continued information.

OK, that last post did look kind of rough. Poor spelling and puctuation optional. Sorry about that. I was just afraid if I didn't get it posted, pretty soon a week would have gone by.

So, the Icynene insulation salesman came for a visit. I want to get a bid on insulating our attic which currently has no insulation. What we settled on was, I am going to shim the sidewalls out to six inches. They will fill the sidewalls with an average of six inches of foam. Because my house is old, it is built using what is called balloon construction. Since the sidewalls are filled with wood chips I am going to use my shopvac to reach down and suck out as many of the wood chips as possible. They will spray foam down the side walls, I am hoping I can get down two or three feet. On the ceiling of the attic I am going to put in a secondary rafter so I can raise the ceiling of the room by a foot. Then they will spray five inches of foam under the roof deck. This should get me R-18 on this third floor where I previously had R-Nothing.

All for the cost of $7356.00

Not a cheap project. And in a way, being a corn burner, a little hard to justify. I am planning on burning about $1100 worth of corn this season. If I insulate the third floor, I am thinking best case, I will still burn $700 of corn. Sure a savings of $400/yr, so it will take me how many years to pay this off? But, we can't expect to be buying $1.40 corn every year either. If corn goes up to $6 some fall, I would be counting every little kernel and thinking about them going through our uninsulated roof if I don't do it now.

...Plus of course we get some more living space. Me personally, I would like to build a bedroom suite up there. Hot tub, little kitchenet, maybe an entertainment center. Hell, me and the wife would just move up there and leave the bottom two floors to the kids! :-)

Right now, surprisingly, the house does stay warm enough. As I type it is zero degrees out. It got down to -19 last night. We have the thermostats set at 70 degrees (which, thanks to corn, I am betting makes ours the highest set thermostat on our block) and the house stays pretty darned close to that mark. To do so though the Traeger TPB-150 corn burner I am running is operating flat out. It has been on full burn, feeding corn for the past 24 hours. Basically it is running at 100% duty cycle, which no household appliance is really supposed to do. I think it is hard on it, hard on the burn pots, hard to get the clinker out of the pots. I bet we are using more electricty than normal because the water pumps to the zones are running continously as well. I think that though the boiler can seem to keep up, it will be a lot happier once we get the third floor insulated.