hi, i'm art nash with rich seifert, university of alaskacooperative extension service. the cooperative extension servicebrings relevant research from the university to the common resident to help make their life moreself-sufficient. today we're going to go ahead and take alook specifically at some fairly simple methods in which you can make your homemore energy-efficient. as you see there's a house behind usthat is going to be converted from a summerto a permanent living a house for
the fairbanks climate. we're gonna look at it, diagnosewhat the problems are, especially look at air leakage and try and make it as efficient as possible, knowing how to bring it up to a more comfortable, moreaffordable living space with the least costmethods that we can find. with that let's go take a look. okay, now that we're inside, we're going tostart to look at air leakage and
look at where air might beleaking out or leaking into the house and try and plug those and see what we can do to make thehouse more efficient from an air leakage point-of-view. the important thing here is that mostlythat's regarded as a problem. seal up the small leaks andeverything will be fine. however, we have to allow some air to come into the house to be exchanged tokeep the air in the house fresh. we have to allow some air exchange or the house will become stale and unlivable
and air quality will decrease. we're gonna look at places like under the threshold of thedoor, where air leaks in the new bottomof the house, around the windows. on electrical outlets, and perforations in the wall forplumbing. in the ceiling, a very important thing,putting a good air leakage control barrier, a paper control barrier, atthe ceiling, is very important for weatherization and is very important forgetting control of air leakage.
it may be that we tighten up the house that we may enoughneed a ventilation system, a mechanical ventilationsystem, to give enough air for the inhabitants to be comfortable and healthy with the airquality that's in the house. many matter homes, in fact, most modern homes that are builtby contractors almost always have an active ventilation system. usually in the northern climes,
heat recovery ventilation systems areused, though they are relatively expensive. one of the advantages of having a heat recoveryventilation system is that they can provide balanced airflowthrough the house to ensure that there's fresh air entering with stale air leaving, and yet the heat is recovered from theexiting air and given to the air coming in.
i'm standing near an open window on abeautiful sunny day. it happens to be april and you can see is the window isopen which is a standard form of passive ventilation, and it is a system that we've been using inhousing in the united states and in alaska for many, many years, but we're finding they we're getting to aplace where not only is this a bad idea in the middle of winter asanybody who lives here can tell you, but it is not going to be adequate formost of the year.
we want to make the house alot more effective with controlled ventilation. there is a physical process that goes on most housescalled stack effect where air tends to leak in low in ahouse and leak out high because we're addingheat to that air as we bring it in, we heat it with whatever system we'reusing to heat the house. this house has both baseboard heaters and a wood stove, and as that air is heated it tends to want to become buoyant and move upward,
so you have this general pressure tomove air out of the house high and into the house low called stack effect. well, stack effect works really well inmoving air in and out of the house. in fact, it works a little too well, and consequently when you have very,very cold temperatures outside and you're heating your house maximum, you tend toenhance the stack effect, and air leakage becomes a really bigfactor in heat loss. so once you get a control of heat
loss through air leakage, you can much more manage the energyconservation and heating of the house. it becomes less expensive and yet you alsocan control ventilation and may want to movetoward the heat recovery ventilator which is mentioned earlier, but getting control of air leakage, getting control of the stack effect, is a crucial factor. once you get controlof it then you can apply the head recovery ventilation option,
but if you don't get good control of air leakage, the ventilation option is moot becausethere will be so much air leakage, when it is very, very cold, that you can overcomewhat you're losing too fast by this leaky old barn that you have, but you can't add enough ventilation to make a difference. so the house has to be worthy of ventilation before you apply it.
