Hey Jed1973 - where is BH are you?? I am in a 1960 w/board house in Box Hill Nth, near the Freeway/Middleborough Rd.
I went to the Building & Home Improvement Expo at Jeff's Shed a few months ago, and collected up quite a bit of stuff on Double glazing - I have a LARGE window, facing due west, which is impossible to shelter other than with a blind in the summer (which is pretty OK), but which haemorrhages heat in the winter. I need it to open to get the changes in in the summer, as we have draught-proofed etc the house so well that if I don't catch the changes, we have to leave the cooling on all night in order to sleep ... Catch 22 again ... And no, I can't put heavy drapes etc on this window - it's above the stove, sink and kitchen bench!!! So I'm looking at double glazing and similar treatments. The window (glass area) is 2.6m wide and 1.3m high, so this is no trivial exercise!!! And I want casement-type openings, not awning or sash ....
With a mid-20 century w/board house, there are a number of basics to do first. And remember that with a w/b house, no matter what you do, you spend a lot of time going round messing with blinds and curtains and doors and draught stoppers ... that's just how it is!!!
1. Serious insulation in the roof, (R3.5 at least, possibly more) and sarking under the tiles/tin as well too. "Draft-stoppa" thingies over exhaust fans, and make sure there are no gaps in the roof insulation. Something like 10% exposed ceiling will let out 50% of your heating or somesuch. If you have halogen downlights, get rid of the wretched things. They require insulation gaps round the transformers, as they get very hot and are a fire risk. And while they might be low voltage, they are NOT low wattage! If you have an attic, don't forget to work out how to draught-proof the entrance/trap door.
All this will help all year round - stop heat getting in in the summer, and keeping cold out and heat in in the winter. The whole house needs the ceilings done - half isn't good enough. There are currently grants/rebates available, and the state gov't has just tossed a whole lot of shonky operators off the scheme, so it should be a bit easier to get a good one. Not tomorrow though - the good ones will have a long lead time!
2. Keep the sun OFF the house/glass in the summer. Much easier to cool it if the heat doesn't get in in the first place. Sun blinds outside, shade cloth, deciduous trees all help. If you can't do the sunblinds/shutters whatever yet, shadecloth hung off the eaves, or even those el-cheapo bamboo blinds (which will last 2 or 3 years on the north or east), or judiciously placed market umbrellas or shade sails will all do quite a bit, till you get the proper stuff. And the heavy curtains will also help a bit.
3. Draught-proof the place. Under doors, around doors, and don't forget the windows! Have you ANY idea just how leaky aluminium sliders are???? Amazing! Sash windows with a gap(ing hole) between the top and bottom halves are pretty flash for draughts too! Don't forget door socks or those fringe-type draught thingies for internal doors.
If your house was built to have floor coverings, and you have removed them, PUT THEM BACK!!!! Polished boards might be nice and fashionable, but the 2 cm gaps under internal doors designed to accommodate carpet, and the gaps in between the floorboards, and between the floor and the skirting etc etc are a MAJOR source of heat transfer. Carpet with underlay, properly fitted to the walls (no gaps at the skirting boards), and heavy duty vinyl or similar, with underlay, in the kitchen etc, and good grouting round the tiles in the bathroom will make a hell of a difference.
You can get spray-on muck to spray on the undersides of the floorboards, if you have easy under-house access, but how long will it last, how much electrical and computer cabling, and plumbing stuff will it cover up???? Carpet is a much better go, or that floating timber flooring stuff, as long as it isn't gappy, especially round the edges.
Another source of draughts not often considered is the holes in walls where things like the pipes for the sink, dishwasher or the washing machine, or the pipes under the bathroom basin enter the house. In the country they tend to plug these gaps with steel wool to discourage rodents, but in the city, stuffing them up with bubblewrap and stick it there with packaging tape works wonders! Completely cover the hole/gap with tape - stick it round the pipes/hoses etc. These holes are usually where you can't see them, so aesthetics aren't a major consideration - stopping the arctic gale is!!
