Workshop Breathes New Life into Old Houses in New Hampshire
By Garry Dow,
Community Outreach Coordinator,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
“Houses breathe?” she asked. “Houses breathe,” I replied.
The old woman peered out over her wire rimmed glasses. “Really?”
“Really,” I said.
We were standing in the middle of the Tracy Memorial Library in New London, NH. The room was a jumble of competing voices and folding chairs, but she had the look of a woman trying to sort things out. A woman busy rearranging the furniture of her own mind. A crowd was in motion around us – the kind of social frenzy that preludes a public gathering – but the old woman stood perfectly still.
“Well then,” she said. “I’ve come to the right place.”
Nearly 30 people representing half a dozen towns from the Upper Valley came out on a cold and blustery Thursday evening last week to participate in the inaugural launch of Button Up NH – the highly successful home weatherization workshop pioneered in Vermont and now available in New Hampshire.
New London is the first of nine regional weatherization workshops sponsored by Button Up NH this winter. Others include Lebanon, Grafton, Plymouth, Sanbornton, Concord, Dover, Atkinson and Rye. These workshops are conducted by qualified home energy experts and include information on how simple household adjustments and modest investments can lead to significant energy savings over time.
The standing-room-only event was well attended and well received. The oversized crowd included professional energy auditors, the sustainability coordinator from nearby Colby-Sawyer College, a dozen or more curious homeowners, and a large contingent of local energy enthusiasts. Robert Walker of the Sustainable Energy Resource Group led the workshop, which was sponsored by the New London Energy Committee.
During the two hour session, Walker guided an eager audience through a dizzying terrain of home energy budgets, simple do-it-yourself weatherization measures, professional home energy audits, extensive professional energy retrofits, health and safety concerns, and technical and financial resources.
Weatherization, Walker said, is not complicated. Some projects require a professional, but at a fundamental level, weatherizing is about sealing holes (air barriers) and insulating spaces (thermal barriers) – in that order.
“To know what holes to seal and what spaces to insulate, however, you have to know how air moves through a building.”
In a typical house cold air is sucked in through the basement and expelled through the attic. Convection. At the same time, heat is being lost through barriers in the house where the temperature gradient between inside and outside is the steepest. Conduction.
Wrapping the building in a continuously sealed envelope buffered by insulation keeps cold air out and warm air in. This slows the movement of air through the home and minimizes the occurrence of warm air meeting cold. The result is a shorter exchange of air and a greater retention of heat.
“You want something like a quarter of the air in your house to turnover each hour,” Walker said. “If you button up too tight it can lead to problems with moisture and unhealthy air. So you always want to strike a balance between too little air flow and too much air flow.”
In one highlighted example, a family in Sunapee, NH invested $6,578 (with $3,450 in rebate returns) and now saves $3,000 annually after a payback period of only 1.5 years.
The audience asked questions throughout the presentation. They ranged from the best kind of insulation to use for a specific weatherization job to the physics of heat loss and everything in between.
Eventually the workshop broke up and the crowd poured into the street. As the last of the cars disappeared over the ridge that divides the Connecticut and Merrimack River valleys, I found myself completely alone for the first time that evening.
Outside a neat line of old houses dotted the road. The sky was a star-studded black and the air was pure cold. It hurt just to breathe. In a building across the way, two large windows were lit by the warm glow of an unseen lamp. The face of the building looked remarkably human. Two yellow eyes staring out from beneath the brow of a covered porch. Not unlike our own Button Up logo.
“Houses breathe?” the old woman had asked. “Houses breathe,” I had replied.
Yes they do, I thought, and turned for home.
All Button Up NH workshops are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Garry Dow, Button Up NH Coordinator, at (603) 422-6464, ext. 115 or gdow@cleanair-coolplanet.org.
Tags: Button Up NH, home weatherization, older homes
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