Energy Saving Facts
Energy Saving Facts
For You and Your Home, Start Saving Power and Money Today.
by Don Ames
1. Make Friends With Your Power Bill.
And your Power Company. There is valuable information on your statement that you need to use to begin to identify where and how to save power at your home. Compare your power usage this month with last month and with the same month a year earlier. Learn to identify your ‘base load’ usage separate from your seasonal usage. Your power company may have a number of free programs to help you save money. Some companies even offer free energy audits. To begin your crusade to save power dollars, I recommend you begin with your power bill and your power company. The Energy Spy Insider weekly newsletter will have in depth instructions on how to get the most out of your monthly power statement.
2. Get Involved With the Smart Revolution.
The Smart Revolution is here to stay, better get on board before it picks your pocket.You will be hearing more about Smart meters, Smart appliances, Smart grids, Smart homes, and Smart phones. The Smart revolution is picking up speed so fast that it is going to be hard to keep from getting run over. Smart energy and clean energy is going to cost you and me more money. There is no way around it. The way we get energy is going to change because the world has a huge appetite for more and more energy and because the more and more energy is going to need to be clean energy. Keep going the way we are and living on the moon is going to look like a good clean choice. We will need to embrace the Smart revolution in order to control our energy bills. Play it Smart or you will see your energy bills go right out the roof.
A Smart meter is going to be replacing your electric meter. Say good bye to your favorite, the dog is barking, meter reader. The new Smart meter has the ability to send a signal back to your power company that reports how much power your using. There is a smart meter for electricity and natural gas. The meter sends out a meter reading, not once a month, but many times a day. The power company is going to know how much juice you use at 8:00 in the morning compared to 2:00 in the afternoon. It’s like big brothers watching.
Now, here’s the good part. Google has already come up with a program that will allow you to have your real time meter reading right on your own personal computer. Google has developed a program that intercepts the meter reading. And, best of all, guess what, it’s free. If Google has this to offer, than how far away is Yahoo, probably not far behind? This is how we embrace the Smart revolution. We learn how to use our Smart meter to help us understand our power usage and then how to save power and save money. Let’s not get too excited to early however, the Smart meter and Google program have only hooked up in 4 areas of the world and two of them are in Britain.
Stay tuned to Detect Energy and the Energy Spy Insider to keep up on this developing technology.
3. Have a Real Home Energy Audit.
This can be an eye popping experience.This can jump start and rev up your power saving efforts. This can pin point where your money saving intentions should be directed.Before you contact a company that specializes in residential energy and energy audits (about $250), contact your power company for audit and contractor recommendations. There is a good chance that you can have an energy audit and get all or most of it paid for by your power company. You see, your power company may have been directed by your State to spend money on energy conservation. Your home energy audit may be helping your power company fulfill their Stately obligations.
Ask the auditor if he or she is going to do a blower door test and inquire how long the audit is going to take. If the auditor says a blower door test is not included and the audit will take only about an hour, this audit is not worth the trouble. If the auditor says a blower door test is included and he or she will be at your home for 3 hours or more, sign them up. This 3 hour audit will be worth the time and the trouble.
Sign up for the Energy Spy Insider Newsletter and I will take you along with me on home energy audits.
4. Double Check Your Energy Lifestyle.
Oh-Oh, the ‘L’ word. L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E. Let’s face it, a home can only hold up so many satellite dishes. Humanity has been plugging in one new electrical appliance after another for years. Come on, admit it, we’re just not living if we don’t have that VCR and TV mounted to the underside of the kitchen cabinet. Fact of the matter is, any power saving measure we undertake can be short circuited by our lifestyle.
(Install a low flow shower nozzle and then take a 30 minute, really hot shower. Install a low flow sink aerator and then let the water run while we brush our teeth. Install a new water saving toilet and then flush it three times. Use a 50 inch TV to light the bedroom. Install a programmable thermostat and forget how to program it. Replace the furnace filter and then 3 months later forget when the last time was that we replaced it. Run the new, high efficiency dishwasher half full. Set the new super-duper clothes dryer for 60 minutes drying time when the super-duper includes an automatic shut off setting when the clothes are dry. Leave the computer on all night so it will be ready to go in the morning. Pay the blankety-blank power bill without ever reading it.)
