Great ideas from everyone. Thank you for your continued advice. At the moment I've been up in my attic continuing to seal penetrations that I forgot about such as ones from switches going to overhead lights where the electrical penetrations pass through the top plate as well as sealing air gaps between the top plates and drywall. Thanks S-F for showing what top plate sealing was all about because without that I would have blown cellulose above it and buried my easy chance at handling the top plate air leakage issue.
Once I am finished with the sealing and get just over 1000 pounds of additional cellulose into the attic, my next project is to put removable 90% solar blocking screen over the southwest facing windows of the house which is what is causing my house to turn into an oven in the summer. The temperature differential is quite a bit smaller in the summer so I'll return to this multi-layer glazing prior to the fall. It's a matter of too many projects and too little time. I want to get landscaping done so I can level the ground(side to side) to make it safe to use a ladder against the house, paint the house, replace some rotting hardboard siding priming all sides prior to installing, the roof needs to be replaced as it is losing granules and curling badly on the sun-facing slopes and then I'll be installing PV. My local utility only provides 120% of the past 12 months electricity usage when factoring for solar sizing if you use their solar incentive program so oddly enough in order to fit in my future EV to the game I actually need to use more power than I otherwise would to get them to fund the size of system that I need to have to cover the additional electrical load of an EV. I'll make new threads for the progress pictures of the attic and solar blocking screen installation.
My goal is hopefully to be able to size a future air conditioner from the 2 ton system that keeps up until about 88 degrees as per design temp into a 1.5 ton higher SEER replacement unit that may just allow for higher outdoor temperatures before it can't hold the temperature to 75 degrees. I'm already underneath the load of the smallest condensing furnace I can purchase. I'm also considering getting one of the super high SEER Fujitsu 9k or 12k units to carry out most of the cooling for the house. If after the insulation and solar blocking efforts make the house comfortable with roughly a 12k load, I may just leave the current 8.5 SEER power sucker installed and use the mini-split almost exclusively but call on the low SEER unit to pick up the slack on the hottest days. If I install the mini-split myself, I'll save quite a bit of money versus having an AC guy install a 1.5 ton 16 SEER system and I'd also get the benefit of spot heating to my bedroom when that is the only room I want heated. Currently I'm sharing the house though so it wouldn't be spot heating with someone else here but if I'm ever back in this house by myself I can focus on heating just the bedroom most of the time while I keep the rest of the house at a much lower temperature.
Sorry if I'm diverging from my original post when I created the thread but I thought I'd give you an idea of what things I'm working on now.
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