Bartholomew_and_the_Oobleck-Dr._Seuss_(1949)What could go wrong? If Lowe’s will sell me a Dow “Froth-Pak” for $747, it must be easy enough to do. And I am not completely without experience. Over the years I have emptied many a can of “Great Stuff” expanding foam into my rafters, my window casings, my hair.

Basement insulation may seem like a digression from the subject of the Great Heat Pump Update, which went well. It took about three long man-days to install five heads and an outdoor unit, which gave me pause: I had considered installing those myself, as is my habit, after seeing that you can buy a unit for $700.

No. Freaking. Way. There are faaaaar more parts than they show you in the Lowe’s advertisement. And the installation involves a huuuuuge amount of wall-boring, and electricity, and yarding seven tubes through a hole that’s only big enough for four tubes. That assumes you sized the whole system correctly in the first place. If you don’t size your system correctly, forget about the amazing efficiency you hoped to gain. You might as well give Lowe’s your $747, jump into a thorn bush, smash some spiders into your hair, then throw the heat pump in the trash: You’ll achieve the same effect, but save a lot of time.


But that went fine. The system is silent, steady, and unobtrusive. Don’t talk to me about “ugly things hanging on the wall.” If humankind can get used to colossal steam radiators that frustrate any furniture plan, and rusty baseboard radiators snaking around a room, and air ducts in the floor where you can look down and see 20 years’ worth of dog hair and Cheerios, I’m confident that we can think of something uglier than heat pumps to complain about.

And basement insulation is actually not a digression from the subject of heat pumps. Where once a few tons of iron furnace and piping shed heat into the basement, there now is no heat at all. But the household plumbing is still down there, at the mercy of the approaching winter. The field-stone foundation, its mortar gone dusty with time, doesn’t mount much of a defense.

Hence the need for foaming. There is now a heat pump head down in the basement, to protect the pipes. But I’ll be damned if I’ll ask that thing to heat a field-stone foundation, and the frozen earth beyond. There must be insulation. What kind, and installed by whom, to be determined. There are two haz-mat suits in the kit. Just putting that out there.



No, this won’t be live because it’s impossible to operate a pipe wrench and take a photo without doing grave bodily harm. It’s hard simply to operate the pipe wrench. img_1347.jpg

Fortunately, destruction is the goal, here in phase one, which we’ll call OPERATION DEE-FEE: I’m determined to get rid of 3000-4000 pounds of iron (Fe) that for decades have manufactured and distributed steam to heat my 1918 home.

First task is to re-home three of these cute covers. One of them fit one of a client’s radiators. Two of them are still on my front porch.

Now it’s time to detach the radiators from the iron pipes that feed them under the floor. IMG_1348The massive pipe wrench showed promise at first but most of the giant nuts were stuck tight, and would not budge. One did. It was satisfying.

Then my husband informed me that they make Sawzall blades that cut metal. The pace picked up markedly. My friend Mikey got involved. We’ve both been working through some heavy emotional baggage, and I must say, the Sawzall has extreme therapeutic value. The blades (“bi-metal,” with a high “teeth per inch” rating) are $20 a package, but that’s a fraction of what I pay to see my psychiatrist.

We got so carried away that I took no pictures. But imagine Mikey in the fetal position on the floor, growling obscenities, and muscling that Sawzall blade through an iron pipe. He’s wearing safety glasses, because bits of white-hot metal fly everywhere.

IMG_1413We descend below-decks, and attack the steam pipes. They criss-cross the basement ceiling, and meet in a massive octopus tangle at the (dead) boiler. One blade, in our amateur and shaking hands, can gnash about 500 pounds of Fe into sections that we can haul out of the basement. Performed correctly, your work should look like this. Note that three of the five blades snapped at the base; one is MIA completely. In hindsight, it’s remarkable that we did not accidentally Sawzall the following: a gas line; a water line; an electric wire; each other.

