I spent a good portion of the holiday break catching up on house projects. First the Christmas tree and all decorations were packed up and placed back into the attic. Then more mulch was added to the side flowerbed. I turned my attention to the hole dug under the air conditioner by the varmit who visited us earlier, getting it patched up better than new. While there was a break in the rain, I realigned a downspout so it drains onto the driveway rather than the yard. This should help the new grass take better hold in that spot.

I also changed out the kitchen light fixture, something that had been bothering us for months. I also hung the flourescent shop light in the garage, providing much light there. I plugged various holes in the cabinets and other dark places with steel wool to seal out the mice. I cleaned under the fireplace and wiped all the soot off the fireplace glass. It looks worlds better now.

One thing I started but didn’t finish is putting another shelf over our washer and dryer. Hammering and drilling isn’t compatible with napping children so it will wait for another day. Part of that involves moving the existing shelf lower to make even more use of space.

On the geek side, I reflashed Linux onto my Linksys NSLU2 device and got it using the 1GB flash drive I added to it. I put Openslug on it since I didn’t need a web interface for it anymore. Instead I got a barely-usable Linux distro with no support for simple things like USB printers. It took a few hours just to get CUPS installed and working with HTTPS. When I found there was no USB printer support in the kernel (or modules) I threw in the towel. I’m not looking forward to having to recompile (and cross-compile, too) the Openslug kernel simply to get printer support, but it looks like that’s what I have to do. Linux on the NSLU2 isn’t just cutting edge, it’s bleeding cutting edge, only suitable for geek sadomasochists.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something in my list of projects but that’ll do for now.

After reading this post on Treehugger about these ads, I decided I needed to apply this to my own computing habits. I have a PC in the house which does nothing but backup my other machines. Though this backup job runs at 11 PM every night, I used to keep the PC running 24 hours a day.

Obviously, this is wasteful, so I poked around in the PC’s bios and found a watchdog option which will boot the computer by a clock setting. Now the PC boots right before 11 PM, does its backup chores, and shuts itself down after half an hour. Numerous trees saved, untold pounds of carbon dioxide saved from the atmosphere, and a quieter house, too! Continue reading →

Well, I spoke too soon when I said I rid the house of the opossum the other night. Kelly came to get me around 9 PM last night, saying she heard it scratching under the office floor. Tough little bugger, I thought. Since it didn’t get out the night before its been at least a week since it left the house.

I had to do something different this time. I remember during my weekend research that a good trick to know if an opossum has come or gone is to sprinkle flour at the entrances. If the critter makes tracks, you know its been there.

So that’s what I did. I opened a vent cover on the far side of the house and sprinkled flour on the opening. For good measure, I went to the opossum’s preferred doorway (the original hole it dug under the house), parted the brick pavers I placed above it, and gave it the flour treatment, too.

An hour later I was ready for bed but decided to check for opossum tracks before retiring. Sure enough, the one by the hole had been hit! There was flour not only on the pavers where I placed it, but flour pushed off the paver and onto the ground. Finally, proof that the critter was out!

I closed up the vent and hole again and went to bed. This morning there are no signs it tried to get back into the crawlspace – a place that might have easily been its tomb. Now to clean up the after effects and seal things up where this doesn’t happen again.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing scratches and bumps coming from under the house near the kitchen. My first thought was that our mice were back again, so based on that I placed a non-lethal trap in the kitchen near the noise and waited. When a week went by and no mouse took me up on the tasty crunchy peanut butter (it’s gotta be crunchy: the smooth stuff is poison to mice), I began to wonder what I was dealing with.

Around the time the noise started, we realized the wood damange to the front of our garage wasn’t simple rot but in fact termites. The damage they did was minimal and the site seems to have been dormant for a while but just for some peace of mind we called in an exterminator to set some termite traps. When the sales guy finished checking the crawlspace he had a curious comment.

“Is this the cat that’s been wandering around under the house? Bad kitty!” he joked as he dusted himself off.

“Excuse me?” I replied, perplexed.

“Oh I found some cat droppings under the house. Looks like something’s nesting down there, down by the kitchen area from the looks of the insulation.”

Hmm. We keep our crawlspace closed. How could anything get in there, I wondered.

Another week went by and I was planting bushes on the south side of the house. I noticed what appeared to be fresh cat droppings near the flowerbed I was digging, but something wasn’t quite right: cats bury their droppings and this was out in the open. I put it out of my mind and continued on with the other things I had to do.

Two weeks ago I cleaned up our garden area behind the house. To my astonishment, a cat-sized hole had been dug under the air duct leading into the house. Fresh claw marks were clearly visible in the mud.

