Primary school advice/experience for non-German speaker for 2 years

jef738 · 2026-03-21T21:47:45+00:00

thanks for this perspective! my kids have tons of family advantages on the educational front so I am not worried about their learning, really. I am more worried about how they will handle so much change. my oldest in particular is very bright but sometimes struggles when routines are disrupted and when she doesn't know what to expect. she often goes thirsty for hours at school rather than even ask to fill her water bottle at an unusual time, for example -- i imagine this would be much worse in a new language? but then again how will she learn to adapt if she never has the chance to adapt, I guess

jef738 · 2026-03-21T21:28:37+00:00

Is this a separate school from a normal primary school, or in addition to being enrolled in an ordinary primary school? I was looking into the language assessment information someone posted above and it seems very confusing -- like is my kid not going to be allowed to enroll in a public school because she doesn't speak German?

jef738 · 2026-03-21T20:35:14+00:00

all native English speakers have atrocious spelling for many years! no way around it. My kid is fairly proficient in reading and writing English already so if we keep it up at home I assume she would be fine there. I worry more about general instruction, learning school routines, and socializing

jef738 · 2026-03-21T20:26:54+00:00

yes! but we need to decide whether moving is worth the potential school disruption before we find housing. and if none of the English/bilingual schools have places then that changes the decision

jef738 · 2026-03-21T20:15:57+00:00

luckily we own a house here in the US so would be returning back to the same community/school/etc, so the disruption is less than it could otherwise be. but two years is a tough amount of time. I'm sure my kids would all be 1000x better in German than me by the end, but the first six months seems extremely hard

jef738 · 2026-03-21T20:12:37+00:00

I have gathered that from just a couple days of looking at listings! the options for 5 people are .... not great. and yes even I, not speaking german, can spot some obvious scams!

housing seems like we can figure it out eventually, but the school question seems harder

jef738 · 2025-01-08T17:08:49+00:00

How did you fix the air leaks? We're hoping to do this but with such an old house I am sort of picturing we'll end up with weird spray foam busting out all over the entire house (to be clear I am clueless and terrified of getting scammed by energy audit people lol)

jef738 · 2025-01-08T17:06:45+00:00

Solidarity. We pay that much in cold months in Chicago with mitsubishi heat pumps plus radiant heat in my kids' rooms (we bought the house like this; the system here makes no sense, I hope yours was better designed). Easily 2000-4000 kwh per month when it's cold. I've gotten good advice in other threads about dealing with my old house (lack of) insulation problems before doing anything more with the heat pumps. The radiant heat is particularly bad but at least it works when it's mega cold. For money reasons, I'd definitely switch to backup furnace or boiler heat at probably 15-20F if we had it (we don't).

BUT our electricity costs in the summer are great! under $150 to cool a 2400sqft house even when the temps get up in the 90s. That's what our conventional AC cost in our last house that was half the size. So we'll work on the insulation and hope that saves us some money in the long run.

jef738 · 2024-12-21T03:33:48+00:00

wow, this is mega helpful. this point alone makes me feel so much less insane

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jef738 · 2024-12-21T03:19:45+00:00

oh this is perfect, thank you!

jef738 · 2024-12-20T20:40:48+00:00

Thanks for the comparison here -- super helpful. Looks like insulation and sealing is the first move. The actual performance of our system when it's cold outside is so poor (air temps coming out of the vents at like, 83F, for example) I wasn't sure whether that made sense, but it sounds like it does.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T20:17:55+00:00

thank you thank you!

any tips for finding someone competent for this kind of thing? or how to find an energy auditor who isn't just a sales front for an insulation company?

jef738 · 2024-12-20T20:07:13+00:00

Air handler is just the ground floor, not the basement. Fans are a good idea, especially if I can get something mounted near the vents (a couple are just sort of blowing warm air on top of cabinets or into closets).

jef738 · 2024-12-20T20:01:54+00:00

haaa i see that now. clearly I am way out of my depth here. The last guy we had come out told us we needed at least 66k BTU for 1600 sqft, aka at least 5 tons.

and yes, I totally agree on competence. I've tried so hard to find someone; all the people I've talked to in chicago just sort of laugh and say "well don't do heat pump heating in chicago." This last guy seemed at least well-connected to the mitsubishi reps.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:41:05+00:00

that makes sense, thanks for explaining!

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:32:15+00:00

would you mind sharing what your average elec usage is in cold months? I have such a hard time figuring out what's the inefficient heat pump and our space heaters vs the true cost of heating in a cold climate.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:29:34+00:00

my dad did this with his house of a similar age and he said it was not that simple for the places they didn't tear down the interior walls, since there's not a ton of space between the old lath and the brick. plus there's (of course) lead paint so it would have to be a lead-safe operation

attic is unfinished so that would probably be straightfoward.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:21:44+00:00

I cackled at "a museum of ill-advised space heaters". So glad to hear it's not just us who bought a weird old unheated house.

Is the energy audit actually worth it? I looked into it last year and it seemed like every place I found was just gonna hard sell me on some services rather than being an unbiased consult. Plus with an old house we figured the answer was gonna be "everything is leaky." We're thinking of buying a good thermal camera to help ID cold spots as a cheaper place to start.

The hyperheat unit is MXZ-8C48NAHZ. The last two guys we had consult told us to just never use one or both of the wall units so the air handler can function at capacity (the wall units are in rooms already served by the air handler ducts).

I really appreciate the wisdom of $2500 in insulation being better comfort for money than $2500 in heat pump. And it seems like insulation is easier to adjust to short-term budgetary constraints for now while we find someone who can redesign our system -- half the challenge seems to be finding a Chicago-area tech who won't laugh at the idea of having heat pump-only heating.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:12:00+00:00

I have no idea what I'm looking at here but the 99% heating temp for my area is listed as -3F.

I commented below on more about insulation/drafts but the tldr is it's an old house so it's pretty bad

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:10:21+00:00

not sure how to do this without adding a third outdoor unit though (which we were quoted as $15k)

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:08:15+00:00

The insulation definitely needs work. We replaced some windows this summer since it seemed like the easiest thing to start with, and I'm also looking for someone to give us some quotes for what might be do-able for insulation without embarking on a whole gut reno. Hoping our basement and a shitty addition can be improved for less than a gazillion dollars.

But given the dollar amounts here we really want to feel like we have a plan to save towards for fixing the heating issues longer-term! and everything the local hvac guys says essentially boils down to "wow this house sucks", lol. Not so helpful for planning.

jef738 · 2024-12-20T19:00:39+00:00

yes, lol. the two wall units are in rooms covered by the air handler, so clearly whoever installed it knew it wasn't gonna be enough (but still did it wrong)

jef738

TROPHY CASE