Left to my own devices, I maneuvered the smallest of my radiators onto a blanket and dragged them out of the house. The tide of pride was running strong in my veins until these guys came to haul away the Fe pile. Big Mike (green shirt) picked up the small radiators and carried them to the truck as though they were little puppies. They used a dolly and a crane for the big ones and for the dead boiler.


And that was that. I waved goodbye to the age of steam heat. One hundred years those radiators served this house. And they went down fighting.

Tune in next week for the actual installation of the heat pumps.

IMG_1435And for OPERATION HOLE PLUG. You’ll often see these steam scars in old houses, plugged in various ways, with varying aesthetic results. The floor has been refinished around the radiator feet, which will add to the challenge.

CALL KENNY AND MIKE for all your heavy metal needs: IMG_1433


My husband didn’t hear me the first 200 times I said, “Add water to the steam boiler reallllly slowly.” He’s from a part of the country where the populace prefers less catastrophic methods of home heating. So when the boiler quit due to low water, he descended to the basement, located the cold water valve, and let ‘er rip.

Steam heat is one of those Northeastern traditions, born of cheap coal and hard winters. You shoveled coal into a boiler, and the resulting steam swarmed up through cast iron pipes to heat colossal, iron radiators. Sure, the radiator valves leaked a little, and the pipes hammered, and every week or so you had to add water to the boiler reallllly slowly, but… inertia. And in the 1970s when people began to give one tiny darn about fuel efficiency, it became apparent that steam boilers would never measure up… well… The heat was so nice, pulsing so steadily from those masses of iron.

Adding to the comfy inefficiency of steam, the radiators tend to be too big. They were installed in the early part of the 20th century, when houses had single-pane windows and no insulation. During the decade after the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919, radiators got even huger: They were sized for houses in which the windows were left open at night, all winter, to blow away the germs.

As homeowners insulated and weatherized over the years, the mismatch chafed. Most steam radiators retain at least some flaking paint not because it’s pretty, but because slapping on metallic paint reduces a radiator’s effectiveness–intentionally. Ditto for those boxy radiator covers. In apartment buildings of a certain age, there’s an entire cottage industry bent on out-witting the infernal steam radiators.

Well, my husband has beaten ours decisively. Cold water struck the red-hot intestines of the iron boiler, which shattered just the way the manual said they would. A pool of rusty water spread like furnace-blood across the floor.


I made a quick survey of the inefficiencies in this system:

Inefficiency of the boiler itself: Steam boilers always waste at least 15% of their fuel. Because my house is well insulated, my boiler was actually too big, further eroding its efficiency.

Heat loss to basement from mammoth, cast iron pipes: A lot, even though I wrapped them in insulation.

Radiator inefficiency: Between the dust, the paint, and boxy covers, a ton. Maybe 30-40%.

These various losses are apples and oranges, but they add up to a rotten fruit salad.

This house turns 100 this year. I think a century is long enough for the original technology to prove itself. We’re giving it a 21st Century Viessmann 222F direct-vent gas boiler with 98% fuel efficiency, three pump speeds, outdoor temperature sensor, and built-in domestic hot water tank–along with some flat-panel radiators, each one a zone unto itself.

We’re leaping a hundred years in a week.

What could go wrong?


Electron eater. — wikimedia pd

Knob-and-tube wiring, the antique technology that strikes terror in the hearts of home buyers, is not a fire hazard! In theory. Technically. Much.

So says this report, which examined the rate at which the early 1900s wiring starts house fires. After studying a bunch of fires and fire-trap houses, these investigators concluded:

“Properly installed and unaltered K&T wiring is not an inherent fire hazard.”


But what the heck is knob and tube wiring, you ask?

It’s the aboriginal electrical wire, standard equipment from the 1880s to the 1940s. It carried electricity into your house in copper wire wrapped in cloth insulation. As they snaked through the walls, the hot wires were kept clear of the flammable wood with ceramic insulators, some shaped like knobs, some shaped like tubes.

