There's a whole air flow
1/9/10 10:55![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkemeraldsBack in 1912, when my house was built, Portland was booming, and housing for railroad workers was going up fast and cheap. They dug a hole, set some sturdy timber posts in concrete piers, laid beams across them, and put up walls and a roof.
There was a woodstove. No central heat, no insulation, no double-glazed windows; just a box of wood and glass, hovering about three feet above a depression in the soil, with a thin wooden skirt between that crawlspace and the east wind.
Fast forward a century, and a tiny house in an ungentrified working-class neighborhood is, not surprisingly, hardly improved at all. There are electric space heaters now (of the recalled-for-fire-hazard sort), and some cheap landlord of the past insulated the roof to 70s standards, but the house is still bloody cold in the winter.
Well, that's all about to change. The Clean Energy Works contractors spent the morning here assessing and measuring, and whee! It looks like I'm getting not only big fluffy insulation on all six sides of the cube, but what amounts to an actual heating system, too.
Just think! I'll be able to sit in my living room on a January night, rather than having to go to bed just to keep warm.
It's homeowner geekery at its finest, but I'm really pretty excited.
There was a woodstove. No central heat, no insulation, no double-glazed windows; just a box of wood and glass, hovering about three feet above a depression in the soil, with a thin wooden skirt between that crawlspace and the east wind.
Fast forward a century, and a tiny house in an ungentrified working-class neighborhood is, not surprisingly, hardly improved at all. There are electric space heaters now (of the recalled-for-fire-hazard sort), and some cheap landlord of the past insulated the roof to 70s standards, but the house is still bloody cold in the winter.
Well, that's all about to change. The Clean Energy Works contractors spent the morning here assessing and measuring, and whee! It looks like I'm getting not only big fluffy insulation on all six sides of the cube, but what amounts to an actual heating system, too.
Just think! I'll be able to sit in my living room on a January night, rather than having to go to bed just to keep warm.
It's homeowner geekery at its finest, but I'm really pretty excited.
(no subject)
1/9/10 23:23 (UTC)(no subject)
2/9/10 00:44 (UTC)