Kari Jones' Story

My name is Kari Jones. I live with my family in Victoria. My climate change story is about renovating my house. Two years ago my husband and I started renovating the basement of our house in Fairfield. We tore everything out of the basement, leaving only the structural stuff like the beams and struts. Then we called City Green Victoria to come and do an energy audit of the house. Their representative, Wendy, came and checked the whole house—the windows, the doorways, the attic, everything. Then she put a huge fan contraption in our front doorway and measured how many air exchanges we had each hour.

A normal house that is moderately well insulated is supposed to have 3-4 air exchanges in a hour. We had 12. Yyppes…..

Wendy gave us a number of suggestions such as putting a thicker insulator in the basement walls before we rebuilt and adding a vapour barrier to wick out moisture. Over the next six months we slowly built our basement back up, replacing single paned windows with double paned ones, putting in warm and beautiful (though kinda’ expensive) cork flooring, and insulating for all we were worth. When we were done Wendy came back for a follow up visit, and phew… we are down to 6 air exchanges an hour.

Still more work to go, obviously. We have to insulate the upstairs and get better insulation in the attic. But we’re on the right track. Our house is so much warmer! And… our heating costs are half what they once were.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone somewhere between Nelson and Victoria!

Kari Jones, Co-author of Hiking Adventures for Children