Where heat escapes from the average home

Replace the incandescent light bulbs with CFL’s – check…done.

Now what?  Many homeowners are asking exactly that question – as we learn and hear more about global climate change, an increasingly important question for many of us is what else can I do to help?  How can I reduce my carbon footprint?  What can I do to live a more sustainable lifestyle?  This week I discussed some potential answers to these questions with Sloan Ritchie, owner of Cascade Built, a green real estate developer here in Seattle.

There are a number of lifestyle and product choices you can make to help out – however, some are more available than others and some may be cost prohibitive at the current time; who ran out and bought the new Tesla all electric (and very expensive) roadster for Christmas?.  And we all won’t be moving into LEED rated homes anytime soon.  LEED rated homes are a rounding error in terms of market availability and these high efficiency, environmentally friendly dwellings carry a premium price tag (although that’s changing).

Having said all of that, you can still help out in your 1992 built, 2000 sq foot <fill in house type>.  Two words – energy efficiency.  Or more specifically heating efficiency.  Did you know that in the average home 50% of the utility/energy usage is for heating?  If you’re going to expend energy to heat the air in your home, you don’t want that same air to immediately find it’s way to the outside (and possibly cold) world.  I learned a new building term this week (thanks Sloan) – ACH or “air changes per hour”.  It’s a volumetric measure of how much air is replaced in your house in a single hour, presumably air from the outside.  A tightly built home has an ACH rating of .25 – .35.  An average house built today has an ACH in the 1.4 – 1.8 range.  An older, more “loose” house comes in around 2.5 or greater.  So, a tightly built (or updated) home, which by the way is a key element in LEED rated homes, makes better use of the energy expended by keeping much of that warm air in the house – which means using less energy to heat – which means you’re doing more than CFLs.

So for those of us that make up the majority of the homeowners and live in an average or older home, how can we improve our ACH?  Well, here’s a quick hit list to get you started:

1. “air sealing” – the idea is to plug, fill or otherwise block pathways for the air to the outside world – under each faceplate for switches, electrical outlets, phone and cable jacks, install a foam gasket (watch a very short video here) to help prevent air from escaping
2. While you’ve got the faceplates for various switches and outlets off, have a look to see if you’ve got gaps between the electric box receptacle and the framing.  If so, either caulk (if it’s a small gap) or pack with foam for larger gaps
3. Make sure you’re windows are well caulked and that the caulk isn’t deteriorating; re-apply caulking as necessary
4. Check the weather stripping on all exterior doors; if it’s either non-existent or deteriorating, replace it
5. Take a quick look in crawl spaces, attics and any other non-heated spaces where you might have pipes – find the ones carrying hot water and insulate them.
6. Make sure to change your furnace’s filter at least twice a year – similar to dryer vent cleaning, the more flow you have through your filters the more efficiently your furnace will run
7. Next to heating, refrigerators are next in line for improvements in efficiency (and thus savings on the energy use front) – to help the refrigerator be more efficient, simply vacuum the front grill at the bottom of your refrigerator on a regular basis; you guessed it – more flow of air = better efficiency

All of these tips should be doable in a weekend after a trip to your favorite hardware store…  If you’re up for the next level of effort (and potentially investment), here are few more things to consider:

• how energy efficient are your windows or doors?  Are there more efficient or performant windows available?
• what about the level of insulation you’ve got in your walls and attic?  Although the builder of your house likely applied what was required at the time, it may be inadequate today, especially if you have an older house
• Moisture prevention is another key aspect of proper home insulation; if you don’t have a vapor barrier or you have an inadequate vapor barrier between the walls/ceiling and your insulation, moisture can form where the warm air inside the house meets cold air outside the house (yep, you guessed it in your wall and ceiling spaces) – this is a sure way to reduce the efficiency of your insulation
• what is the ACH of your home?  If you’d like to know, you can hire a professional home energy auditor to actually do a test and help diagnose where you’re losing precious air (using a blower door) or heat (using an infrared camera like the one used to take the picture above)

All of these items are very likely to require additional cost and you’ll probably want a professional involved in order to do it right.

Whatever path you choose, the effort you put into increasing the energy efficiency of your home will pay dividends – first through your own knowledge and peace of mind that you’ve done more than change the lightbulbs.  And once you’ve done a few of the items above, you’ll hopefully see the other type of green savings – that of saving $ on your utility bills.

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