almost all the fuels we use in the heating of our houses today are carbon-based, even if you using wood, even though it'snot a fossil fuel, it still burns, essentially, carbon and produces carbon dioxide.allthe other fossil fuels, coal, oil, gas, are carbon-based fuels, and so as long as we are usingcarbon-based fuels to heat our houses, there is a chance if things go wrong, that we canproduce carbon monoxide in the houses, and carbon monoxide is a
is one of the single most dangerous poisons that ever can be in your house. you can't sense it, youcan't smell it. it is entirely impossible to know it'shappening, and the worst part of carbon monoxide isthat you become starved of oxygen and lethargic,and you lose your alertness so you can'talways tell when something is happening to you,
so we highly recommend that everybodyhave a carbon monoxide detector in their houses. it''s very, very good insurance. it's not all that expensive and even the weatherization program now gives a carbon monoxidedetector to every house they weatherize for safety purposes. one more thing is we often getquestions in cooperative
extension about where to place these. it's not an easy question the answer. some of the simple answers are betweenwhere you're sleeping and where the most likely appliance is which could give you carbon monoxide. that's pretty much for the homeowner to decide, but one of the things that's key is thatthe carbon monoxide will be a combustion
product. it will be warm gas. it will tend to be buoyant, so youdon't wanna place this low in the building. you want to place it at least chest high or arm height, and that's about the bestrecommendation i can give you for that. one more thing that i wanna make sureyou would know, all carbon monoxide detector have a limited life. the detection technology that's used does deteriorate with timeafter about four years, so i recommend whenever you buy a carbonmonoxide detector you turn it around on
the back and you write the month and year in which you purchased it and hopefully four years from that time you will look on there and say it's time for me to buy a new onebecause it will become unreliable after that point. one more feature.
i highly recommend that you get abattery-operated carbon monoxide detector because it's very much more likely that you willhave a carbon monoxide incident if you're in operating conditions which are an emergency. say the power is out in your house and youhave some other option for heating that may be a source of carbonmonoxide emissions. you might want to have a batterydetector that operates in that condition
and lets you know that there's a problem. with a power plugin model thatwouldn't be possible so double good is to have a battery type carbon monoxide detector. now it's time to look more closelyand see if we can find out where the air leaks are in this building, and we did a little preliminary seeking here, searchingout, and we found that this little line which is almostreally hard to see i think probably in
the camera, but there's a seem in the window here which is separated, probably a little bit of shrinkage of the wood over time. you can actually see daylightthrough this, and so one of the ways we could seal this, this presents a problem because it's a finished piece of wood, but you could
caulk it with a very thin bead of say transparent caulkand then cover it with a nice piece of trim. that's one air sealing place which wecould scrutinize and look at very carefully, so that's what we're going to do next islook around the building for places which are obvious air leaks that we canwork on. similar to rich went ahead and threw me anobservation and sunlight found cracks between the windowcasings. i'd like to check the other naturalopening in a home, which is the door.
now with the door, you can take a dollar bill, open it up, place it, so that we have it curling around to thefront. we then tug on the dollar bill and it slowly comes out with some resistance. we know that that's probably a prettydarn good seal.
we can also do the top of the door. and again, there's proper resistance and yet no tearing or no pinching. however, when we come to the bottom of the door,you'll notice that in this situation, there's been paper towel that has been put there because mosquitoes were coming in. we don't even need to check with a dollar bill if the mosquitoes are coming through, so we'll take care of that problemlater with a very quick and easy
type of material at another time. let me add that in a home where there's a bathroom fan and a range hood, possibly even an electric dryer. if all the items are turned on at once thus pulling air out of the house, you can go ahead and wet your hand
with moisture and just feel right along the edge and see if that pressure that's beingcreated internally through those fans is pulling or rushing air past your hand. this shouldn'thappen. another easy way to take a look at it, visually,
is to go ahead and get a punk or anincense burning sick, light it, and hold it next to the door, again, withall the fans and the dryer on. this will help you to see how fast and also in what direction the smoke is going. obviously, it should be pulling due to thedifference in pressure of the outside and
the inside of the house towards thosefans. rich had mentioned when witnessing cracks between casements of windows, sunlight coming in, that a small amount of clear caulking can be applied to stuff up, more or less, that crack. the piece of molding can be appliedto the outside. this will, of course, keep any wind from coming in.