Aha! The door of our uninvited house guest! Thinking I’d close the hole and deal with the consequences later, I piled the hole full of nearby, golf-ball-sized rocks and covered it with a brick step. That should do it, I thought.

The next morning I was even more astonished to find that every single rock had vanished! What’s more, a neat little tunnel had been dug from the existing hole to the other side of the brick step. A pile of leaves cleverly hid the entrance of the new tunnel.

I’m dealing with a worthy adversary, I thought to myself. I piled even more bricks on top of the new tunnel and considered it closed again. We went on Thanksgiving vacation with the hole sealed.

When we got back the scratching and bumps were still there, only they took on a more desperate sound. Yesterday offered me a chance to go under the house and investigate. Droppings were present around the corners of the house. Insulation was pulled down in places, often with leaves piled on top: nests! The metal screen of a vent opening had been shredded with the metal pulled inside – an effort to escape. I shook the leaves out of the insulation and carefully tucked it back into place, moving around the whole crawlspace in about an hour. Satisfied with my work and seeing no critters, I dusted myself off and went back inside.

Last night Kelly and I were watching a movie when the scratching returned. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the flashlight and ran outside, shining the light around the foot of the house. Two beady eyes glowed at me from behind a vent opening under the kitchen. Our mystery guest turned out to be an opossum.

As he wandered off the ledge of the vent and back into the depths of the crawlspace, I devised a plan to free him. A removed vent cover on the far side of the house was balanced so that it was easy to open from the inside and would indicate when it was used as a door. At the end of our movie, I walked outside to find it lying on the ground: the opossum was out! I replaced the vent cover and went to bed with the hope that the critter was gone for good. I’m not crossing my fingers, though.

From what I’ve read yesterday, !opossums are non-destructive critters who move slowly and are not at all aggressive. I suppose if we had to have something crawl into the house, its better that its an opossum than a raccoon or skunk. The challenge now is to keep the crawlspace secure through the upcoming mating season in January.

Ah, the joys of living on the edge of town!

The results of my recent trip into the attic to improve the insulation have shown it to be an unqualified success! It was three hours of dirty, hot, sweaty work and $150 in materials but it was well worth it. The air conditioner can now keep pace with the thermostat setting, whereas previously there might be up to a 5 degree difference. I was considering all sorts of remedies for the upstairs heat: installing a roof ridge vent ($1.5k to $3k), adding a heat shield ($300), adding (another) attic fan ($300), or even installing a new, separate air conditoner ($3k+). The cheapest solution has turned out to be the best.

The attic fan I installed (with much peril, if you’ll recall) is still not functioning. When it works it can probably cool the attic down by ten degrees. I’d still like to get it fixed but now that the insulation is doing its job there’s no rush. I’ll wait until it cools off outside a bit more.

One thing that still needs addressing is our master bedroom closet. It sits on the end of the house (on the southern side no less), has no air duct supplying air conditioning to it, and has our attic accessway in it. During the summer, this closet heats to 95 degrees! There’s not much reason to add AC to it, but one thing I would like to do is build a way to better insulate over the attic stairs. I’m thinking of building a hinged cover for them.

Ah. So many projects, so little time!

I love the smell of sawdust.

I must be crazy. I mean, how else can you explain it? Fed up with an air conditioner that can never cool off the upstairs of our house, I finally did something about it. When my niece’s birthday party getting cancelled coincided with a cooler, overcast Saturday morning, I knew I had to act.

Whoever did the initial insulating of the house claimed to have put down over 12 inches of blown in insulation in the attic. I measured it myself and found it to be at a little over 6 inches! Insulation usually settles in time but not into half its original height! Judging by that and the fact that our home inspector discovered places in the attic not even covered by insulation, I decided the first guy never finished the job. It was time to lay another layer of insulation in the attic! Kelly agreed to take the kids to the museum while I went to Lowe’s to gather up materials.

I bought a car full of Cocoon blown-in insulation in one store, then drove 10 miles to another store to pick up a blower as the first store was out. I found it amusing that the folks behind the counter took 10 minutes trying to find the paperwork for the blower. Apparently they don’t loan them out too often.

I returned to the house with the materials about the time the family returned from the museum. After Kelly and I put the kids down for their naps, she joined me for the labor-intensive task of installing blown insulation. She would stand outside and feed insulation bags into the blower machine while I stood in the attic and spread the insulation from the hose.

Yes, I was headed for the attic in the heat of summer. That’s how nuts I am.