We want to save power and save money, so we are going to have to live a little like ‘Ed’. Come on, Ed doesn’t have it that bad.
5. Take Care of Your Heating and Cooling System.
Most of the power we use goes into heating and cooling. Therefore, the potential for the biggest savings starts right here.
Here are three real home stories to get the point across.
1. The double wide manufactured home was built in 1992. The homeowner contacted me with the complaint that the kids bedrooms were cold and the kids were getting too many respiratory infections. I checked the amount of air flow at the heat registers and found that the left side of the home, the side with the furnace, had much stonger flow than the right side. I crawled under the house and discovered that an animal had been using the underfloor area for a bedroom, probably their cat. Nothing like sleeping on the warm crossover duct on a chilly winters night. The flex duct looked like a worm that had been run over by a car. A new crossover duct was installed, the cat was barricaded out, and the air supply to the bedrooms was restored. It’s not very energy efficient to try and heat a home with half the heating ducts blocked off.
2. This home has a gas furnace installed in the attic as part of a remodel. The homeowner is concerned because the home never really warms up. There are two return air registers in the hallway with filter grills. The filters in the grills are clean and the homeowner says she changes them regularly. The flow of warm air at the supply registers is slight, the gas furnace is not putting much heat to the home. There is a pull down ladder in the garage to access the furnace. Inspection of the furnace reveals another filter right at the furnace and this filter is plugged solid. The homeowner had no idea there was a filter in the attic. Pull out the plugged filter and the house warms up and the gas bill goes down.
3. I am evaluating a home for adding a heat pump to an electric furnace. A heating contractor is with me to provide a bid. The contractor pulls the front panel off the furnace and exposes the very dirty, totally plugged filter. The homeowner is looking over the contractors shoulder and says,”Oh, there’s the filter, I’ve been looking for that.” The filter had not been replaced since the home was new 4 years ago.
Don’t forget that your heating and cooling ducts are part of the system. The delivery system. Studies indicate that the most cost affective repair you can have done to save energy and save money is to have your heating ducts sealed. Your furnace goes to a lot of time and expense to create a comfortable home, no use letting the delivery system ruin the effort.
6. Establish Your Air Barrier.
It’s just a term that people use in the industry – this air barrier thing. It’s really very simple, your air barrier is what your home uses to separate the outdoors from the indoors. The air barrier is the walls, the floor, and the roof. The air barrier is usually not a problem until people come along and make holes in it. The builder, during your homes construction, made most of the holes. The only holes you can see without going to a little trouble are the holes made for windows and doors. Yea, I know, it seems a little funny to think of a window as a hole in your house.
Recommended course of action is to seal up the air barrier. First of all, contact your power company and find the cheapest and best way to get an auditor with a blower door to visit your home. While the blower door is running, (sucking air out of your home) take a tour of your home and feel for leaks. Feel around windows and exterior doors. Feel the supply and return heat duct registers – feel under all the sinks around the plumbing pipes, feel the electric outlets and switches – feel the cadet wall heaters, feel around ceiling exhaust fans and recessed light fixtures. Feel behind washing machine and refrigerator. Feel around chimneys and wood stoves and pellet stove flue pipes and fireplaces.
The blower door technician will give you a cfm (cubic feet per minute) value representing the air leakage in your home. He or she should talk to about your homes minimum ventilation level and discuss how much your home needs to breath. Make an appointment to have the blower door person back after you have sealed up your air barrier. Re-test the cfm leakage of your home and see how well you did.
Use spray foam, caulk, foam rope, weatherstripping etc. to seal up the problem areas you find. And then go into the attic and underfloor spaces and seal around any pipe or wire that connects the space with a wall or room. Be sure to wear protective clothing and gear when entering spaces with dust, cobwebs and insulation. Oh, by the way, if the attic has 16 inches of blown fiberglass that looks like a fresh snow fall, just stay out and figure it’s too pretty to mess with.
I hope the six areas I have discussed above will give you ideas on how you can save energy and save money at your home. For more information with greater detail, please consider signing up to receive the weekly Energy Spy Insider newsletter. Till next time, have a good time saving power.