Cost of AC before I insulated the attic would have paid for a lot. But once that got done, at a cost of about $200, the heating and cooling costs got cut in half. I definitely went for the low hanging fruit immediately. At that same time, I installed the up ducts,, those are the modern version of the door to the roof. The hottest air in the house vents out immediately when you do turn on a swamp cooler. 90% of the time, the swamp cooler is off, and then it acts as a solar chimney on the house. It allows hot air to convect out of the house all day and into the night.
My best guess is I'd save about $30 a month,, for 6 months a year. Spring and fall the house is fine without heat or AC. So at a rate of $200 a year for AC and heat, it would take a pretty long time to pay for the project. Too bad we did not do it when we moved in, but you know, it was busy then. 5 days of work a week, every weekend, either flying a hot air balloon, or moonlighting to pay for next weekends flights.
If I do the work myself now, I can insulate the walls fairly cheap. However, I have chronic fatigue now, so pulling out all the exterior wall sheet rock in the house, furring out the walls 2" then re doing all the insulation, then re hanging the sheet rock, taping, texturing and painting, sounds like a lot of work. Emptying the room enough to just do it sounds like a lot of work. Each room done would cost about $200-300. I should do the room I spend all day in. But again, the fatigue makes it hard. I do house projects at similar cost all the time,, this year it was a master bath expansion, adding some space for a decent cabinet, upgrading the toilet. That was about an $800 project, and even more overdue, more needed than improving the walls. We're old, it was high time to make the bath more handicap friendly. Now we have the tall toilet, good handrails everywhere, and space for our hygiene stuff that is at waist level, not under the sink.
I keep thinking, this winters project will be to thicken the walls and get R20. But then some other project is needed worse. Two winters ago it was flooring.
But on the upside,, I know for a fact my AC bills are a fraction of my neighbors. The perfectly placed trees I planted are doing their job, my sunny side windows and walls are shaded all summer, and just the attic insulation alone had an enormous effect. I do wish I had the Victorian house tall cielings, but the dang bank balked at lending us enough to buy that 1910 house. Instead we got a pretty decent house cheap, on the repo, in 2000 when they were cheap and house flippers did not snap them up. We are doing just fine,, but we will turn that AC on daily, and run one window cooler pretty much 24-7 for a few months. But we sure don't have to run whole house AC 24-7, like nearly everybody in town does.
