Issues → November/December 2008 → Home & Garden →
Heating Old Houses
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"Older homes will never lose their importance. In New England we have so many old houses and so much history. You go down into Boston, the old brownstones, or a place where I grew up, Lexington, Massachusetts, where there are these old houses around the Revolutionary War battlefield. Our family house was from the late 1700s, and my great-great-great-great-grandfather was one of the men killed on that green. That's a special connection.
"I've lived in my house for more than 30 years. I've renovated it five times. I cut it in half once. I got rid of a wing that was rotted. I did things to it when I first started working on it that were wrong and that I've corrected over time. Sure, I get tired of fixing my house -- you find yourself going, Enough is enough, but then I get back into it.
"When these homes were built, they didn't think about saving energy. They didn't care -- they just let it run wild and the house was in great shape because it could breathe really well. But unfortunately we're in a situation now where we want to tighten up our buildings. There's absolutely no reason why these houses can't be efficient.
"There are lots of things you can do. For example, what costs you money 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even if you're on vacation? Your hot-water heater. It maintains a temperature so that when you take a shower at the end of a long day, you can just turn that faucet on and you'll have your hot water.
"But if you insulate the outside of the tank, you're increasing the efficiency of the heater by lessening the amount of time it needs to come on to keep that water hot."
READ MORE:
How Old is Your House?
Energy Efficient: Vermont-Five Star Home
Relative Heat Values of Various Fuels
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