I brought with me a thermometer, a big thermos of icewater, a box fan, and a huge determination to get this done. The thermometer read a little over 100 degrees when I began around 2:30, by which time the sun soon came out and began cooking things. As I worked up there without the fan running (because it blew dust everywhere), the temperature leapt to 128 degrees! Turning on the fan rapidly cooled things off, if you can call it that. Within 2 minutes of running, the fan brought the temperature down to 120. After three hours up there I was almost used to it, to be honest. It reminded me of the time I spent in the Persian Gulf, one of the hottest places I’ve been.

I took frequent breaks and communicated with Kelly via cellphone whenever I needed the blower turned off. Things semeed to work fine until I reached for my phone only to realize its battery was now buried somewhere in the insulation! It was a needle in the haystack by that point. I consoled myself remembering it was on its last legs anyway and wouldn’t hold a charge.

While I was up there, I discoverd the attic fan I had installed (and almost lost a finger to) was mysteriously not working. I had sealed the outside of it with duct tape in an effort to improve its efficiency. I found the tape was hanging from the fan’s lifeless blades, one possible clue to its demise. I’m hoping it blew an internal fuse, rather than burn out the motor. There’s no way of knowing until I unscrew it from the wall and take it apart. After seeing what the box fan could do to cool the attic, a working attic fan must make a big difference, too.

I found another interesting thing when I reached down to adjust the supply duct for the upstairs air conditioning. Right where it bent to come into the attic, I felt a cold spot. In an attic heated to 125 degrees, one should not feel a cold spot on the outside of an insulated supply duct! Thinking the air was getting trapped at the turn, I twisted it a bit to clear the blockage. The cold spot seemed to go away and the air coming out of the upstairs registers began to feel a bit stronger.

Three hours and 15 bags later the attic insulation was four inches deeper. That brought it up from a value of R-19 to above R-30 – quite a difference! Not only that, but I was thrilled to see the air conditioner actually cooling the upstairs. My neighbors’ air conditioners were whining away while ours took a breather. Not bad for a humid day in the upper 90s!

And don’t think Kelly was just slouching around while I was in the hot attic. Though she was outside in the breeze, Kelly worked just as hard as I did, pouring 20-pound insulation bags into the hopper in the 100 degree sun. By the time we were done were both covered in cellulose dust and looked like we’d crawled out of a swamp somwhere. In spite of this we were happy. Well, at least I was happy. I had led Kelly to believe this was a 90 minute job when instead it took twice as long. She forgave me, though, and I certainly couldn’t have done it without her help.

Yeah, it was a lot of hot, sweaty work. Yeah, it was insane to try to do it on a hot summer’s day. But, it made a huge difference in our comfort and it only cost 120 bucks and three hours! Once that insulation is there it will always work for us. The upstairs not only is cooler, I swear it is quieter, too. The outside noise I took for granted is greatly reduced thanks to that new blanket of insulation.

If you’re looking to make a big impact on your home’s comfort and you don’t mind getting a little dirty in the process, consider putting in some blown-in insulation. For us it seems well worth it.

Last weekend when the family and I went on a bike ride, I realized just how dangerous it is not to be able to hear behind you when cycling. Fortunately there wasn’t any danger on that ride, but the threat exists. You can’t hear anything a fellow rider might be telling you, nor do you hear approaching traffic.

I’ve got an idea that addresses this, but I haven’t baked it long enough to share here. If you’re an investor sitting on a pile of cash, though, you’ll find my email address on my resume. 🙂

Going on the bizarre theory that houses are easier to cool if the heat is kept out of them to begin with, I finally got around to installing a radiant barrier on our garage door. I got the idea last year when looking at solutions for our attic heat. A lot of university cooperative sites were steering people away from powered cooling (gable fans, for instance) in favor of passive solutions, like radiant barriers. Radiant barriers reflect heat back into space, before it can seep into the conditioned part of your house. I’d like to do the whole attic, but a test was needed first. The garage door is a good candidate for a radiant barrier, as it faces due west and gets cooked by the afternoon sun.

Applying the barrier wasn’t hard at all. It’s essentially bubble wrap covered by aluminum foil. All I had to do was cut it to fit the panels of my door. The barrier fit so snugly into the door panels that they didn’t even need to be fastened.

The results were immediately obvious. As I insulated panel after panel, I could feel the source of heat – the hot door – disappearing. An hour later, I had 95% of the door covered in foil. The windows are the only remaining problem, the sun’s rays still burn right through them.

Radiant barriers aren’t cheap. The 2′ x 25′ roll I used for the door cost around $23. Still, but the radiant barrier seems like a good candidate for the attic, especially considering our air conditioner can’t keep our house cool on hot summer days. If a barrier can cut the attic temperature from 140 degrees to 100, it will make a world of difference in our summertime comfort.