Deep Energy Retrofit: The Problem Areas

Jeff Wilson says his house is nearly perfect in every way for his family -- it's situated in the Appalachian hills, in a vibrant college town, in a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. But it needed a lot of TLC. So the Wilsons completely gutted and remodeled the home's interior and backyard living area, creating an open floor-plan, which allowed the family to better entertain guests. This photo shows the outside of the home before the Deep Energy Retrofit. The existing attached garage you see is rotting away and has no insulation, so the Wilsons plan to demolish it and replace it with a slightly larger, super-insulated structure to make space for a workshop and office. Other problems with the home: the siding is damaged, the roof is on its last legs and the windows are single-pane, cracked and rotting. The old rounded dormers show daylight through the cracks between the windows, creating substantial air leaks.

This is an example of what most of the home's windows looked like before the DER. Wooden, single-pane windows, glazed with putty, were standard back in 1940 when this home was built. Seventy years of weather, the house settling and general use had made them barely functional. The windows and doors were a major weak spot in the building envelope -- the shell that separates the interior and exterior environments of a building.

This image shows an actual crack in one of the windows, most likely due to settling or an accident of some sort years ago. Even if the Wilsons replaced the pane, fixing the aesthetics of the broken window, they'd still have old technology wasting vast amounts of energy over time. The Wilsons had a few difficult windows to replace -- two unique bay windows and two unique arched dormer windows -- but according to Jeff, it was important that they "bite the bullet" and fix the problem once and for all.

This is a close-up of one of Wilson's old bay windows. A previous homeowner had once installed storm windows, which were rusting in some areas. The wood frames were rotting away, despite being carefully and frequently repainted. The Wilsons wavered a bit about replacing the bay windows because it is a major job, but they ultimately decided that the windows were one of the weakest links in their building envelope and couldn't be ignored.