Everyone has a favorite season(s). My wife loves the spring and the fall. I love all the seasons because every one of them has something different to offer the avid outdoor photographer in me but winter is my favorite by far. I live in a winter wonderland here atop Walch’s Mountain. That’s not the mountain’s real name but I like to refer to it as my mountain because there’s only a handful of us who live up here, miles from what my wife likes to refer to as civilization.
For the most part, up here we’re still living like everybody lived during the 19th and early 20th centuries i.e. heating our homes with wood burning fireplaces and wood burning furnaces. A few of my neighbors have converted to using K-1 Kerosene that they truck up the mountain themselves because no one will deliver up here, especially not in the winter time when the roads become impassable to anything except four-wheel drives and Snowcats. Most of us prefer to stick with wood as the fuel of choice because our homes are surrounded by forest that offer us a lifetime supply of fuel. All we have to do is get out there in the woods during the warm months with our chain saws and harvest a years supply free. OK, folks, relax, I’m not going suggest that you move up here with me and harvest firewood to save money this winter. As my wife, a city girl, would quickly tell you, this mountain isn’t very hospitable to city folk during the long, hard winters.
Up until I bought my dream home up here on Walch’s Mountain, I lived in civilization and had to fight the battle of the rising energy costs just like all of you have to. Over the years, I have learned many tricks to saving energy when it came to heating my home and I want to share a few of them with you here. Did you know that the average homeowner in the United States spends an average of $1,600 every year on their home utilities? Most electrical energy is still generated using fossil fuels. The fossil fuels consumed to provide the energy needs of a single home produces twice the carbon dioxide pollutants as the average family car does in a years time.
The first step in reducing the energy that your home waste every year is to create a whole-house energy efficiency plan. Like a car, your home consists of many different systems that all consume energy.
Your home heating system consists of more than the furnace and it’s a system consisting of many components some of which most people wouldn’t see as being part of the heating system. The ductwork concealed in floors, walls, and ceilings are major components of the heating system. The insulation in your walls, floors, and ceiling are an integral part of the heat delivery system. Windows and doors are an integral part of the heating system as well. Almost everyone would see the connection between the furnace, its thermostatic controls, and the delivery duct work but not many would consider the insulation found in the walls, floors, and ceilings of their homes as being part of the heating system, but it is just as windows and doors are in the truest sense of the word. You can have the highest rated energy efficient furnace available today, you will still waste energy if the heat produced by this state of the art furnace is lost because of leaky duct work; no insulation in the walls, ceilings, and floors, or inadequate insulation; and/or leaky doors and windows.
The way your home produces and delivers hot water is another system that plays an essential role in your whole-house energy efficiency plan. You can have state of the art, energy efficient hot water heater you will still waste energy if the water heats the air around the pipes because they are inadequately insulated or lack any insulation at all. More is involved here than just the delivery system, how the hot water is consumed plays a big role in energy conservation.
Your home lighting systems is another major system that we consider in detail as we explore each component of our whole-house energy efficiency plan. Alright, I think you’re getting the idea of what I mean when tour home consists of many individual energy consuming systems that act together towards the total energy consumed by your home and determines whether that energy is consumed efficiently or wasted.
The first step in developing our whole-house energy efficiency plan is to conduct a home energy audit and that’s what we are going to concentrate on in this article. There are two approaches to home energy audits, the do-it-yourself approach and having a professional come into your home and do it for you. There are pros and cons to both approaches.
Why have an energy audit done by a professional?
The major advantage of having the audit done by a professional is that they have the training and the years of experience that you don’t have so they’ll catch the little things that you might miss. The professionals also have the high-tech tools of the trade which makes the audit go faster and much more efficiently. The professional auditors have powerful tools like "Blower Doors" and "Infrared Cameras."
"Blower Doors" are powerful fans mounted in a frame that fits into an exterior doorframe. In operation, this fan sucks air out of the home thus lowering the interior air pressure. With the home at a lower pressure with respect to the outside pressure airflow’s into the home through air leaks. The auditor will use a smoke pencil or some other such device to detect this in-flowing air and mark those locations. There are two types of "Blower Doors" calibrated and uncalibrated and it’s important that the auditor uses a calibrated Blower Door. This is important because the calibrated Blower Door has a set of gauges that tell the auditor how much air is being sucked out of the home as well as the differences between the inside and outside air pressures. This pressure ratio is indicative as to just how tightly sealed the home is. The uncalibrated Blower Door allows the auditor to find air leaks but only the calibrated Blower Door allows the auditor to quantify his or her report.
