On 6-Jan-2004, kevins_news wrote:

Bingo. How do i do this?

The biggest problem is getting to the leak if the whole whose is finished.
An unfinished basement gets you to the place where many of the external
connections (plumbing - like outside water tap, electrical, phone/cable
etc), so you can close those. If you have a suspended ceiling try removing
some panels near the outside walls and see how it looks.

I noticed when i messing with a phone
outlet on one wall. It's a wall that is perpendicular to an outside
wall (one of the walls my townhouse shares with the neighbour). The
outlet is 8 feet in from the outside wall. When i took off the
coverplate i could feel a slight cold air breeze. Is this somehow
pluggable right around the outlet or do i have to track down the hole
in the vapor barrier on the outside wall?

You can get an airtight box and seal the cover for any electical outlet.
Not as good as getting to the source of the leak, but adequate otherwise.
Check the front and back walls for any obvious leaks - the external
phone connector (sometimes a box) could be open. Don't plug a weeping
hole in the brick though.

Holes are often made for external air conditioning line, phone/cable
electrical service etc. Find and seal them from the outside if you can't
get to the vapour barrier inside.

If only we'd
done this before so that we could have paid to have these upgrades
done at build time since they would have been relativly cheep at that
time instead of expensive upgrades now. Things like HE furnaces,
whole house ventilation with heat-recover, better windows, extra
insulation in the walls, etc.

Ahhh... 20/20 hindsight - just think what your _next_ house will be like
:-)

Is there another good source of things like the above that
one can do?

Keep looking - I can't think of any single source. Perhaps someone else
can.

The plan is to, sometime in the future, build a strawbale (or other
highly efficient) house more out in the country with wind and solar
generators. Possibly even go so far as to put in water reclamation
facilites and whatnot. We'd love to be completly, or at least mostly,
off the grid.

You and me both - I'm close to doing this, it all depends on finding
a job in a place where I can afford the land. T.O. is toooo $$$$$.

Mike