Weather Imagery

The blizzard we had on December 20th, 2006 was probably the worst I’ve seen since living in Colorado Springs. The 10 minute average wind speed hovered around 45 mph for 3 hours and wind gusts exceeded 55 mph. It was one nasty storm that caused a lot of problems all throughout the country.

For us however, and most people I spoke with who live all around the city, the pain was troublesome. Because the wind came from the northwest, it blew snow directly through the louvers on the gable vents in the attic which then accumulated on top of the insulation. However, I didn’t know this until 3 days later when the sun came out, heated the attic which then melted the snow. This was not good.

The wife thought the pipe to the toilet in the bathroom had a leak, but there was a splatter pattern to the water. Just as I was crawling around looking for the leak, water started dripping on my head. I looked up and saw water dripping all around the bathroom vent in the ceiling. When I went up into the attic to take a look, I realized we had a problem. A big one.

There was about 2 inches of snow piled up extending 4 feet away from the vent and it was melting … fast. Most of the insulation in that area was sopping wet and had absorbed the water like a sponge. I knew I had to remove the wet insulation, otherwise, come summer time I was going to have one heck of a petri dish experiment in my attic. So I ran down to Home Depot and purchased two large bags of R-38 fiberglass insulation with vapor barrier. When I returned home, I pulled out the wet insulation (yuck), left the attic bare for about 36 hours and ran a temporary fan through the attic opening to evaporate moisture. The day after the attic was dry, I laid down the new insulation. I also decided to build some covers for the gable vents so I could prevent the wind from blowing snow into the attic in the future.

Most people just get furnace filters and place them on the inside of their gable vents. This acts as a semi-barrier that allows air through but collects snow and other debris. Problem is, this storm was so powerful both my neighbors discovered their filters were blown/torn off and they too suffered snow in their attics. So I decided to build some covers that would be closed for the winters months then opened in the spring. I used some flat pine board (1″ thick) from Home Depot, stainless steal hinges, and a latch. I treated the wood with a sealant to protect it from the rain/snow.

Now I can close off the gable vents and not worry about snow accumulating in the attic. My solution got its first test about a month later when the next winter storm came barreling in. When I went up to take a look, the small crack between the vent door I made and the vent itself had caked up with snow to produced a blockage. This worked out very well and no snow made it into the attic.

Every once in awhile, it’s nice to capture an image of something on your computer screen, save it as a file and email it off to someone. I frequently have my mom do this when trying to figure out a particular error she is receiving on her computer. When the error appears on her screen, I have her take a screen print, save it as a file and send it to me via email so I can take a look.

The great thing about this capability is anyone that has Windows XP can do it. All you have to do is press Alt+Print Screen (the Print Screen button is usually just to the right of the F12 button on a standard keyboard). Strangely, you won’t get any indication that anything has happened when you do this.

But the image has temporarily been stored on a virtual clipboard. Now we just need to paste that image into a program and save it as a file.

There are many applications out there one can use to paste the image into, but I just tell my mom to use Paint. It’s a simple little image editing program that comes with Windows XP and it’s perfect for this sort of thing. To open Paint, click Start => All Programs => Accessories => Paint. Next, select the Edit option at the top and click on Paste (or ALT-V will paste the image as well). You should now see the image you captured. To save the file, click File => Save As … and in the drop-down menu that says “Save As Type”, choose JPEG. Pick any file name you want and click the Save button.

Over the last couple years, I’ve wondered why our master bedroom was on average about 10°F cooler than the rest of the house during the winter. At first, I thought it had to do with poor insulation or that the central air registers in that bedroom were not supplying enough warm air from the furnace. Turns out cold air infiltration was the culprit and it was seeping into our bedroom from two locations.

