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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> The architect said to me that we'll never fully recoup our costs of putting the hat on the house.

Your architect is almost certainly right. I would bet that most of your improvements came from fixing the drafts, with the insulation providing a marginal improvement on top of that.

I’ve also dealt with insulating old homes, but I did draft fixes, wall insulation, and attic/roof insulation at different stages. The draft fixes provided the most improvement, followed by attic/roof insulation. Insulating walls had much less effect than I anticipated.

In friends’ houses I’ve used my thermal camera (which I didn’t have back then) and it’s easy to see where the heat or cold is coming in during weather extremes. These days I’d recommend anyone start with the thermal camera view before deciding where to spend money on insulation.

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> Insulating walls had much less effect than I anticipated.

I wonder if that's due to air already being a decent insulator and walls have sizeable air voids. As long as you cut out the drafts, the air in the walls should remain a decent insulator. It's also my understanding that the draft treatments are at least as important as the insulation work which is done when retro-fitting insulation. One reason attic insulation would make a much larger difference is most homes with attics use vented soffits designed to encourage airflow. They are built to be drafty and you can't seal up those drafts without redesigning things.

Depends what your walls look like inside. If it’s balloon framed with no blocking, you’ll have a good convection current inside the wall.

The moisture concerns when trying to add insulation to an old uninsulated house are real, in service of saving a few thousand dollars of heating costs you could literally destroy your house and your health with mold.

Someone is going to come by and look at your comment and raise an eyebrow.

The building trade and construction is filled with nerds, amazing products, cheats and snake oil... so just like tech but less VC'c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_science building nerds are on point and doing all kinds of cool stuff. If you want the modern version of bob villa this old house is probably this: https://www.youtube.com/@buildshow . It will give you some clues as to what is going on in modern construction.

Oh I’ve seen buildshow. I have also seen him talking about mistakes he made in the older designs he had. I would be real cautious about letting a builder at a lower tier than him beta test their ideas on moisture control inside my walls when I’m the test dummy inside.

Even if you don't use a thermal camera, just the thermal thermometers work as well. Sure, you have to take more readings, but the result is the same. A lot of people probably have one of these now after Covid, and can at least test things out before going to the step of a full thermal camera.

I have a bedroom that has a shared wall with a water heater which causes this room to be hotter than the rest of the house. Using the thermometer showed the temps after I added a barrier to the inside of the utility closest dropped significantly.

Thermal cameras have got really cheap: I found one on Aliexpress for less than £150, that plugs into a smartphone.

Have you tried it, though? Is it any good?

What kind of thermal camera do you recommend and what price range?

I bought a Topdon TC001 a year ago that in my experience is significantly more responsive and higher resolution than similarly priced FLIR or other name brand options at that price point. It appears there are even more low cost options now.

I find it rather interesting that companies like FLIR are limited by regulation (I believe US export bans) from selling IR cameras with greater than 9fps. there is also a resolution cap but I forget what it is off-hand. Strangely enough this doesn't stop US citizens from purchasing higher performing cameras from non-US companies. I think technology has come down significantly in price over the last few years and you can now get smartphone attached versions like infiray for a few hundred bucks.

For what use cases is 9 FPS not sufficient?

I have a seek thermal which plugs into my phone.

Very handy for checking for drafts and cold spots, and also checking the fuse box and other electrical for hot spots.

The resolution is not amazing, 206x156, but it's enough for this type of work.

I have a friend who is happily using a flir one, with a resolution of 160x120 at his day job as an electrician and it is also enough for checking for draft, water leaks insufficient insulation, etc.

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