The professional auditor uses the infrared camera to perform a thermographic test for heat lost. Thermographic tests measure differences in surface temperatures and is used to analyze the effectiveness of the insulation in your home’s wall, floor’s, and ceiling’s. Thermographic scans may be conducted on the interior walls or on the exterior walls depending on the weather conditions. The professional energy auditor will combine the Blower Door Tests with the Infrared Thermographic scan test to produce the most accurate energy audit possible.
If you opt to go this route, contact your energy provider because most of them will conduct a professional energy audit on your home free or for a nominal cost. If your provider doesn’t offer this service, ask them to recommend a professional in your area. As a last resort check out your local yellow pages and then check the company’s reputation with your local Better Business Bureau before engaging their services.
The do-it-yourself energy audit begins inside the home
You can conduct a diy energy audit that will closely approach the accuracy of a professional audit but you will miss some of the things that a pro will catch with their thermographic scans.
To begin our audit we are going to be searching for air leaks. Eliminating air leaks can reduce our yearly energy consumption by 5 to 30 percent. The obvious places for air to leak into our homes is around windows and doors; through gaps in our floors, wall, ceilings, etc but there are less obvious places that many people overlook when conducting their diy energy audits. Some of these less obvious air leak locations are
1. Around electrical switches and outlets
2. Along baseboards and around window and door frames
3. Around attic and cellar doors and hatches
4. Around and/or through window and wall mounted air conditioners
5. Around fireplace and stove dampers
6. Gaps around pipes where they enter your home (under the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, in the laundry room, etc)
7. Nail holes in exterior walls
8. Defective window and door weather stripping
9. Improper fitting storm windows, etc
Use your imagination. A candle makes a good tool for finding air leaks especially if you conduct your diy audit on a day when there’s a good breeze-blowing outside.
How to conduct your own basic pressurization test without a "Blower Door."
If your candle or smoke stick doesn’t turn up the air leaks in an expeditious manner, you can conduct your own basic home pressurization test. The results of this basic test is much the same as those resulting from the use of an "Uncalibrated Blower Door." It’ll show you where the air leaks are but it won’t quantify them. To begin the test you need to
1. Turn off all combustion appliances, such as an oil or gas fired furnace, and gas fired water heaters
2. Close all windows, exterior doors, and fireplace or stove flues
3. Turn on all exhaust fans and install a large box fan in a window to pump the air out of the rooms.
This test lowers the air pressure in the home below the pressure of the air outside of the home. Lowering the air pressure inside the home will increase the flow rate of the air infiltrating the home through cracks and other sources of air leaks making them easier to find with a candle, a smoke stick, or even a wet hand/finger.
Inspect the outside of your home next for cracks, holes, damaged caulking, etc. Be especially to check where different building materials meet such as where
1. The sides and ends meet at a corner
2. The door casings and window casing meets siding
3. The chimney meets roofing materials
4. The foundation for cracks and other damage
Inspect the insulation in the walls, ceilings, and floors of your home.
Most likely your home will contain the minimum required at the time your home was built but with today’s higher energy cost; you may want to increase the R Factor of the insulation. Check the exterior walls of your home. No matter when your home was built the exterior wall cavities should be filled with some type of insulation. Gaining access to the inside of the exterior walls can be tricky. If your home has an attic or an attic crawl space, crawl up there with a powerful flashlight and see if you can peer down inside the outside walls. If there isn’t ant readymade easy access, you may have to create one of your own. A good place to do that is inside a cabinet or closets that is placed against an exterior wall. You can cut a small access hole inside a cabinet or closet and then close it up again after making your inspection. If, for some reason, the exterior walls of your home aren’t filled with insulation, consider having blown in insulation installed by a pro or consider renting the equipment to install blown in insulation yourself.
If the attic access hatch is over a conditioned living space make sure that it is insulates as the ceiling itself is insulated and make sure that it seal tightly when closed.
In Part Two of this series we will take a closer look at how to handle some of the more common sources of air leaks that you found during you energy audit, such as
1. Around electrical switches and outlets
2. Along baseboards and around window and door frames
3. Around attic and cellar doors and hatches
4. Around and/or through window and wall mounted air conditioners
5. Around fireplace and stove dampers
6. Gaps around pipes where they enter your home (under the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, in the laundry room, etc)
7. Nail holes in exterior walls
8. Defective window and door weather stripping
9. Improper fitting storm windows, etc
About Jerry Walch I have been a professional freelance writer since the early 1970s. I started out writing fiction but soon moved into doing technical writing for hire. Having been an avid do it yourselfer for over fifty years, I now specialize in writing for the DIY markets. I have done everything from auto mechanics to wood working and my writing runs the gamut as well. Having worked in the electrical trades for over forty years, my work for hire involves doing technical manuals for equipment manufacturers. Did you enjoy this article?