The Prius gives, the 3600 f2 house takes away
Last year, we used about 150 gallons of gasoline in the Prius. Total cost, somewhere in the ballpark of US$350. Which is good, and energy efficient, but which is horribly dwarfed by the house, which was built back in 1909 or thereabouts, when the idea of "insulation" didn't go much further than "if you have an sealed air gap, it will keep the drafts out" and then crudely insulated in the 1980s, which has so far eaten something over US$1200 in heating bills (not including the two visits by the furnace repairman when the stupid oil pump ate a tarball) this last winter.
Ugh. US$1200 is about what it would cost for me to buy enough strawbales to insulate the summer cabin. And if I was feeling ambitious, I suppose I could gut the house down to the studs, reinsulate with drawbale, then hire someone to replaster the whole shebang. The less ambitious plan of putting solar water heater panels into the roof, then gang them together with the hot water heat so that I could use the solar power to heat (some) of the house is thwarted by the teeny detail that the roof is pitched east-west, where the sun doesn't shine enough to make it worthwhile. That's the fun thing about old houses; it's expensive to retrofit them so that they aren't complete money holes, because they were designed in the good old days™ when fuel was dirt-cheap and a family well off enough to afford a nice house in the suburbs could afford all the fuel that the house needed to operate. (Our house probably started with a coal or hog fuel burner, which was retrofitted to a diesel burner when the homeowner decided that they'd had enough of maintaining an automatic stoker. The old grates and furnace door are still floating around in the basement, so we could convert back to coal if we wanted to hand-fire our furnace. But that's approaching the build a new strawbale house, please! department.)
What's the point of this little rant? I'm not sure; the city is convenient for mass transit and local shops (thus 1 car, one bus pass, US$350 for gasoline), but the old house is not good for power and the completely fucked up Oregon tax system means that the City of Portland is so starved for revenue that it ends up looking for any excuse to reappraise houses. And with our house, a reappraisal means that our property tax might triple to ~US$10,000/year, which would make it a much less appealing investment.
Perhaps I'll buy a truckload of strawbales, gut and reoutfit the garage and make it into our own little version of Bath, in case we are forced to retrench next winter. We can live in the garage and tell the bears stories about how nice it will be to move into the big empty house when the weather has moderated to the point where we can go into the house without freezing our wimpy tuckuses off.
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Try shelling out $125/mo. year around for natural gas (handy ‘budget’ plan). Our house was built in 1899 and was finally insulated (in the attic at least) last fall.