Air infiltration is a bad thing. No matter how much insulation you have, cold air infiltration leaking into the house will cool it down considerably and quickly. In our case, we had cold air infiltration seeping into our master bedroom from two places. The first and most noticeable was through the windows. Melody Homes (now called D.R. Horton) installed the crappiest, lowest grade windows they could get their hands on when they built the house. Embarrassingly, it took me two years to realize that snow pilling up on the inside track on the window probably wasn’t normal. I figured this was probably the first thing that needed to be upgraded, not replaced. I’ve ordered 5 new very expensive windows for the room and they should be installed late February. They are made by Champion and have had very good reviews. I was also very impressed with the demonstration.

The second place the air was seeping in was less obvious. It was actually coming in from behind the baseboards located on the exterior walls (we had two of them). When I removed the baseboards, I could feel a rush of cold air whenever the wind blew. There was about a 1/2 inch space between the bottom of the wall and the sub-floor. My solution was to use the air-tight expanding foam for window and door seals and spray it in the empty space. Careful, that expanding foam is very messy and you don’t need a whole lot. It expands … a lot.

UPDATE: The windows have been installed and there is an improvement. The room is about 4 degrees warmer than it was before. I still think there is an insulation problem and I’m going to have a home energy audit performed this spring. They cost about $400 but hopefully it will help us find ways of improving our home’s efficiency.

Related Topics

• Insulating Ducts

Ugh, this was not fun. I hate messing around with fiberglass insulation, especially when I’m working with it in cramped locations. For example, a crawlspace.

Once again, Melody homes did yet another crap job, this time “forgetting” to insulate the duct work for our central air furnace which happens to run through a ventilated crawlspace. The duct work spiders off into many different directions to supply heat to our house, of which about 100′ runs through our crawlspace. So, during the winter the crawlspace is the same temperature as outside; about 20°F. Whenever the furnace is off, the duct work cools off to about 20°F and takes a good 30 seconds to heat up. As a result, we get an initial “cold blow” through the registers for about 30 seconds, pumping cold air when it should be warm. Even after the ducts heat up, quite a bit of heat is being conducted from the duct work into the surrounding air which happens to be in a non-living crawlspace. This is a huge waste of energy.

So my obvious solution was to insulate the duct work, something Melody Homes should of done when the house was first built. Before you insulate your ducts though, I would strongly suggest you seal joints and holes with mastic to insure maximum efficiency. Once the mastic was applied, I tried two different methods of insulating my duct work.

I bought R-8 duct wrap which is a 2″ thick roll of fiberglass insulation surrounded by a shiny aluminum like sheet that somewhat generically fits around 6″ duct work. It comes in 5 foot lengths and is usually slipped around the ducts before they are installed. If installing the insulation after the ducts are in place, some cutting will be required. My second method was to purchase R-19 fiberglass batts at 5 foot lengths, cut them to the right size, and wrapped them around the ducts. This was a bit more work but I caught the hang of it and the installation went pretty quick. Strangely, the fiberglass batts only cost a little bit more money than the 5 foot spans of R-8 duct wrap.

In the end, it’s tough to know which insulation method worked best. I have to believe the R-19 batts offer more insulation than the R-8 duct wrap, but the question becomes, is it noticeable and worth the small extra cost? That’s tough to answer because all the runs are different lengths and have different amounts of air that pass through them. Whatever the case, the cold blow has been greatly reduced although not eliminated. Instead of it taking 30 seconds for warm air to come out of the registers, it does so in about 10 seconds. The crawlspace is also much cooler when the furnace is running than it was before, so I know that less heat is being conducted into the non-living spaces. This means more heat is making it into the parts of the house where I want it. So the effort and time to insulate the ducts was well worth it.

This was another one of those infamous Colorado blizzards that snuck up with about a 1-day warning. The first forecasts from a few days earlier didn’t mention anything about a significant snow storm, only that we may get a couple inches of snow and some moderate winds. Then on Tuesday, the day before the storm hit, forecasters started hinting that this could be a pretty powerful storm. I figured it wouldn’t be that bad because a fairly potent yet uneventful cold front had already pushed through a few days earlier. Anyhow, here’s the hour-by-hour experience of the December 20th, 2006 blizzard from the town of Falcon just outside the city limits of Colorado Springs:

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