likewise, the other location in the housewhere there's a large opening that can be opened and closed isthe door. in this case, we're going to go ahead and seehow to apply a little bit of caulking to reduce the amount of ventilation coming in in places we don't want it. now with caulking, there's a whole plethora of different colors, different types, paintable, non-paintable,
and made up for different parts of your home and such at any building supply store. row of it. let me just suffice to say that regardless of which caulking you choose, you really should caulk in the summerwhen you can ventilate the whole home freely. they all have different ingredients that really should be avoided from any type of inhalation.
once the caulk is set after about four hours, feel free to come into the home. it is set, it's cured, and the different types ofvolatile odors that are given off will be pretty much finished. with caulking, also, you'll find thatthere are some brands that may make claims, such as the one that i have here, of having thirty five years ofdurability guaranteed,
however, we would suggest that after about five years, one year after your smoke detector has cancelledout, that you go ahead and take a razor blade and neatly cut along the edges of where the caulking is adhering to thetrim, the wood, the tub surround, and scraping it clean and reapplying caulking again.
the caulking that i'm going to use, asyou can see, is a paintable caulking, silicone, that's beige. as i mentioned there's quite a consumer choice outthere. once i've gone ahead and applied the tube into the caulking gun correctly and i've used the
metal shard to go ahead and poke through. i can go ahead and apply pressure and find that indeed the cracking comes out. i findthat this is under quite a bit of pressure though and therefore it will run even when you're not pullingthe trigger. my suggestion, with your thumb, go ahead and release thespring-loaded aperture, take your wet towel,
wipe it, and now have your hand ready and only apply pressure even if it's passive once you have the gun in place. let's go ahead and lay a bead and see how it comes out. you'll notice that i'm pointing it at about a fortyfive-degree angle from the horizontal and the verticalsurfaces of the walls and the floor and lightly
just apply a small bit with the nozzle and pull it evenly. it's very difficult to get it perfectlyeven, but we're going to go ahead and take care of that in a moment. i release the pressure. as you'll notice we had laid a bead along here and yet there's still someareas up toward the paneling where there's a void,
so i'll go ahead and run over this again while gently squeezing on the trigger to apply an bead of caulking. in this particular case some of thatwill be subsumed behind the actual siding or plywood paneling. and at this point, again, wetting the finger.
i'll go ahead and drag across lightly so as to force some of the caulking up along the bottom part of the paneling. now, in four hours, though this isn't the mostbeautiful job as far as finishing it, it is probably best to go ahead and haveit fully dry and then apply a piece of
base cove, a type of trim, per se, just to cover over this. we could spend some time adding morecaulking and trying to get rid of some of the bumps and such, but our main goal isto go ahead fill the void. my experience with caulking is, as manyothers have told me through the years, the moreyou mess with it, the more you're going to probably botchit up and apply a liberal amount which you won't know whatto do with.
you can see and we're looking at anelectrical outlet here and this is a two-by-four stud wall, and when this wall was built, it doesn't reallymatter now whether there was good air sealing around thiselectrical outlet or not, but it's a common place where you have a lot of airleakage because it typically would have been cut out of thevapor barrier and the electrical box would have notbeen air sealed, so they're actually products availablenow and i'm looking at them. they come in packets.
is seeking it is a plastic gasketed material. it has nicelittle cut-outs that you can simply remove like this and and designed to fit right into an electrical outlet cover. i have to make sure i can get that little hole where the screw is supposed to go, which is not easy to do with the largefingers that i have. i'm still not doing it.
maybe i will just not worry about it. there we go. then let me take the faceplate off of the electrical outlet, single screw does it typically comes off very nicely. you can see this hasn't been dealt with in a long time because there's a lot of, this is kind of an instructive thingbecause there's a lot of what looks to be
dust from dandelions and things accumulated here. so there was some air leakage. this has been filtering air for a longtime. you simply place the gasketed material in here. make sure you can put the screwthrough the hole, put the faceplate back on, screw it in place, and the screw is nicely placed there. it's even in the hole.