Knob and Tube wiring. — Wikimedia pd

Although K&T has been rendered obsolete by wire that’s wrapped in a metal or plastic jacket, remnants of the “legacy wiring” remain alive and well in many older houses. And contrary popular perception, it’s not particularly hazardous! I’m pleased to have found this study, in part because my Dad always contended that K&T was actually safer than the new stuff. But because he was prone to skepticism in the face of most technological “advances,” including computers, vacuum cleaners, and the clothes iron, I wasn’t entirely sure I should trust him on this point. Apparently, I can.

So, yay! K&T is a much maligned and innocent technology!

Now, there are just a few minor GIANT caveats:

1: In an overhead light fixture, the heat of the bulb can slowly cook the cotton insulation off the copper wires. I stumbled upon this situation in my 1918 bungalow, and the black char marks on the ceiling plaster were legit scary.

2: Adding insulation over K&T can allow the warm wires to heat up and set things on fire. An awful lot of old houses have had insulation blown blindly into their walls and attics over the years.

3: Those pure and original K&T circuits have been tampered with over the years, pushing them WELL past their design specifications.

Now, how do you know if someone has twiddled around with your original K&T?

Oh, we just know they have: When these houses were built, electrical fixtures were limited to an overhead light in each room, and a couple of outlets for the Victrola and one of those crazy new toasters.

But since then, a tidal wave of electrical inventions has washed through the marketplace, and into the house. When the electric razor appeared in the 1930s, your Grandpa had to have one. He spliced a new wire into the old K&T circuit in the basement, and poked it up into the bathroom wall to power a new outlet. Electric refrigerator? Splice in another branch! Vacuum cleaner? New outlet! Washing machine? Electric iron, fan, coffee percolator, radio, television, microwave, clothes dryer, cook-stove?

So many splices!

Each with the risk of untwisting, or touching something flammable, or lacking sufficient insulating tape!

Each brighter light bulb and bigger fridge pulling more hot current through the humble wire wrapped in cotton!

So it’s mixed news, really: K&T is not inherently a fire hazard. But exherently, it really might be. It probably is. I’m glad mine is all gone. Sorry, Dad.

wikimedia pd

TOILETS IN CELLARS: I sh*t you not.

wikimedia pd

“Boys and girls, do you need to go to the basement?”

When I first darkened the door of Boothbay Region Elementary School, I was baffled to hear the teacher ask this of my class. A couple kids raised their hands. They left the room. Eventually they returned–that seemed promising. It was a few days before I correlated the term “basement” with the bathrooms down the hall.

Since those days, I have occasionally discovered toilets that actually are in basements.

I find these cellar stools interesting for two reasons.

First of all, to call a toilet a “basement” illustrates how we use euphemisms to talk about taboo topics. Consider how far afield we will travel to avoid saying: “I will poop now.” Instead we come out with, “I’m going to visit the little girls room,” or “I need to see a man about a horse.”

But second, toilet history is just fabulous. There’s such tension between the desire to poop in private, and the competing desire to poop far away from where we eat and sleep.

The obvious compromise is the “outhouse.” It offers the privacy of a house, but it’s outside of the house. The outhouse had a long run as the pooping location of choice. But as toilet technology evolved, the crapper sneaked indoors, like a stray cat on a cold night. Although early “indoor outhouses” tested out all levels of the house, my favorite was the “bay privy,” a feature of medieval castles.

The bay privy was a bump-out, a small addition, hanging high on the wall of a seaside tower. Within that bump-out was ye olde outhouse. And far below, the bay did your flushing for you. (Not every castle was waterfront property, and so some castle privies simply discharged to the castle wall, contributing to the defense of the premises.)

But I suspect toilet-in-basements descended from cesspools-in-basements. Before public sewers penetrated urban areas, many city dwellers did their duty in an outhouse over a cesspool. Or, if space was really tight, they did  it in an “inhouse” that was mounted over a cesspool in the basement.

From the outhouse evolved the portable “earth closet,” a chair-type appliance with a removable hopper full of absorbent dirt or wood ash. Then came the water closet, which used a “trap” of water to prevent sewer gases from rising out of the toilet.

wikimedia pd

The point is, the toilet was a filthy and troubled entity, not remotely welcome in the bathroom. The bathroom, after all, was where you went to wash, to clean yourself. (Technically, the “lavatory” is the washing-room, not the toilet–again with the euphemisms. Even “toilet” is from the French word for getting gussied up. “Toilet water” was another term that gravely disturbed my youthful ruminations.)

