Energy Saving at Home

I live in Maine, so we pretty much have to. I live in one of the first houses that were built in Millinocket. As far as I can determine, the place was built as a boarding house for some of the first mill workers, since the mill was here before the town. When we bought it, the building was a three-unit apartment building. We converted it into a home, but it's large and it's old; not old like some houses are old, but I found a 1910 postcard that showed our street and, at that time, it was dirt and our house and the even larger house across the street were the only houses there, so I guess it was built around that time. The town doesn't have records because there wasn't a town here yet.

Anyhow, it is large and it wasn't particularly well insulated. One of the walls was stuffed with newspaper and magazines, for example. As I've been working on parts of the house, I have been insulating them, but I've never been able to afford a large-scale insulation project. Still, I think we've got it fairly well insulated now, and we've replaced all of the windows with double-pane windows. There were, I think, 36 of them so that wasn't cheap. Plus, I finished the attic, which had previously consisted of sheets of insulation draped over the rafters. Now we have a sizable insulated room there, although unheated. With insulation in the floor, ceiling, and walls of the attic, more of the heat remains downstairs.

Last year, we qualified for an energy saving program that provided heat pumps for homes that were thought to benefit from it. Rather than an income qualification, they were looking for houses that could save a lot of energy costs with the addition of a heat pump. Normally costing a few thousand, that was installed in our upstairs living room free, and that saves a whole lot on our heating oil costs. It comes on only when it senses that someone is in the room, so we can keep the thermostat very low there. Interestingly, we found that a cat jumping up on the couch will trigger it, so that cats have been taking advantage of that. The heat vent from the heat pump is pointed right at the couch so when I notice that I don't have any cats in my office, I know that I'll be able to find them on the couch upstairs. The heat pump will also cool during the summer, which will be an added advantage. This adds to our electric bill, but saves more on our heating oil costs than it adds to the electric.

This spring, we are going to separate the water heater from our oil heating system, replacing it with an electric on-demand water heater, which should keep the oil pump from having to come on throughout the summer, just to heat water that we may not even be using.

Otherwise, we keep the thermostats at about 65 degrees during the winter, and use space heaters and slankets in the rooms that we are in. My cats have heated cat beds in my office too, since they are particularly averse to cold.

 

We have been having problems with our house heat. I think Bobby mentioned about our furnace not working and he had to get the parts and fix it. Now, it is working again; but the thermostat does not work right.
At night we turn the heat down to 65, and then up to 70 in the mornings, but what it does is kicks on for a little while and then somehow resets back to 62 degrees, and we end up freezing until we realize that the thermostat has reset again.
Sometimes, it turns on and stays on , but when we need it most, in the morning, it is when it seems not to want to work right.

Robin has one of the Nest thermostats that works with WiFi and has an app, and she has ordered one for us now, too. It is supposed to be here this weekend, and then we will see how well it works. Since it uses a WiFi connection and an app, we don’t have to try and use any settings on the thermostat, like on the one we have now.
We can just tell the app when we want it to warm up in the morning, and cool down at night , and if we change our schedule, then we just use the app to over-ride the settings for right then.
I think that Robin can even talk to hers, like Siri, and tell it to warm up or cool down her house, but I am not sure about that part.
Anyway, I am excited to see how well it works !

 

Since I last posted in this thread, we have had our house fully insulated. In fact, it required that I add an additional floor to the attic in order to fit enough insulation in the upper part of the house. So, between the roof of the upstairs and the first attic floor, we have insulation, then we have more insulation between that and the new attic floor. It doesn't give me as much headroom in the attic but it's still a usable space. Plus, all of our exterior walls were insulated professionally, entirely paid for by the same program that paid for the heat pump, and they came looking for us, so I'm sure they were paid by someone, although it didn't cost us a cent. The attic, walls, and crawl space were all insulated.

Where we used to go through four tanks of oil in the winter, this year we've only had to refill the tank once. We're also keeping it much warmer in here than we used to. Previously, we'd keep the thermostats in the 60s and use Slankets or space heaters, while the cats had heated beds. This year, we're keeping it reasonably warm in the house, although the cats still have heated beds.

My next project is to get a wood stove for our library. The library was built as a porch, I think, then enclosed and converted into two bedrooms while the place was an apartment building. The porch was built on a separate foundation from the rest of the house. We tore down the wall between the two bedrooms and made a library out of it.

Several years ago, we had a freeze-up and we elected to discontinue heating the library because the exterior walls had little or no insulation, and it was greatly adding to the cost of heating the house. Although we still have our books there, the library has not been much used in the winter because it's unheated. Because of that, things tend to accumulate there so we didn't even bother making it usable last summer.

I'd like to put a small wood stove in the library so that we can use it again, but only when we want to. I like the feel of wood heat, and I can cut all the wood we'd need for it from our land up north. I'd like to clear out some parts of the woods anyhow since that's better for wildlife.

 

Okay, I have an incentive to do this one. I found a small, low-end, wood stove on clearance at Lowes, and bought it. It's very small but it will be sufficient for the library. Since it's lower to the floor than I would like, I think I'll build something to set it on - high enough so that I can get to it without having to stoop, and maybe high enough so that I can put some wood beneath it, so that I'll have dry wood available. I won't be putting it in until the snow melts, though.

 

It wouldn't be directly under it. Not only would there be not enough space but that would be very dangerous. I meant under the platform that I place it on, which would, of course, include a stove board, as would be the case if it were placed on the floor of the room.