What are the alternatives?

We decided to do an exterior insulated retrofit: physically add insulation to the outside of the existing house walls, an "exterior insulation retrofit."  What were our alternatives?  I found seven alternatives: (1) blowing in insulation, (2) interior insulated retrofit, (3) insulation with EIFS stucco, (4) move to a different house, (5) move in with other people, (6) get a wood stove, (7) do nothing.  Not all of these alternatives, incidentally, are incompatible with what we did, so we may revisit some of these "rejected" alternatives down the road.  

(1) Blowing in insulation.  This method drills holes into the sides of the walls (drilling from the outside is less expensive), then blowing some insulating material into the empty spaces between the drywall and the veneer (in our case, brick). 

This is by far the cheapest method, well tested by experience, and I strongly recommend it if it works for you.  The total cost is maybe 5% - 10% of the exterior insulation retrofit.  The E-star guy said that this would bring our walls up from maybe R-4 to about R-13 or so.  Even if you later decide to go whole hog and superinsulate, this is a relatively  inexpensive first step.

Unfortunately, in our case this method won't work.  This method depends on there being empty spaces between the veneer and the drywall.  Our walls have no such empty spaces, as we discovered to our chagrin.  It is built (from inside to out) with drywall, concrete block, and brick, and no empty space at all.  The place where we thought we would encounter an empty space was filled with concrete block.  So we decided to do an exterior insulation retrofit.  I believe that a number of houses in Denver in our neighborhood will find themselves in the same situation.

(2) Interior insulated retrofit.  In this method, the outside of the house would remain unchanged, but 4 to 6 inches of insulation would be added to the inside.  The big disadvantages of this are (a) it is very disruptive to your life while it is being done, (b) you lose floor space, and (c) depending on your situation it can be more expensive. 

We had floor space to burn, so that wasn't an issue, but it would have probably been even more expensive than the exterior insulated retrofit.  We would have had to rip out the kitchen (which we liked just fine) and reinstall it to add insulation there.  Additionally, the steps to the downstairs basement were adjacent to the outside wall, so adding insulation there would have made it difficult or impossible to get furniture up and down the stairs either into or out of the basement.  (Unless we decided to widen the stairs to compensate, which would have cost another hefty sum.)  There are other technical problems which could probably have been overcome, but we didn't go any further after thinking about this.  

(3) Insulate with EIFS instead of hardcoat stucco.  This isn't an alternative to an exterior insulated retrofit so much as it is a very different kind of exterior insulated retrofit.  EIFS stands for "exterior insulation finishing system," also known as "artificial stucco" because the end product is largely indistinguishable from hardcoat stucco.  The advantage of this would be greatly reduced cost (perhaps by as much as 75%).  

The idea would be to affix the polyisocyanurate sheets directly (with some sort of glue) to the side of the house, then apply the EIFS directly over the polyiso.  Thus, neither the EIFS nor the polyisocyanurate needs any support structure.  This deserves to be seriously investigated.   The main disadvantages were:

(A) We couldn't find any EIFS stucco contractors who were also knowledgeable about energy conservation. 
(B) There are too many lawsuits over EIFS and we were not totally convinced of its safety.  It may very well be that the EIFS contractors who did the work which subsequently became the subject of litigation were just incompetent, and that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with EIFS, but we couldn't find a contractor who could convince us that they understood the problems, understood energy conservation, and could do the job. 
(C) Precisely because the EIFS and polyiso do not require support, it's not clear how much polyiso could be safely attached.  If more than 2 inches of polyiso were there, there would be a danger of it falling off ("coming unglued").   That would give us an R-value of about R-13, not bad, but not as good as we wanted.
(D) For the same reason, the electrical panel, mailbox, etc., could not be attached to the polyiso / EIFS  combination.  The polyiso / EIFS would have to go around these items, thus creating small areas of uninsulated wall (which would also look tacky).   
(E) There may be other objections or problems we haven't thought of, but that was enough.  We did get two bids for this kind of work, both under $10,000, but declined to take this path.  

(4) Move to a different house.  This was a serious option.  It would probably have been difficult to find a house that was already insulated, but we might have found a house that could have been insulated using method #1 above (blowing in insulation).  Or, we might have just found a house (or townhouse or condominium or apartment) with fewer square feet and thus less heating cost.  We rejected this because (a) we liked our current house, (b) it is quite possible that the new house would have been more expensive than the old one, (c) even if we found a satisfactory house at the same or lower price than our current one, the real estate fees would have by themselves paid a substantial portion of retrofitting our current house, (d) there is inherent risk in moving to a new house -- we might have encountered the same insulation problems with the new house, or other problems just as bad.

(5) Move in with other people (or invite others to move in with you). This is a "software" alternative to the "hardware" alternative of increasing insulation.  This gives you less floor space in the home you're living in, but instantly reduces your costs.  Example: two people live in your house. You invite another couple to move in provided they split the heating costs with you.  Voila: you have cut your heating costs by 50%.  It actually reduces it slightly more than 50%, because the extra body heat will offset some of the heating requirements. 

Why didn't we do this?  This is a question I've dealt with extensively in an article entitled Community and Individualism.  The short answer is this: communal experiments are hard to do in an individualistic society.  The risk involved is substantial, there is not much "selection" for potential fellow communards, and there is little promise of a chance of financial rewards or energy conservation results.  If the situation were to change so that communal efforts once more became fashionable -- perhaps as a result of an economic collapse due to peak oil -- we might revisit this idea, though.

(6) Get a wood stove.  This approach views the problem as a natural gas problem rather than as a heating problem per se, and switches the fuel from natural gas to wood.  At current prices, wood is actually comparable to natural gas in cost, and the latest and greatest wood stoves now produce minimal harmful emissions.  

However, could everyone in the country heat their home with wood?  I wasn't able to get a definitive answer because I got very different answers to questions like "how many BTUs can you grow on an acre of land in a year?" and "what about the transportation energy cost to transport wood to one's home?" not to mention "what about the increased insurance costs and fire extinguisher costs?" 

Random, uncritical internet searches and resultant calculations gave me wildly disparate estimates of BTUs / acre of land / year: I came up with 17, 55, or 138 million BTUS / acre / year for hybrid poplars, which seems to be the quick-energy-from-wood choice of the moment.  Back-of-the-envelope projections indicated it could easily take on the order of several hundred million acres of land to give all Americans our level of heating (before this insulation project) via wood.  This might be doable but require foregoing all or most feed crops (thus a mostly or entirely vegan diet for all Americans).  

In any event, because of land problems it's safe to say that you would still need to seriously reduce heating energy costs for your house even if you went to wood as your sole source of space heating.  I like wood as an alternative and we may ultimately get a wood stove, depending on how fast the country runs out of natural gas and how long it uses natural gas to generate electricity instead of heating homes.  But in itself, wood stoves are not the approach to take; it needs to be combined with something else (smaller homes and tighter and thicker insulation). 

(7) Do nothing. This is the default alternative.  Advantage: zero cost.  Disadvantage: tremendous cost later on. 

Obviously this is not an alternative I would argue for.  But doing nothing (for anyone who is aware of our energy problems) is not necessarily just being "stupid."  Our society has to confront the problems of energy as a society, not just as individuals, and it isn't clear what direction society will take when it finally realizes there is a problem.  For someone who is renting, or who is deeply in debt, "doing nothing" may be the best of several bad alternatives.  Why insulate a house you don't own, or won't own shortly?  But if you have a pretty good idea that in 10 years you'll still be in the house you're now inhabiting, my guess is that superinsulation is likely to be the way to go.