OT: Insulated the garage ceiling, Payback looks good


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Posted by Keith in Washington on Monday, February 02, 2009 at 19:20:04 :

This is off topic but I keep the Dodges in this garage.

Our house has always been very cold above the garage. In December I ripped off all of the sheetrock off my garage ceiling and sealed the cold air return and insulated it to R26 and insulated the rest to R30. I also insulated the heating ducts in the garage to R13. Then sheetrocked it all with 5/8.

My wife just gave me the latest gas bill. It covers late Nov to late Jan. I had the insulation in place by mid-Dec. My gas consuption per day was down 30% verses a year ago. On top of this the temperature averaged 5 degrees cooler verses last year. My gut feeling is that the heater is running about 1/2 to 1/3 of what it use to. It will be interesting to see a bill in which the entire time is with the new insulation.

We were expecting an improvement but nothing like 30%. I believe that the biggest change was sealing and insulating the cold air return. As soon as I did that we lost the cold draft in the hall. The other day my wife came to me and said "I do not know what to do. I walked into our bed room and the air is warm. I have never had that in the 20+ years we have lived here".

What I found it the garage ceiling was.
The cold air return was open to all the joist runs in the garage and also to uninsulated walls. It was also sucking garage air from the unsealed joint where the sheetrock butted against the support beams. There was R11 insultation that was installed backwards in the joist runs. So very little of the 10" joist runs actually contained insulation. Now they are totally full of insulation.



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