The Greening Seminar, About Saving Energy
Planning Green Communities to Conserve Resources
by Don Ames
Just when you think you’re out of school and the homework assignments have stopped, your seminar instructor thinks it’s cool to send you back to your hotel room with overnight homework. Back in class the next morning, even though I did not do the assignment, I noticed that a lot of my classmates did. Darn.
I am in the big city again today at a seminar that is focusing on developing green living units for Native Americans. The homework assignment wanted me to consider greening ( saving energy ) at an apartment complex of 35 units build in 1960. The apartments are heated by propane furnaces and propane water heaters and no upgrades have been done since construction, not even light bulbs or appliances. At this point, I assume that a lot of the furnaces, water heaters and appliances no longer work so propane and electrical usage must be down.
Luckily the instructor had us provide our greening recommendations as a table group and one of the other people at the my table spoke up - so I was off the hook. The recommendation made was to set up resident training classes in energy savings and if they successfully completed the curse, their unit would be given new, energy star appliances. Well, this addresses lifestyle as a major energy saving influence and I think it was a really good approach. For the unit itself, not counting the people, if all these units have forced air heating systems, the most cost effective item would be to seal the return and supply heating ducts.
This is really the same with an individual home. Sealing the heating ducts is certainly not as clamorous, as say, installing new windows, but the pay back from sealing heating ducts is far more than replacing windows. Sealing up heating ducts in a home is about an $300 to $500 dollar item. Replacing windows is about $400 item per window.
After the heating ducts, the next item to upgrade would be the attic/ceiling insulation. Again, you will get more energy savings for each dollar invested with a well insulated ceiling than you will get with most other energy saving measures. An attic can be upgraded to an insulation level of R-38 for about 90 cents to $1.20 per square foot. There are incentive funds and tax credits available to help pay for these energy saving upgrades. Check out the incentives before you have the work done so you can be sure the work is done by a certified contractor. To select the contractor, ask your local power provider to recommend a contractor or two.
Be sure to double check with the contractor that the attic will be air sealed before the insulation is added. A contractor that would add insulation without air sealing is not the contractor you want to use.
Darn, the seminar is over, the cookies were good, and the information was helpful – and the homework was not graded…
Hope you enjoyed this article, come back soon…remember, I won’t leave the light on for you…
DonAmes, detectenergy.com