Home improvement question -- which should I do?

Factual Questions
21

How about shutters on the outside of the windows? That’s the way our ancestors handled heat. When the sun has penetrated your windows, the heat is already IN your house, and really has nowhere else to go.

My home’s last owner had shutters (the steel roll-down variety) installed for safety reasons. I think they are ugly as sin, but I have found they do a fine jonb of keeping the suns’ heat out.

One more advice: how about installing some more indoor doors, if all the rooms are currently connected? That way your AC only has to cool the square feet you actually live in.

22

Honestly, I think a lot of the heat is coming down through the roof. It’s a black tar roof, and other folks I know with similar situations say that insulating their roof has made a huge difference in their house. Obviously the large windows don’t help, but I’d rather try the window film treatment than shutters… my goal is to make the house more efficient while keeping its original charm, not making it uglier.

Based on this thread, holding off on the a/c until I insulate, fix the windows, and possibly add a heat vent on the roof will hopefully help a lot.

23

I also live in a house in the LA area that was built in the 1950s. I have done some upgrades and here is what I found.
Windows IMHO helped the most. Double pane low e glass. I also made a couple of them smaller. I also replaced all the doors. The 10’ wide slider into the back yard, I replaced with a 6’ wide French door, with mini-blinds built between the panes of glass. This door is a west facing, and boy did that make a difference in the summer. All in all it makes the house much warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.
My three ton A/C before could not keep up in the summer, now I have to close down the vent in the SW bedroom because it gets too cold. :smiley:

My other thought is where is the return air grille for your A/C system? If it is not on the top floor, you will never get the house comfortable in the summer.

Good luck

24

There are reflecting coatings that can be applied to a roof such as yours, assuming the existing roof is sound.
You might get some ideas from this site (note the search feature): http://www.energystar.gov/

25

Your home cannot be at a pressure that is different than the pressure outside without an attempt to equalize.

In practical terms, that means if you put an exhaust fan up near the ceiling the house will be under negative pressure-----you’re sucking air out of the house.

Nature doesn’t like that and it will want to equalize. So…underneath every crack, around every [leaky] window, and every time you open a door air will rush in to equalize with the outside.

You’re sucking air out, and an equal amount of air is coming into the home via the windows, doors, flues, walls etc. For example, if you put a 200 CFM exhaust fan near the ceiling (and it’s actually moving 200 CFM) than 200 CFM is entering your home vis these cracks. (and a “crack” may simply be opening a door)

In commercial buildings that’s called “make up air”; it’s air that’s “making up” the air lost due to exhaust.

The problem is that this make up air is outside, untreated air. Your A/C system is designed to recirculate 90% of the air it cools. If you add exhaust this make up air will have to be cooled.

If you add an exhaust fan and don’t take this additional “cooling load” into consideration your A/C system still won’t cool because you are now cooling part of the neighborhood.

If you do take this outside air into consideration you will quickly realize that a 3 ton system is no longer gonna do the job. You have a much higher cooling load due to the exhaust/make up air and you’ll spend potentially a lot more cooling your house and back yard.

IME, Rick’s (and others) approaches will do better. Contend with the envelope first; roof, roof insulation, windows, doors and walls.

Then deal with the HVAC. As to the heat upstairs, either adding a cold air return upstairs (to bring that heat back to the furnace to be treated) or adding a “mini-split” as GaryM mentioned will do better.

Exhaust fans are excellent to ventilate/exhaust attics. (And even then need make up air via ridge vents or soffit vents)

But IMO using exhaust fans to ventilate/exhaust the living space is a bad idea and will not work.

26

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but just last week I took my Level I Thermography course from FLIR, and the instructor said that the people who make windows in two styles, argon filled and regular, put argon in all of the windows because it’s cheaper than having two assembly lines, and just charge more for the ones with argon on the label.

I tell you what, looking at the outside of some houses with an infrared camera is an eye opening experience, that’s for sure. I don’t know how much a thermal scan costs, but you could look into one.

27

Bill Door
You have a PM.

28

I’m nominating this (in my own head) as one of the most informative threads I’ve read in a long while. =)

29

Argon’s cheap. I buy lots of it at work. Keeps spatter down, that kind of stuff. Even so, if it’s a high volume shop, it sounds like all they need is a manufacturing engineer. It’s completely stupid to have two separate assembly lines for what’s essentially just a different process among many.

30

Agreed, there are some excellent suggestions here. I will heartily second those that have advised a roof coating, either the snow white stuff or the reflective aluminum paint type. They can make a considerable difference, especially in SoCal where cold winters are not an issue and you won’t miss the extra heat.

Window coatings are also very useful, but I have found one drawback to them. They have to be applied to the inside of the window to keep them from being destroyed by UV. This means that the coating itself becomes a heat radiator on the inside of your windows. It still cuts down on the heat admitted through the glass, but not as much as it could. An alternative, or even complementary, solution are solar screens. These are standard window screens with a sun-blocking fabric instead of ordinary screen cloth. They are available in a range of colors and opacities. We had 90% bronze shade cloth installed on our windows and the improvement was dramatic. They also looked nice on our house and could be easily removed for winter storage. They weren’t very expensive, even though the company had to build a frame for them, since our windows were designed to have screens only on the part that opened, and these covered the entire window. Finally, they were easy to see out of, but impossible to see into, and didn’t make our home look like a house of mirrors.

31

I know one question I keep forgetting to answer is that our roof is in decent shape. A few areas that could use some patching, but overall the roof should be fine for another 2 years at least. So worth checking into making it reflective at least.