you have made a very good gasketed airtight seal. you can use these. they come in packs of, it looks like six, and do, usually a house, depending on how many outlets you have, in short order. you might want, for safety purposes, turn the power off so you don't accidently put the screwdriver in the wrong place and have a bad day, but otherwise, very easy to do andfairly durable. once you put that plastic gasket inplace, it's out of sunlight. it should last a very long time
and be a pretty good gasketed seal. so the one place in your home where you'reconstantly opening and closing encasement is your door. now, doors over time, though you may have set them well andthey were snug against the door jam, may end up developing cracks. you may get a warping of the door of the jam and you
may find that the seal is not tight,that air will infiltrate through certain portions of the jam. it used to be that you take a piece of thin felt, line it up, and while you were holding it, you would try to dig a small finishing nail and half the time hitting your thumb, nail the nails through and snug up thefelt. however, today we have a much moreefficient
material that we use that's made out of rubber and is almost like a gasket, and this material usually comes in a row. originally, it was the width of boththese pieces, incase the jam was 0.75 inches wide. however, as you'll notice on this olderjam, i don't need both pieces, so i've merely found the scoring
and separated them. the other convenient aspect of this material is that with a simple pocket knife i can go ahead and make a slice and adjust the length. so, at this point, let's go ahead andapply
what i have. i'm going to go ahead and first wash the surface off with a damp napkin and then wipe it with the dry end just tomake sure that dust, cobwebs, other things that may have developed, come off clean. you can see the accumulation right here that would inhibit the ability of the
adhesive from sealing well. let me mention also while i clean this that though the adhesive is fairly sticky, and it's a fairly strong tape, to make this last, i would obviously go ahead and trydifferent types of, maybe, glues. every three inches or so on the back
of the gasket material put a dot of glue. now, i'm going to simply go ahead and fold this back, and as i go i'm gonna go ahead and unfurl the protective layer. i want to make sure that this is fairlysnug, not only flat against the jam here, but snug up against here. so i will
find a point, pinch, and when it looks like everything is snug, i'll firmly apply pressure. i'll go ahead and pull the tape. i'll find a point with some tautness in the gasket, push down, apply pressure. you can see that this is much easier and not as time consuming
as using a hammer with the type of flexible materialitself. the nice thing about this material too is that you can paint over it if you want you, and in addition, if you need to cut out a certain portionbecause part of it is starting to get worn down orstarting to break, the top surface,
due to maybe an irregularity in your door, you can cut that piece out and put a new piece in, applying pressure. again, if i had a certain type of adhesive with me, every three inches, i would put a dot of adhesive. now in this situation i want to miter or come in at an angle, so with my knife i'll go ahead and simply saw off
the residue blocked piece of gasket material making a 45 degree angle, coming back in, and overlapping, slightly, this gasket material. i can apply and put it in, and as i mentioned one of the advantages is
that even though my strip was not long enough in this particular case, i can go ahead and take off of the other strip now by measuring and simply slicing and adding a piece in there. there you have a mitered corner. even though i still have some to add here for now, really the important place that iwanna test and make sure that the gasket material isn't going tobe too tight as down by the strike plate. so i'm going to go ahead and shut the door,
and we'll see if there is somewhat of a sponginess or a give and whether the door fits snug and yet not too tight. let's take a look. now i should be able to simply apply a little bit of pressure to the left or the right, and it should open right up. having said that, let's see if it's secure against thedoor jam.
not much give it all. now i will go back with a cut out piece and just add this in. here we show, and remember now we'reconverting a summer house to a winter house, and the summer house has single pane glazing. that's going to be fairly nightmarish in the winter.
now we're gonna show you, how with aproduct that's available almost anywhere in alaska, in all the building supply storesand hardware stores, that you can take a plastic material add it as a second pane, effectively of glazing to a window
and have three good things happen.you'll have an effective insulating of the window as though it werenow a double pane system. you can do it if you are lucky and the framing of the window iscorrect, you can heat shrink it and make it very, very tight and look almosttransparent with very little distortion, just like a good window. thirdly, it has the additionaladvantage that you can seal around the edges such that no moisture can get to the
window surface and you don't havecondensation problems. so art is going to take it now andshow you how to tape around the edges. he's already done someof that, and he's going to tape the final layer, and then we're gonna hang thematerial and show you how to do it. so i just want to emphasize, as rich said, this is fairlyeasy. this could be done with one person as we'll show when we hang this that the film actually through static electricity with cling to the window. however, we're going to go ahead and have the both of us work on this.
