In Weather News
The BBC is reporting that Antarctic ships escape from ice trap as weather changes. Both the Akademik Shokalskiy and the Snow Dragon are moving after a wind shift broke a channel in the ice. The Russian captain anticipates that the Chinese ship will catch up and pass his vessel and provide a clearer path to the open ocean.
Locally, it got above freezing for about an hour today at about 3PM. It didn’t get above the former record low temperature for this date until noon. The new record is 18°. Mobile, Alabama has a new record of 14°.
Inside an igloo it is 32°. A single candle will raise the temperature 8°. All of my heaters only manage to raise the temperature in my house by 30°. The windchill is in single digits [the middle one].
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You really need to see about insulating your attic if that’s all you managed. Insulating your walls would be helpful too, I suspect. The blown-in cellulose insulation works best because it also works as a vapor barrier in *both* directions, which of course is a problem in the South with air conditioning. My mother’s house’s attic was ridiculously overinsulated by the previous owner and as a result is reasonably warm despite being built on a (notoriously cold) concrete slab, having large single-pane windows that shed heat like crazy, and only having 2×4 walls.
In other news, it’s so cold in Chicago that even the polar bears couldn’t take it. They all went inside.
I have blown fiberglass in the attic, but lack the thermal storage of a concrete slab, like your and my Mothers’ houses. Mom was never cold, because that slab stays at a constant temperature for a very long time.
The house I’m in is up on blocks and the primary heat loss it through the floor. It was built for cooling, and my air conditioning bill is minimal.
In the Arctic they will hunker down and let the snow cover them for insulation. Polar bears have the lowest infrared profile of any mammal, their insulation is so good. OTOH, no need to show off if there are other options.
Actually, because heat rises, the primary heat loss in your house is *not* through your floor though it’ll make your feet chilly (eep!). If you’ve insulated your attic your heat loss problem is likely your walls. You can blow cellulose into your walls, but it requires poking holes into your drywall at the top of the wall between your studs then patching the hole after you’re done, something that most people aren’t very interested in doing. One thing of interest — because it’s the *radiant* heat loss that annoys most people when it comes to floors (i.e., the fact that they are radiating heat to the floor from their bodies), this is a great application for that foil-backed styrofoam insulation that they sell at Home Cheapo. The foil faces downwards. The downside is that you have to actually cut it into strips the width of your floor rafters then get underneath and staple the stuff to your subflooring. Ugh. Crawl spaces. I hate spiders. Snakes too. Sigh!
The heat rises and pulls cold air up from the floor. The subflooring isn’t plywood, it is 1X6 boards. The floor is three-quarter board laid perpendicular to the subfloor, but there is nothing, like tar paper, between them, so air can infiltrate. The attic insulation is fine for air conditioning, but the house is terrible for heating.
It’s a rental, and when I leave it will be torn down, as the land has more value as an empty lot, than with with this house on it, so the owner isn’t going to want to spend money that he can’t get a return on immediately.