Online Home Energy Tracking Options

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Americans spend approximately $241 billion dollars on energy to heat and cool their homes on an annual basis.  This is why you are seeing so many utility, state and federal government plans such as the Home Star bill.  These programs are designed to help control energy costs for the American home owner as well as reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

So how many of us actually track our utility usage beyond opening up the envelope and complaining about the cost?  How many people actually know their average month, or yearly usage?  With the increasing cost of energy, I am sure there are more that will start paying attention.  But how do we keep track?  Smart meters are starting to roll out all throughout the country which will allow us to access that information easily.  However it will take some time before everyone has one.  There are devices that we can purchase, such as the TED energy detective that can be hooked up to our meters, some complicated, others not.  However a lot of us do not want to incur that expense.

Besides creating a spreadsheet and tracking our monthly usage, what are our options?  There happens to be a few free online services that will do this for you and will generate relatively easy to read graphs showing your usage and billing history.  Most of them will even give you a score as a way to compete with your neighbors.  Therefore I would like to take the time and briefly review a few of them that I have tried.

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It’s about more than energy

Home energy audits are about more than energy usage, they are also about health and safety of the home and its occupants.  Earlier this week the local media picked up on a story of a woman who died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to a malfunctioning furnace.  (Carbon monoxide kills 1, hospitalizes 3)  Even the Building Performance Institute (BPI), an organization that creates the standards for home energy auditors had a press release of a family that died from carbon monoxide and why our work is so important.

Water heater failing the spillage test & back drafting combustion gases into the home.

A lot of the testing that we do as home energy auditors is combustion safety testing and monitoring the levels of carbon monoxide not only in the home but what the appliances are producing and checking for gas leaks.  What I see more often than gas leaks and furnaces with high levels of carbon monoxide however is water heaters that back draft combustion gases into the home.  And this can happen with old and brand new hot water heaters and is easy to create conditions within a home that makes it difficult for a hot water heater to draft properly.

A recent customer had two hot water heaters that did not have a strong enough draft pressure in the flue to exit the combustion gases, and a major gas leak was even found at the gas meter that was inside the home.  So by inspecting this customer’s home to help him improve the energy efficiency of his home, I potentially prevented him and his family from being a headline of carbon monoxide poisoning.

So schedule a home energy audit to not only improve the energy efficiency of your home, but to make sure your appliances are working efficiently and safely.

Challenging our priorities

As the new year begins, we all have resolutions to improve or change our lives in some way.  For the design and construction industry, I truly believe there needs to be a shift in thinking.  Energy efficiency needs to be a key player in all of our work, and I am not just talking code minimums.

As I am now performing home energy audits, I am inspecting way too many homes built before the 1960′s with small to large additions or alterations.  Yet the majority of the original structure in not touched.  This is why I am visiting these homes, they have these brand new additions and brand new high efficiency furnaces, yet they are not comfortable.  No surprise when a newly insulated addition is added to the home and the original structure stills sits uninsulated.  But what may be more disturbing is the rare addition built within the past couple of years that are extremely under-insulated at the ceiling.  And what amazes me even more is that home owners are so conditioned into thinking that they are uncomfortable because they have “bad” windows. Read the rest of this entry »