Last week, the bedazzled avatar of Lime reader Vicki R asked if her cold house would be better served by a new heating system or better insulation. Good question. In an older house like mine (and like Vicki’s, I imagine), small improvements to the building’s envelope – the walls, windows, floors and ceilings protecting you from the outside world – can go a long way. Adding insulation to your basement and attic can save a couple thousand pounds of CO2 emissions every year – and a few bucks on your heating bill.

Whenever I talk to the local energy nerds here in Boulder, one point they’re always hammering is how installing the high-dollar stuff – solar panels, geoexchange systems – should be the last step in creating an energy efficient house. At least in terms of remodels, which is where I’m living these days.

But people like those big-ticket items, the energy nerds say, because they're sexy. Yet digging an $18,000 hole to help heat your house doesn’t make sense when your attic is poorly insulated, or when the windows leak, or when – as is the case with my house – there's a literal hole in the wall. Off the west end of our living room is a small sort of sunroom, in which the previous owner, Paul, liked to hang plants. Fearing that the plants would get too hot in a south-facing sunroom in super sunny Boulder, he cut a hole in the wall and installed a fan. Only there's no cover for the fan, so in the summer we've got this nice intake of cool night air; in the winter we tape black plastic over it and wish for summer.



To drop $10,000 or $15,000 on a new heating system while energy is literally pouring out of our house – along with the money it costs to get that energy – would be, quite obviously, pretty foolish. If we owned a nice new home with tight windows and thick walls – or if we just had money to burn – it'd be a different story. But with the old creaker we've got, it's patch the walls first, solar panels (or geoexchange) much, much later. We installed a new boiler because we had to – our old one crapped out on us. (Technically, we were saving a great deal of money and natural resources with our dead boiler – but it would have been a cold winter.) So it was less a matter of calculated choice than of outright necessity. Frankly, I would have preferred a few contemplative months to explore some of those big-ticket options, but that's the way it goes.

As for the sunroom hole, I ended up gluing a 3-inch thick piece of Styrofoam-block insulation over it, at least until summer comes and I can afford to hire someone to fix it properly. An ugly solution, but when it’s 2-below outside, beauty holds no sway.