In case you happen to be living under a rock, July has been the hottest month on record. On planet Earth. It’s even hot where it’s winter. Here in Houston, it’s been over 100F for the last month and will continue to be for the next month. The local utility has been hitting record use days repeatedly and asking people to watch their power usage. (Let’s be honest for a minute here and point out that it’s not actually people’s homes that are the issue as much as the massive cooling load associated with half filled office buildings and malls/grocery stores/etc that they insist on keeping at 55 deg – not to mention the indoor baseball and football stadiums…)
Shawn was recently talking with his coworkers who said they are having difficulty cooling their houses more than 20 degrees below the outside temperature and their air conditioners are running constantly. And these are people who have expensive houses. That would be both miserable and expensive. Conversely, our (not new or fancy) air conditioner runs about 15 min every hour and has no trouble cooling our house down 30 deg to the reasonably comfortable 75 deg that we keep it at. This, people, is the difference that insulation and good sealing around windows and doors makes. Plus the effort we’ve gone to to add extra insulation. And I must say, it has been well worth it.
Check out the linked posts for details on what we did, and even if you’re not starting with open walls, blown in insulation is better than nothing. The name of the game is energy efficiency. Save some money, save the planet, and be a lot more comfortable.
Engineers Without Walls 