In the winter, you need to stop heat escaping through glass at night. Heavy lined drapes under pelmets are considered to be nearly as good as double-glazing in many applications, but only if you actually SHUT the curtains!!! If you have north-facing glass, let the sun in in the daytime, but close the curtains as soon as the sun goes off - this is what I mean about 'running' a w/b house - you're forever closing and opening blinds and curtains, and pulling down sunblinds and shoving them up again, LOL.
If all else fails, the bubblewrap trick will provide some insulation of glass in winter, and is certainly cheap!! If your windows are long, drapes to the floor are better. If they're mid-height and you can get the drapes within the window frame, that's OK. The idea is to have a still captive layer of air between the glass and the covering, which is why pelmets at the top, and floor-length covering are good. Completely encloses the space, so the cold air can't escape. It is best to have the drapes curve around at the edges, so they meet the wall at the sides of the windows too.
If you have evap or other ducted cooling, even if the system does have a damper in the roof unit, it isn't too hard to make foam and cardboard bits to fit inside the vent covers. Heat rises, and you don't want it rising up the cooling ducts in winter!!
If your house still has those vents in the upper walls, they need blocking too. They were necessary with open fires, and no other heating, to stop people getting asphyxiated when using open fires or kero heaters etc, and for a bit of air circulation and to stop mould when there was no heating etc in bedrooms. But they're not necessary these days. In a 50s/60s house, the easiest way to deal with the wretched things is to paint them the same as the walls - they should have wire mesh on the 'inside the wall' side, to keep flies and creepy crawlies out - all you need to do is several coats of paint to block up the wire. Victorian houses, with those pretty wrought iron covers over large holes are a PITA - ours are easy peasy, but don't forget them, LOL.
By the time you've done all this stuff, most of which isn't expensive at all, and you can do it in dribs and drabs, you will notice a great difference, and questions of major works with heating or windows may not even arise! From now till March, you need to concentrate on keeping the summer heat out, while thinking about what you need to spend Easter doing to keep the winter heat in.
A few years ago, I got fed up with having to paint the west wall every three weeks, as it is high, exposed, un-shelterable, and a general PITA. I just happened to get an offer from a mob who do vinyl weatherboards, who offered free installation in exchange for the advertising plaque on the fence. I though it wasn't a bad deal, and cost very little more than a painter! So I did the west and north walls of the house. No-one who doesn't know has picked them, and a wonderful side-effect is the insulation properties of them! They have some sort of foam stuff (PVC??) inside them, and they work wonderfully! Wall insulation is something w/b house owners don't think of much, but it helps immeasurably. The difficulty retrofitting it is that timber frames have noggins in them - you can't shove many batts down from the top, even if you are thin enough to crawl in the roofspace that close to the eaves, and even if you have space under the house, you can't shove lots of stuff up from underneath. So what do you do? Take off the weatherboards ????? Take off the plaster inside????? While that awful brick-like stuff which was around in the 70s is pretty grim now, and lots of the older stuff had asbestos in it, the current vinyl weatherboards are pretty reasonable, don't need painting, and incidentally, are excellent insulators!!
Of course, if you ever do have either weatherboards or plaster off for any reason, you can shove batts inside as far as you can - anything in the walls is better than nothing
Unfortunately, there are some things to do which accomplish one or other of these things, not both. Double glazing the windows will work really well keeping heat in in the winter, but if you don't keep the sun off the outside of them in the summer, they won't keep any heat out at all!
So see what you can do with a bit of passive stuff, and relatively cheap other stuff like draught fixing first, and then see what else might help.
You're welcome to come and look at my vinyl weatherboards, or any other of our passive stuff any time, or if you would like another pair of eyes to look at your house, let me know. I was born & bred in a w/b house in country Vic 60+ years ago, and have lived in lots since, so I've got pretty good at getting and keeping them civilised over the years, LOL.
