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This old house: my first green change hits close to home.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The following is an attempt to make insulation sexy. A fool's errand, I know, but hear me out, because I've actually discovered that R-values can make your heart flutter.

I became well acquainted with R-values--a measure of resistance to heat flow--a couple of months ago, when I had three experts (one a thermal-imaging specialist, one from TXU, and one from the Environmental Protection Agency) evaluate my house's energy efficiency. Now that I was serious about going green, I had to know where to start. The news from my auditors, however, was brutal: My quaint fifty-year-old two-story was about as environmentally incorrect as a house could be. It was leaking warmth in the winter and allowing heat to penetrate in the summer, making both my heater and AC work overtime. My attic, they told me, rated a dismal R-9 (instead of the recommended R-49), my French windows a troubling R-1 (together they amount to a wall, and walls should ideally be R-18), and my floor had basically no R-value. If I was going to reduce my carbon footprint, I would first have to address this woeful energy seepage.

So I decided to start with my attic. My thermal-imaging...

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