The Tale of Sir Covid

If you missed the comment I tacked onto the end of last week’s post after it went up, it read:

Oh joy, it’s COVID. Whee.

And that, right there, pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the last week.

I was sick. Still am, in fact. I spent several days with a fever, but that broke and I am back to normal in that regard, but my nose and sinuses have more in common with Niagara Falls than anything human, and my energy comes and goes.

In short, it’s a joy.

And of course Anne is rubbing it in. She brought the disease back from Chicago somehow, though no one she saw there is sick and where she got it from is entirely unknown. Her own symptoms were so brief she discounted them entirely, but when I tested positive, she tested as well. My own test result was so strongly positive it leapt off the desk and tried to kill me. Hers was barely there.

In any case, I am on the mend. Today the nose isn’t quite as bad, the fever remains absent, so I expect with time I will fully recover and can get back to whatever my regular life is supposed to be. At the moment, however, I am doing little but reading and wasting time on the Internet. That leaves me with little to share, but there is one thing I did before I got sick:

As you may recall, we’ve started working with an architect, an engineer, and a contractor to get our kitchen renovation plans sorted out. One of the things we are considering is adding insulation to the ceiling of the lower floor of the house. It turns out the roof is uninsulated and I was pretty sure that was a problem, but I wanted to be certain of that.

And how does one do that? Why, take some data, of course! And put it into an exciting chart! So during the last heatwave I used an infrared thermometer to take temperature readings at various locations on the ceiling. I did this on both the first and second floors, several times a day.

The result is the chart above. Isn’t it lovely?

The second floor is newer, and it is insulated to at least some degree. Those temperatures are the green and blue lines in the chart.

The first floor is the original 1960 construction that lacks all insulation. Those are the red, yellow, and orange lines in the chart.

As you can see, the uninsulated ceiling starts out cooler — this was day three of the heat wave, I think — since it has lost all the heat from the day before overnight while the upstairs has retained some heat. Around 9 am things are essentially even, but then it’s mostly off to the races for the uninsulated roof. There are two exceptions:

The SW corner of the living room is always in shadow, from the upper floor or (later in the afternoon) from the row of cedar trees between our house and the house next door. It more or less stays in line with the upper floor temperatures. It does heat up slightly before coming back in line at 2pm, which may be the affect of morning sun hitting it from the east.

The NW corner of the living room spikes up with the rest of the lower floor, but then starts dropping around 2pm, and that’s because of the shade from the trees hitting the west side of the lower roof first.

In general, what this shows is the temperature inside the house at the ceiling going up by 20+ degrees Fahrenheit over the course of the day. That heat has to go somewhere which is upstairs — since heat rises — where it gradually increases the temperature of the living space up there. We have to work to get that heat out of the upstairs each evening, and it’s not easy.

The upshot of this little bit of data gathering is that we are now 100% certain we need to add the insulation in question. We’ve been told the way is to add it on the inside using spray foam insulation. We have the room to make that work, and we’re certain it is needed. It will make the downstairs warmer in the winter, and the entire house will be cooler in the summer. And now we have the data to prove it.

With that, I will take my leave. I need to sit more comfortably for a bit and then get back to working on the computer. Life doesn’t stop when you get sick with COVID, and I have too much stuff that needs doing.

Please avoid getting the bug if you possibly can. There’s a summer surge going on. It’s nasty, and long COVID is still a thing. Masks and vaccines help, of course. I don’t want to think about how sick I would be now if I hadn’t had the vaccines. Not good!