I live in a pier and beam home built in 1997. Heating and cooling system are two heat pumps with electric backup. The heat pumps seem to work efficiently during the summer but during the winter the house always seems cold and our energy consumption is highest. I saw your video recommending not to install insulation under the subfloor. My question is about the skirt . We have a skirt made of trellis wood (square slats and holes). Would a solid siding skirt help with the heating efficiency?
David
Tom: First off, no solid skirts. You have to have ventilation under a house here or you’ll get all kinds of problems. Mainly, moisture problems coming up into the house, and mold growth and wood rot. There’s a lot of different things. So no to that.
Number two is the heat pumps are fine but people don’t realize in the winter time when it goes below about 40 degrees, 38 degrees, depending which system you have the heat pump stops working anyway and you go back either to a strip back up heat or a gas furnace. Most of them have strip back up heat so that’s why it’s expensive. It’s going to be expensive anyway.
Lastly in the summer time you don’t have to have insulation underneath the house but in the wintertime that gets cold, so that’s where you might want to rethink how you dress in your home, maybe some supplement heating systems you can buy off the market, just put for room heaters to boost it up a little bit to make you comfortable where you are without having to heat the whole house. If you want to insulate maybe underneath the bathroom or the bedroom where you spend a lot of time, but not necessarily the whole house because it’s going to be expensive and you’re not going to see your money back.
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