So it’s my guess that toilets ended up in basements because they just too gross to come upstairs. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that toilet technology earned the commode a place in the average washroom.

But there are other theories.

The “Pittsburgh Potty” is a commode found in older Pittsburgh homes, sitting shamelessly in the open basement. Sometimes a rudimentary shower stands nearby. They’re rumored to be the Maine equivalent of a “mud room,” a place for dirty laborers to shed a layer of grime after work.

Others argue that a basement toilet was more of a men’s room, with the upstairs loo reserved for the ladies.

I think it’s also possible that the cost of upgrading to an indoor flush was less daunting if you installed it in the basement rather than remodeling and plumbing a room upstairs. In cold regions, the risk of plumbing freezing in the basement could be lower, as well.

But  ultimately, I suspect toilets lurk in basements because they are fundamentally squalid, vile, foul, vulgar: base.



pd wikimedia

My domestic partner is a man of science but he harbors dark doubts about thermometer technology. When he steps out of a 75-degree house into an 85-degree world, and a breeze causes his skin to feel cool, he concludes that it’s cooler outside than in: He throws open the doors.

I work hard for my indoor coldness and my low humidity. I fiddle with venetian blinds to permit light, but limit heat. I have lined my curtains with white stuff to return intrusive sunbeams from whence they came. I cook outside. And I keep the freaking windows and doors closed when it’s warmer outside than in. 

“But it feels warmer inside.” That’s the refrain.

“Feelings aren’t facts,” that’s my response.

“Physics,” that’s my response. “Evaporative cooling. Google it.”

Turning a fan on my domestic partner, that’s my response.

Positioning one thermometer inside the door and one outside the door, I have tried this.

But feelings can feel remarkably like facts, and so they endure. Summer after summer after summer.

As marital discord goes, this is small potatoes. Inevitably, after a week or two of bickering over windows and doors, summer dithers off the tropics again, and we return our attention to the thermostat wars.



White makes right: Snow shows that the right side is better insulated than the left.


With a fresh blanket of snow on the roofs, and the furnaces churning in the basements, it’s a fine time to play “read the roof.” This amusing/depressing game can reveal a number of secrets that your house might otherwise keep to itself.

Like, where is there insulation, and where is there not?

On the right side of this first example, you can see a clear line where the insulation ends, over the “knee wall” portion of the third floor. (See cross section below.) Escaping heat is melting the snow faster on the lower part than the upper. On the left side of that big dormer, there are a couple of rafter bays where escaping heat has melted the snow completely, suggesting no insulation; and between them, a pretty well insulated bay. Chimneys are almost always good at conducting heat from the inside to the outside, melting snow in a circle around their base.


Action shot: Thermal bridging under way.

Action shot: Thermal bridging under way.

Here’s a classic case of “thermal bridging.” On the left side of this roof, the wooden rafters that support the roof are allowing heat to escape faster than the insulated bays in between them. The migrating heat melts the snow over the rafters a bit faster, creating those parallel lines. It’s like an X-ray of the roof framing.

Extra credit: The overshot eave of the bungalow gets no heat from the interior, so see how the snow there is slightly deeper there?


Compare and contrast: An efficiency freak does not live in my neighbor's house. She may not have amazing insulation, but she has a life.

Compare and contrast: An efficiency freak does not live in my neighbor’s house. She may not have story-book insulation, but she has a life.

Can you spot the hot spots?

Can you spot the hot spots? (That line down the middle is ice on my windshield. Sorry.)

OK, that’s my house. I’m an energy efficiency geek. The home of my neighbor is more normal. In old houses, those rafter bays are only about 4 inches deep, which really limits the amount of insulation you can cram in there. Both these houses would have been built with no insulation, or perhaps a product from the “Yankee Ingenuity” line. (Newspaper isn’t uncommon; I have also seen sawdust and old clothing.) Updating of insulation tends to happen piecemeal, willy-nilly, as the years  and energy crises and remodeling projects go by. The result is usually not “blanket of snow,” but “crazy quilt of snow.”


