Ideas?
 

Hey everyone? My friend just bought a house and is looking to make it more efficient to save some dough. Today we insulated the crap out of the basement, in the ceiling of it with 24" R17 and around the edges with 15" R19. Just doing 3/4 of the basement, it got alot warmer just from the heat being put off from the lights and dryer.

Any ideas what we should do to help out the heating bill? Winter is fast approching and in this altitude, it'll get very cold. We're working in the basement now since alot of cold comes through the block walls. We plan on painting the walls with the water-proofing paint, and then laying up blue-board around the door and windows...

Any thoughts are much appreciated!
Nic

You can raise the R value of windows by adding the greenhouse insulating plastic bubbles.

You should ask the previous owners for bills and compare the before and after.

What sort of house, land and HOA if any are you dealing with? Might have some suggestions depending on your situation.

Ya know, I didn't think of the blueboard thing. Think I might have to get some of that myself, and build window inserts. Some of our windows are always covered with curtains and almost never opened, and are certainly never opened in the winter. Some blueboard blocking those windows in wouldn't even be noticed.

I guess it would be called a "town house", I'm not really sure. It is in a college town (FSU) so I just call them rent houses. He lives there and also rents it out to 2 other students.

A town house is a long building with multiple residences in it, where you have several floors as part of the house with nobody living over or under you. Many of them will have a garage as the first floor, living/kitchen as the second floor and bedrooms and bathroom on the third floor. I lived in one once, was a 2 story with a basement for a "third" story, no garage. Better than an apartment, worse than an actual house. Mine was an end cap but on a military post with base provided radiant hot water heating, and no utility bills.

Hmm, not a whole lot you can do then, outside the place, since except for a very small section of front and back yard you are sharing a common area. Hopefully you are in an inside unit and not an end unit so your neighbor's HVAC will be keeping your side walls in a controlled environment. I don't even know that you'd be able to do any solar on that. Sounds like you've done about everything you can.

Its not a town house, thats just what I call them becuase they all pretty much look the same in that town. I guess they built them really fast and similar back in the day (30's and 40's). It has a small basement and 2 levels.