Design

Eight years in this house has taught us a lot about things we will do differently if/when we build a home. This house is wonderful and ya'll know I love it to pieces; however, there are some design flaws that become glaringly troublesome each winter.

First, three rooms of this house are over the garage. B.'s bedroom, the kids bathroom and part of the playroom/media room. We lived here for at least 4 years before we realized just how cold it was in poor B's room - and now that we have a small portable heater in there, we know for a fact that the winter temp in that room is frequently below 60 degrees. The builder did what a lot of builders do - they saved money by not adequately insulating the garage ceiling (which is B's floor). Since we had the garage dry-walled, we didn't really 'notice' as the house was being built. It's top on our list of 'next big things to do to the house': add insulation to the garage. Not that we use it as a 'room' but because there are so many rooms overtop of it that are freezing. B. now uses an electric heater to take the chill off. It's helping.

The builder also did a totally inadequate job of designing an appropriate duct system upstairs. After a few years of suffering with extreme heat and cold upstairs - and being told 'upstairs are never as efficiently heated or cooled compared to the rest of the house' (in spite of having an entirely separate HVAC unit for the upstairs), we had the ducts checked and discovered they weren't even connected. Just hung over the rafters of the 'attic' (crawl space) and left to toss hot or cool air into the space vs. getting it through the registers and into the rooms. We spent a small fortune for the duct work to be totally redone upstairs - and it helped. But it's still plenty cool up there in the winter and mighty hot in the summer.

That is partly due to a mis-design of the thermostat for upstairs. We've already moved it from one wall to the other - and that didn't help much. In the winter, the heat from downstairs rises up to the landing - and the thermostat registers a balmy 71 degrees. Which it is - on the landing. But all the surrounding rooms - where we eat, sleep, compute, etc. - are freezing cold. To get the heat to run in those rooms, we have to set the thermostat upstairs to over 72 (if the downstairs heat is on). And if you leave the house and 'forget' that you've cranked it up to get a little heat up there, you come home to Hawaii - in the dead of winter. Sauna like.

I've given up fretting about these odd quirks - we work around them. There are portable heaters in the rooms people sleep in (except the Master Bedroom 'cuz it has a fireplace that puts out a heck of a lot of heat when required) and fans for summer. There's really not much we can do to fix it at this point - the unit is where it is and moving it would be a huge, expensive undertaking. So we adjust. And I'm constantly the 'HVAC' police, triple checking that we haven't left it set high/low when we're heading out for awhile.

On the subject of energy, I stopped our Balanced Payment plan this past month...and now, when I go to the website and click on 'setting up Balanced Payment Plan', our monthly payment would be ~$40 less than what we were paying. If they'd just adjusted the thing like they were supposed to - 'cuz I knew we've lowered our monthly cost quite a bit - I would have stayed on it. But the bill in November where I only 'owed' $99 and they were asking for $419 put me over the top....I just paid the $99 and moved the other $320 into savings - to 'prepare' for the big heating bills soon to come and the monstrous cooling bills of the future summer. I'm a good budgeter - I think I'll just budget myself from now on. Makes me mad when they don't adjust appropriately and keep charging me $40 more per month than we're using. Their clue should have been that we carried a credit balance for months, even in the summer! I'm making the family nuts with my monitoring of our energy usage but it's working!