This last one is frankly open to interpretation. It’s an odd pattern. We can see again that the cap of the house — the flat part of the third floor ceiling–is better insulated than the sloping part over the eave. On that lower part, those narrow white stripes suggest that the rafters under the roof are actually the most insulating element of the “roof assembly,” and the rafter bays between them are letting heat out faster. And both the chimney  and the sewer vent stack are acting as thermal bridges.

The puzzling part is that row of hot dots. Something about the insulation pattern directs rising heat to these distinct spots in the roofing structure. Those hot spots may not be very big, but once the black roof is uncovered, it heats quickly in the sun and enlarges the dot.

For reference purposes, a cross section of a basic roof. And the ice dams that occur when insulation is of the crazy-quilt variety.

Cross section. That swirly stuff is insulation, but only in new or really well renovated houses.


Oops! I forgot to replace all my old windows before winter!

unnamedThis picture is worth a thousand words. Just do this, and you won’t have to read the rest of the post. But by all means if you prefer reading about stuff you should do, rather than actually doing it, read on. We’ve all been there.

I, for example, read up on replacement windows every November-December when the first blast of Arctic air barrels into my 1918 bungalow. “Next summer,” I vow.

Then, each “next summer” I do not replace my windows, for a number of reasons. Not least, the  bungalow is a tropical vernacular, and tends toward enormous windows on the first floor. Your average vinyl replacement unit would soon warp under the weight of all that glass.

But another reason is that replacing windows just doesn’t save much energy. Even brand-new, double-glazed windows are relatively worthless when viewed as insulation. Two layers of window dressing (roller shade + curtain; Venetian blind + Roman shade) give you the same insulation value as a double glazed window. But only


only if air is not leaking around the edges of the old window unit.

Aaaaaand even if air is leaking around the shrunken frames, rattling them like frosty bones and causing your candle flames to dance merrily, you still don’t have to replace them. Just do this:

1: Tear off strips of cling-wrap.

2: With a fillet knife, putty knife, whatever, work that cling wrap into the crack between the window sash and the window frame.

3: You’re done. Go read something enjoyable.*

No hair dryer. No gray, gummy ropes of… gummystuff. The cling wrap disappears into the chasm, not to be seen again until spring.

*Extra credit for stuffing cling wrap into the pully mechanism at the top of the window.





Did  all the paint marketers drink from the same pitcher of grape Kool-aid at the annual Paint Party? Or is there really an aura, a shade, a tint, to a coming year that is detectable by paint prognosticators? One way or another, the various paint companies seem to be in agreement that 2017 shall be the year of the purple walls. Proceed with caution.


Pittsburg Paint’s prediction: “Violet Verbena.” Perhaps that’s supposed to be “Violent Verbena”? I don’t find it soothing. I wouldn’t choose this for the walls of a prison cafeteria, for instance. 


Olympic’s pinkish pick. Is it just me, or… ick? However, this color can make a important contribution to a landscape painting when it accounts for .0002% of a sunset scene. 


Benjamin Moore is more. It’s a lot. It’s going to take 14 coats of the 2018 “color of the year” to put that purple in the past.


Shhhherwin Williams is betting on “Poised Taupe,” which may actually be typo. This is taupe that’s been poisoned by some purple pigment. I don’t hate it. I’m just a little tired of gray. And this shade doubles down on gray’s sad side. 


Behr couldn’t commit so they have 20 colors for 2017. The “Comfortable” palette is inspired by old pajamas, while the “Composed” is a purple-themed take on a wintry compost pile. “Confident” contains only six colors, as confident decorators decide really quickly what color they like. 




Aaaaand now that I have mocked the color of the year, I’m looking around my house. Here’s Ben Moore’s purple on the drape that shuts off the unused upstairs…


…and this is the wall of the global headquarters of Geek Realty. Huh. Just huh.