the kits usually come with the actual film as well as a double-sided tape. a roll of double-sided tape. similarly, our job with the caulking in the kitchen, we've gone through, and we've basically gotten a wet towel, and we've wiped down the edges of this molding which is protruding from approximately half an inch. we've applied the tape, which issticky on the one side, all the way around
the outside of this molding or casing, and we'll do so here. in the end, this lip on the casing is going to be our sealant for the film. now, you have to be careful to make sure thatit's all within the included area.
now you can always pull back if you make an error, so don't be afraid to go ahead and apply it the first time. so in this case, just folding over a corner and trying to separate the tape from thewax paper maybe will be the most difficult part of this project. you may need to have a razor blade handy to try and stick it to the inside of the tape andpull it away from the wax paper. in any case, i have this started.
i merely removing the wax paper, and it's on this sticky surface then that we'll go ahead and apply the film with a small overlap. we want to do the same not only on this edge but also by grabbing the bottom piece of tape and the side
and then pulling on the top. at this point, we have the edges prepared, and now we want to go ahead and lay the film. what we don't wanna do however is to go ahead and haphazardly take the top of the film and lay it down on the sticky portion
until we've made sure that we have the sheet of film equitably distributed so that there is at least an inch offilm on all the sides. therefore, rich will pick up one corner and i'll pick up another. if you are doing this alone you couldget away with it because before actually taping the thing, you're going to go ahead and merely pushthe film
against the glass, and you'll notice that the static electricity is usually sufficient to hold it for you until you can go ahead and measure andmake sure that you have that overlap. rich i have about a half an inch here, how about you. i have, it's sticking, oh no. leave a little more on the bottom. rich, i have about half an inch, how about you.
i need a little more down here at the bottom. i'm ok now. at this point we can go ahead and start to seal the top. you'll notice that there are lines from the folds of the film. there's nothing to worry about. we want to get it as taut as we can, but we won't be able tonecessarily, at this stage,
bring out those lines in the actual film. we will however though try to make sure that equally across the surface, we have aboutan inch gap between the film and the window. now together let's tug on the bottom as best that we can and then just run our fingers. why don't you just come toward me and i'll just hold it so i don't crimp it in the middle. not terrible.
rich and i have now applied the film to the surface, and we're gonna go ahead and tighten itup. we'll create a taut surface by applying heat that will then caused the film to become tight such as the head of a drum. we'll want to go ahead and turn it on high. we'll wanna make sure that the end of the hairdryer is no closer than an inch from the surface of the film's so as not to burnish it or cause puckering.
i will want to go ahead in a circular motion, move across the window, applying the heat as evenly as possible. let's give it a shot and see what happens you'll notice that the heat is dissipating as the heat goes over, nice and even, again, no closer
than an inch to the actual film itself. you'll notice at this point that if you press on the surface itself, again, it's as taut as almost the head of a drum. you'll notice there is some gapping here, and this is something that you're gonna wannamake sure to go ahead and shore up and try to tighten out as we wanna makesure that there is no air pocket that's coming through the actual tape where the plastic possibly hasn't
been adhesed all the way down onto the tape. your wrinkles are gone. at this point, just for cosmetic purposes, you may wish to go and take a pair ofscissors and just score the plastic right above where the molding intersects the paneling. you wanna be careful though however
to not snip such as this where youmight pull on the tape, but merely grab the plastic lightly, having your scissors half open and running them across the top or possibly using a razor knife. as rich had mentioned, in effect, you'veactually made a two window pane window with very little effort.
you've seen several situations inwhich we've gone ahead and sealed up cracks or holes and such to go ahead and keep air from infiltrating into the house.there is one other product that is fairly popular that you need to use it with caution let's say, and that is spray foam. now some spray foam,
when you apply it, the volume that you apply, you can be assured, much like with caulking, that the bead will stay that size. however,there are other spray foams that may expand to several times the size of what you've applied over the next fewminutes. on the back of this can it's demonstrated
the before shot of a channel and how much foam would beapplied. notice that it is not covering or filling in the edges, but then after some amount of time, whatthe after volume will be. this is pretty important so that you canbe sure a go ahead and adequately fill the void but not cause undue pressure in the void thatmight go ahead and can cause rupturing, possibly pressure around the edges of whatever hole it is or crack that you are working on.
