Home energy check

My electric company (as do many from what I understand) offers a service to customers where they will come to your home and check it out for energy efficiency. It's a free service and it's really quite helpful for homeowners to figure out where they can improve their energy usage. So being the frugal and environmentally conscious homeowner that I am, I set one of these things up for our house.

This morning the guy comes to the house and checks our A/C unit (the number 1 user of energy in the house), our hot water heater (the number 2 user of energy in the house), the duct work under the house (yes ducts run under the home), and the insulation in our crawl space (attic that isn't an attic cause it's too small). Here's the verdict:

• A/C unit is good, but needs to be serviced probably just to be sure it is running properly.
• Need to check hot water heater to see if the temp needs to change (that's just us playing with it)
• We need to have someone come in and fix our ducts. The guy checked and said that the tape is coming loose from the joints and that it is looking worn, so we scheduled another thing for the energy co. to come out and do a duct inspection for us so we can figure out what that will cost. It needs to be done cause I don't like heat and A/C escaping under my house. Plus with winter coming (I know mild Florida winter, but it still feels cold to me) and relatives visiting from a tropical Caribbean island, we need to keep warmth in the house, not under it.
• The insulation is low. We have the loose, blow type insulation and apparently you need 7-10 inches of it in your attic.....we have 1.5 inches. I feel like the inspector said something about the insulation in the crawl space, but I can't remember what....and between the bugs and now the insulation, I think I want to go back through that thing to be sure of what he did and did not mention.

So to keep my house from being absolutely freezing this winter I need to buy and install a new window for the bathroom (window bought, but not installed) because surprisingly tape doesn't do a great job of keeping cold air out, buy and install a new back door (again, tape doesn't really keep cold air out), fill my crawl space with several more inches of insulation, and get my duct work fixed. If I had to guesstimate what all this will cost me, I think we're looking at $2000 possibly.

For those of you expecting Christmas presents from me this year be prepared for a very thoughtful note and baked goods.

Not German Cockroaches

So my big fear with the roaches I found was that they were the hated German Cockroach that makes every homeowner scream in fear (apparently they are really difficult to get rid of), however after having the pest control guy come to my house I have been assured that I do not have German Cockroaches. Well thank God for that.

So we have simple American Cockroaches (also known as Palmetto bugs in Florida) that have decided to live in our house....okay much easier to deal with . Pest man sprayed, charged me money, and now E and I need to decide if we want to make this a regular service. I'm sort of inclined to say yes. I mean it's not that much money and I like the thought of a bug free house.

I'm cool with bugs as long as they stay in their territory. For instance, spider outside spinning a web=very cool.....spider in my house spinning a web=gives me the heebie-jeebies and makes me think I see spiders everywhere for weeks afterwards. See the difference?

Pest control called

E and I weren't sure how to go about researching pest control companies, and since we are leaving town next week for my brother's wedding, it seemed as though the roaches would have free reign over the house for at least two more weeks.....but then we remembered that the house is already under contract with a pest control company for termites. Eureka!! We will just use them.

So a phone call was placed this morning and to my surprise pest control is actually quite affordable. Who knew? Frankly I would have paid double what I was quoted just to know that we weren't living in house infested with bugs. Ewwww....

Hopefully they will be able to come in before we leave town to do the initial treatment, which requires removing everything from the cabinets and closets and luckily for us, we've loaded next to nothing into the cabinets (see post below about the yuck). However, I think both E and I are getting anxious to finish putting the house together, so the sooner the pest control can happen the better.

I was going to finish the kitchen tomorrow, but I guess I'll hold off on that now. Seems silly to load up everything, just to pull it all out again before too long. Oh well, at least I know where my pots, pans, knives, and spatulas are....really everything else can wait to be re-discovered for now. So, sorry Fry Daddy, sorry bundt pans, sorry blender, and so sorry to the various other kitchen implements I have grown to love, you will have to live in your cardboard boxes for a little while longer.