How to Make a Thermal Break on the Inside of Your Home

Retrofit & Remodeling Guide, Expanded Edition

Affordable Housing matters. Affordable Living matters more.

Digital edition · $169 · 30 chapters · 279 pages

Your utility bill is not going back down

From 2021 to 2025, the average American household's monthly electric bill climbed from about $121 to about $156, a rise of nearly 29 percent. Utilities have more increases on the way, and nobody is forecasting relief.

A building built to code is built to the floor, the legal minimum, and the family inside pays the difference between the floor and what the building should have been, every month, for the life of the house.

Here is the part nobody is telling you: you can break that curve from the inside. You do not have to tear the house apart or rebuild the exterior. A thermal break on the inside of your existing walls can cut what that building costs to run, permanently.

A half inch makes a difference

At just a half inch of interior strip, with one of the most affordable fills there is, dense-pack cellulose, a typical 2x4 wall gets about 30 percent better and a 2x6 wall more than 20 percent. At two inches, the best assemblies in this eBook are up to 176 percent better than the 2x4 wall you have today, and up to 139 percent better on a 2x6.

Drop that into a Manual J load calculation and you get a smaller heating and cooling load, smaller equipment, and a lower utility bill every month for the life of the building.

What is inside

• The diagnostic framework for reading any building
• How heat, air and moisture actually move
• Why mold appears and what it is really telling you
• The interior thermal break strip method, step by step, with the full installation sequence
• The ceiling assembly that takes an attic from what is often R-25 in the real world to R-70
• Closed-cell spray foam done right
• Windows, vapor, ventilation, and stopping moisture at the source
• What your 2x4 and 2x6 walls actually perform at, with the numbers
• Climate-zone guidance and the dew-point framework
• A performance-path appendix: verified R-value, U-factor and percentage improvement for every common cavity insulation at every strip thickness, plus the hot roof panel assembly
• The complete retrofit business blueprint for the contractor who wants to build a premium service around verified performance
• Now includes the new guide: Why Roofs Fail, and How They Win

Why I wrote it

Over the years I have taken somewhere between one and two thousand consulting calls. In the last ten days alone I took twenty, and this eBook answers almost all twenty. It is the common core of what most callers needed, written down once so you do not have to pay for the call to get it.

I want to take my grandkids fishing rather than repeat the same thing on every call. If I do not write it down, it goes with me, and the families who need it do not get it.

Who it is for

The homeowner who found mold at midnight. The woman who has been right about her house for three years and nobody listened. The remodeling contractor who wants a premium business. The architect who wants assemblies that perform. The property manager whose buildings bleed energy. Anyone paying a utility bill they should not have to pay.

Which retrofit guide is right for me?

Not sure? Email me at hello@carbonless.org and tell me about your house.