A Historic Home that Refused Exterior Storms

The Ealy House Museum caretakers wanted to improve the environment inside their historic structure. They knew exterior storms would help, didn’t want to use them because the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, had never had any. So began a search that eventually yielded an unexpected solution: interior window inserts.

The Ealy House was built by a prosperous farming family of German descent who moved from Pennsylvania to New Albany, Ohio in 1860. The interior is almost exclusively walnut and the exterior made of brick in a style that exhibited the transition from Greek Revival to Italianate.

Only two families ever lived in the home before it became a museum. Neither the home nor museum changed much, making it a remarkably intact example of mid-nineteenth century living and Christina and George Ealy’s vision. In all that time, no one installed exterior storms on the beautiful old growth wood windows, leaving the frames great condition, but leaving the house with nothing to guard against Ohio winters.

Testimonials

– David Cline, President of the New Albany Plain Township Historical Society. New Albany, Ohio.

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The caretakers of the house museum love its authenticity. But heating and cooling a house that has never had insulation or storms was an expensive proposition.

After learning about Indow interior inserts, they purchased 31 Indow panels for all of the home’s windows from their Indow dealer for the Columbus area, Todd Tamburino of Green Home Ohio. The inserts can’t be seen from the outside and even from the inside, they’re nearly invisible.

Museum Grade panels were used in some windows to block UV light that was damaging quilts they had been protecting with bed sheets, as well as other historic artifacts. The basement windows were especially tricky. Their frames were flush to the interior walls, which can cause a problem for interior storm windows.

Inserts generally need 5/8″ of flat space all the way around the window frame to work. Green Home Ohio helped the museum by building out the frames to allow the Indow inserts to securely fit each basement window. The clips you see in the image below are called “frame clips”. These are sometimes added to help secure an Indow insert when a window has a shallow frame depth (flat space around the window).

Gree Home Ohio’s efforts paid off. Not only did the inserts reduce the heating bill, they greatly reduced the traffic noise from nearby Dublin Granville Road. The caretakers also noticed the dust from the adjacent, busy thoroughfare didn’t blacken the window sills as in years past.

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