so the other thing that you want to be sure tobe aware of is that this is incredibly sticky material, and, therefore, whenever applying it, in this case you are to remove the lid. you would simply apply the hose with a trigger piece onto a stem, and you would pull the trigger, and it would go ahead and fill the tube, evacuating the material. whenever doingthat, you would want to use some type of latex orplastic gloves. the reason being is once this
once it's on your hands it's incredibly difficultto remove. in fact, it will harden like a cake, and you almost have to pry it upsometimes with a razor blade to separate it from your skin. very effective material as far asfilling voids as far as keeping circulation ofair from happening, but it has its use, for the most part, on a framed house
where they're large gaps and large cracks. well, it's time for a few good words about choices of light bulbs. we don't have too many pieces of advice, but i'mholding here in my left hand something that's probably familiarto all because you are tending to buy one simply because it's first, it costs less, it's cheaper, but you will spend a whole lot of money for electricityusing this sixty watt bulbs, this incandescent
bulb to heat your house rather than light your house because ninety percent, nine out of ten watts that goes intothose bulb, comes out as heat, and only it gives light off as a sideeffect of the incandescent feature of the bulb. so we have actually had engineers andcompanies produce bulbs now that are, in fact, this one is about fourtimes more effective at using electricity.
that's a pretty good number for all compact fluorescent light bulbs which iswhat this is. it's one of many styles, but compact fluorescents are fluorescentbulbs, but they use energy to produce light at about four times the rate. so you get four times the amount of lighting, the lumens, out of abulb for the same expenditure of electricity.this is a 13 watt bulb. it's equivalent
to this, to the 60 watt incandescent in terms of the amount of light it gives off, and this can be measured scientifically. so this one will cost you over its life one fourth of the electricity for the same amount of time thatthis one is burning, yet giving you the same amount of light. the only difference, of course, is thatthis bulb costs more,
but it is much more cost competitive then it has ever had been in the past. that's whysome people are reticent to do that. these come now in six-packs. you can buy them in bulk, and they're very, very effective. one more extremely interesting, and now coming into it's own technology that has been developed isone i don't have an example of and
that's the led. it is even more effective inthe long term and, unfortunately, a little more expensive for the same output of light. however, its lifetime is about four tofive times typically what the compact fluorescent is. that's a key thing. the lifetime of an incandescent bulb is typicallya 1,000 hours. the lifetime of a
compact fluorescent bulb is typically 10,000, ten times as much. the lifetime of led bulbs is 50,000 to 100,000 hours, so up to ten times as long as even a compact fluorescent, so the technologies are getting better, the prices are becoming morecompetitive, and it's getting to the point where youcan get an extremely efficient bulb that you may never have to change in your lifetime,
which is a really nice deal. so that's what we need to talk to youabout in light bulbs. always go for the most efficient and time. so you notice around this building, we have compact fluorescents. wehave incandescent, and we have long tube fluorescents. long tube fluorescents are getting moreefficient. there's a tendency to shrink the diameter of them.they often will need a new ballast,
but they are getting moreefficient too. there's something called a t12 thatis the standard 1.5 inch diameter tube. you can now get a t8 which is about twice the output forthe same wattage as a t12 was. even the compact fluorescent tubes, you can use the same fixtures. you just need a new ballast,
and you can actually improve their lifetime, their output per unit watt, electricity as well. so good to think about. we need a lot of light in the winter in and now they're technologies that are giving it to us, better light for longer periods of time and lowercost per output. well, thank you for joining us for the shortamount of time and seeing some of the
energy-saving methods which you yourself can employ in your own home. we've shown you the ways to do it now.we've shown you what products are available. it is up to you to help yourself now to a better life and low energy costs.
0 Komentar untuk "winter house"