.
When it comes to climate change, people may disagree, but most of us want the same thing: to be comfortable and cool when it’s hot—and we want that comfort at the lowest price we can manage.
For people who own the homes they live in, achieving a comfortable environment is sometimes like working a huge puzzle.
Allison A. Bailes III, PhD, CEO and Chief Troublemaker at Vanguard Energy, has been helping people figure out how to keep their homes comfortable and healthy for a long time.
A life-long tinkerer, he challenges himself to big projects and applies what he learns to his work. Currently, Dr. Bailes is sharing his own remodeling project through videos. It’s a good reminder that even experts meet obstacles and are forced to make changes in the course of a big project.
Dr. Bailes took the time to chat with me about how regular folks can make their homes more comfortable, often without a huge capital investment. It was a fun conversation, and given the incredibly hot temperatures most of us have been dealing with this summer, the tips he shared are immediately useful.
Look for disconnected ducts
For people who have ductwork, the first thing to do to both improve energy efficiency and comfort is to take a close look at your ducts, especially those ducts that run through unconditioned spaces such as the crawl space or attic.
“Go in those spaces, and check out the ducts,” advises Bailes. “It’s amazing how many houses have disconnected ducts!”
If there’s a room in your house that’s never quite cool enough, it’s very possible that the duct has come completely disconnected, and is just blowing cool air into your crawlspace or attic.
“Duct systems fall apart. The older the house, the older the duct system, and the more likely that’s going to be the case,” says Bailes.
He described a situation where a client had persistent issues with her heating and cooling system and scheduled an HVAC contractor to come and take a look. The contractor went into the crawl space and looked around, but didn’t find anything.
The problem continued, so the homeowner looked for herself, and found a disconnected duct, but on the far side of the house. The HVAC contractor simply hadn’t gone far enough to find it.
Check the duct insulation
Once you’ve determined all of your ducts are actually connected, the next thing to consider is how well they are insulated, especially in the attic.
“Attics can get up to 120, 130 degrees,” says Bailes. “And you’re trying to run 55 degree air through those ducts.”
Even if your ductwork is insulated, it may not be efficient insulation. “If it’s an older system, it probably started off with R4 insulation,” he says. In that case, insulation with a higher R-value could make a big difference in both your comfort level and your energy bill.
Think about how quickly ice melts in a regular glass on a hot summer day, compared to how long it lasts in a double-walled, insulated tumbler, like a Stanley or a Yeti. Insulating your ducts properly is the same concept—except the result is a more comfortable home rather than a colder drink.
Check the duct connections
A final thing to look for is something called a “panned joist return ducts.” This is when there’s a big piece of sheet metal screwed to your joists with the duct connected to it, usually with a vent in the top of it.
This type of air return tends to be very leaky. Bailes wrote a blog post about it, and included photos, which make it easy to see the problems. Panned joists are inefficient, but worse, they lower the air quality inside your house.
Return ducts pull air from the house so that it can be heated or cooled, and because they are usually so leaky, they also pull air from the crawl space. Once the air is conditioned, it gets blown into the house. Ewww.
The reason panned joists leak most of the time is that it’s really difficult to seal junctions between wood (like your floor joists) and metal (the sheet metal holding the duct). Plus, wood expands and contracts, so even if it’s well-sealed at first, over time, the sealant fails.
If you have panned joists, you probably have leaky ducts, and sealing everything can bring about improvements in comfort, and may even help lower your energy bills. It can certainly improve the air quality in your home!
Go to the attic
A final tip that can help keep your house more comfortable is to check out the knee wall in your attic. Bailes says that even in new builds, knee walls can be a problem.
“An attic knee wall separates a conditioned space on one side from an unconditioned space on the other. It’s just a vertical wall,” he explains. Imagine a house with an upstairs bonus room, for example. You would want the room to be heated and cooled, but you wouldn’t want to heat and cool the attic on the other side. A knee wall should have insulation on the attic side, and often that insulation is installed badly. There might be fiberglass insulation just shoved in between the wall studs, but left unsecured.
“When the batting is shoved in there and left unsecured, and there’s no air barrier, the bats fall out over time,” says Bailes, adding “I’ve probably got hundreds of pictures that I’ve taken of stuff like that.” If you have a room adjacent to your attic, look at the dividing wall from the attic side. “You shouldn’t be able to see the insulation, because it should be in the cavities of the wall and covered with some kind of sheathing,” says Bailes.
Ideally that sheathing should be rigid, and not house wrap. House wrap keeps the insulation from falling out, but it also allows air to get in.
So many different kinds of houses!
Any time I talk to a building science expert like Bailes, I think about my own house, and how inapplicable so much common advice is. My house is old, and was built one room at a time over the course of multiple generations—by people who were not professional builders.
There’s no ductwork to check, and the only insulation is what we’ve added as we’ve done various projects. One of the complications of making buildings, and especially homes, more energy efficient is that they are all so different.
Building codes can help make sure new builds are efficient, and the development of innovative new products means that newer houses are generally better insulated and sealed and ventilated than older houses.
But there’s so much variability that no set of guidelines could possibly cover every situation. I asked Bailes how he would advise someone who lives in an old, leaky house to get up to speed on building science, so that they can make their home more efficient and more comfortable.
He offered a great list of resources:
First, consider purchasing his book. Buying it from the store on the Energy Vanguard website saves you a few bucks compared to buying it from a retailer.
Bailes’ award-winning blog is full of great information and photos—plus it’s just fun to read. He also publishes a newsletter called News from the Front that includes new articles and columns and links to other useful articles. He says that a lot of the content is for homeowners, though not all of it. Here are some specific posts that may be helpful:
He also suggests greenbuildingadvisor.com as a great resource. The site has a ton of information, links to other blogs, and offers information for both beginners and pros.
A slightly more technical, yet still incredibly helpful site Bailes recommends is buildingscience.com. And a cautious recommendation: “YouTube, of course.There’s tons of stuff on YouTube, but there's also tons of wrong stuff on there. You can get some very bad advice from there.”