My home office is not comfortable

Since the pandemic hit my partner and I have been, like many Canadians with desk jobs, working from home (okay I don’t always work from home and love the days when I am outside measuring other’s homes and talking with you about your comfort issues). Today, I want to share a bit about my home office and the steps I am taking to make it more comfortable.

A caveat: calling the space an office is quite a generous term. We are in a 3 bedroom semi and with 3 kids, the office is also the master bedroom. But during the day, it serves as an office so hereonin I will refer to it as my home office.

As the temperatures have dipped below zero recently, you’ll often find me working with a blanket wrapped around me and a hot cup of tea on the desk. Sometimes I even don a hat.

Many of us (myself included) would have tried cranking the thermostat or even speculated that our furnace was not sized big enough. Now that I’m an energy advisor, I know that more often than not the path to comfort involves insulation and air sealing rather than upsizing a fossil burning piece of mechanical equipment that has a lifespan of 10 years (although there are times when a heating system is not sized properly and as an energy advisor I am also trained to check this too!)

So what’s the plan? First up, our ducts. This is an area that energy advisors, home inespectors and even HVAC installers don’t typically look at. But I know that my ducts are leaky as the air coming into one of the other bedrooms on the second floor is much more forceful than what is entering my home office. This was confirmed when I brought in Victor. Victor is with Aeroseal Tech. With a free home quote, he confirmed my suspicions, the air flow to my home office is half of what I’m getting from other vents. He was able to determine that at least 30% of my heat wasn’t making it to where it should. Meaning, my ducts are leaky and the heat, rather than getting pushed upstairs, is getting lost in the basement (where we don’t really need it) and in the walls where it slowly dissipates out. You may not think that this is a problem as the heat makes it upstairs eventually (temperature differences like many things in life naturally seek to balance out, I’ll save the physics lessson for later). But the problem is actually two-fold. Not enough hot air is getting to my home office and what little that does get there is leaking out of my home too quickly making that room constantly 2-3 degrees colder that what I’d like.

That brings me to the next section. You might be wondering why this room alone has issues. Part of it is because of leaky ductwork but the other part is because a good portion of the walls are exposed and poorly insulated. The ceiling is above a small attic that most definitely does not (yet!) have any insulation in it. The front wall also does not (yet!) have any insulation. A third of the floor is actually exposed (it hangs over our porch) and it too is not insulated (yet!). So there are both A LOT of exposed walls in this room and most of them are poorly insulated. The only side that is exposed and insulated is the right which has 2” of continuous insulation underneath the siding (we added this when we redid the siding). By putting my hand on the decently insulated and the poorly insulated walls I can feel an extreme temperature difference.

So the plan involves fixing my leaky ductwork and insulating the exposed walls. Two of the three exposed walls have framing and I plan to have cellulose blown inbetween the studs. Then, when we can take on a bigger project, we’ll add more insulation at the same as time when we redo the roof and the siding on the front of the house.

As far as insulating walls goes, blowing in cellulose between the studs is a relatively uninvasive low-cost approach. A insulating company will drill 2” holes between the studs, fill them with insulation, and patch over the walls leaving me with warm comfy walls and only a few spots that need to be painted over. We’re timing this work so that it’s done before we need to repaint.

I’ve started getting quotes on the insulation work and have the duct sealing scheduled for next Wednesday. I am SOOO looking forward to a more comfortable office in 2021! I promise to keep you posted on my home comfort adventures. If you have a problem with an uncomfortable home office, I’d love to chat and see if we can help!