No air or gap between the inner and outer walls and this should be filled with insulation. In order to keep the ice from melting you need a few things. Think about it, homes today are built like a cooler you put your food in when you go camping. Back in the day everyone said brick walls where good and it helped cool / heat the house. Also having an attic that hot will "cook" your shingles making them brittle and shorten the life span. Your trying to cool your house by running the AC while you have a 130 degree blanket of air hovering over your ceilings. Also keep in mind to get an attic fan to cool your attic in the summer and let out the 120-130 degree heat out. We have 2x8 ceiling rafters with original insulation that's probably matted down but we have a new pitched roof built over the top which will allow me to insulate the the attic with rolls of insulation. In most of these scenarios, including mine having a brick exterior with only 1/2 insulation board then sheet rock making up the wall we also experience loss of heat/air in the winter and summer months. I am replacing my front door with a quality pre-hung product-there has always been lot of air coming in this door and the attic has a R 30 in it that we put in a couple of years ago.any suggestions for how to handle the walls? I had the stucco painted 10 years ago and its all peeling off on the north side- probably not prepped properly. One nearby Stucco contractor advertises that they can do what is called Hardcoat - not sure if that would provide any insulating value or not but I do like the smooth stucco look more than what I have now -which is textured and looks dirty all the time. We also have to have Ceramic heaters on low in the bedroom and living room for supplemental heat- raising my elect bill to 400 a month in the winter. Trying to keep the house at 70 degrees is costly but thats our comfort level. The house is only 700 sq feet and I go through 2000 dollars of oil to provide heat - hot water each year. I was told to do insulated vinyl siding on the house with tyvek or house wrap - not really the look I am going for. Spray foam companies are not interested in doing 1 room at a time- The outside of this 1 story, raised ranch house is stucco. This is not the case however-the walls are freezing in the winter and the house is 10-20 degrees warmer inside in the summer than it is outside. My contractor said that block wall homes should not be insulated-the block is thick enough to keep the air from infiltrating. That was fine when Oil was a dollar a gallon- I recently had some sheet rock work done in my 2nd bedroom and asked if we could pull down the outside walls first, throw in some Roxul or insulation and then re-sheetrock the walls. I wanted to do blown in about 20 years ago-the company came - drilled some holes to see what they were working with and said they could not insulate the walls as the hoses would not fit and that block walls should not be insulated. The problem is - I cannot insulate the walls in the living area. Reading this with interest-I have a cinder block house - with a basement that has a cement floor and its heated. Should we spend the money there instead of the walls? We could really use some advice about what would be our best option to make the house more energy efficient without breaking the bank. I don't think the roof is insulated, either. But, we have high energy bills and I feel like we are just heating the outdoors. Our house is on a slab with radiant floor heat and is fairly comfortable. It seems like EIFS would give us the highest R value for our block walls. I was thinking of EIFS or dryvit to insulate the outer walls but have read about moisture and insurance issues with those. I wouldn't mind changing the exterior look of the house. Adding furring strips, insulation and Sheetrock would be a huge hassle and expense as we have a newish kitchen we like and don't want to rip out to accomodate thicker walls. Inside and out you see painted cement blocks. The issue is that it is a cement block construction with no insulation (that we know of). Thankfully, almost all of the windows have been replaced with thermal windows. We face South and have a wall of large windows to take advantage of passive solar energy. It was designed to be part of a small community of modernist houses using inexpensive materials like cement block. My husband and I love our 1949 mid century modern house.
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