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Electricians & Cable Contractors – The Great Swiss Cheese Makers

So have you ever hired an electrician to install a recessed can light or bathroom vent fan? Or what about a cable contractor that installed additional cable hook ups in the house that required working in the attic to run the new cable? Have you ever gone up into the attic after they finished their work? I mean why would you? It’s not like they installed a new tile back splash, there is nothing really worth looking at. Or is there? Well it is my experience that very few home owners even go up into their attic, let alone after a contractor has been up there. Therefore most homeowners don’t know that the electrician or cable contractor made swiss cheese of their attic.

I have inspected hundreds of homes that have clear paths of travel through the insulation to work area. Then you get to the area where they did the work and the insulation is pushed out of the way or compressed. Not to mention the hole created to run the cables. These holes and the displaced insulation is a large energy penalty on the home costing you more monthly to heat and cool your home. I have seen holes drilled into the ceiling for a single wire as large as two inches. As stated in my post on attic air sealing, these holes allow the air that you paid to condition to easily escape, costing you money. Even the compressed or displaced insulation is affecting your utility bills. As another in the home performance industry, Energy Vanguard wrote about uneven insulation in their blog titled “Flat or Lumpy – How Would You Like Your Insulation?” Now of course how much it really costs you depends on the amount of holes and actual displaced insulation. But sometimes it can be severe, actually cause comfort and durability issues. So what may have been a rather efficient home is now full of holes in the ceiling and insulation increasing your monthly cost to operate the home.

As a result I would grab a can of foam and a rake to seal these holes and even that insulation out so your home can perform at least as well as it did before the contractors tracked through attic.

5 Low Cost Ways to Reduce Winter Heating Bills

The temperature is dropping and many are looking for ways to control their winter heating costs. There are some easy, low cost strategies that everyone can use to help control their winter heating bills. These are my top 5 tips that even the not so handy homeowners can use to keep the heating cost at bay.

1. Open the blinds: Some of the coldest days of the year are the clearest and brightest, so let the sun shine in and help heat your home. There are homes designed to utilize the sun’s rays as their primary heating source (Passive Solar), so there is no reason your home can’t take advantage of this free heat source. Just be sure at night to close the blinds to retain the heat in the home and help reduce drafts.

2. Add layers: Not only am I surprised by the number of people that live in complete darkness during the day, but how many want to keep their home warm enough to wear shorts & a t-shirt. By wearing clothing appropriate to the weather outside can greatly increase your comfort and allow you to reduce the temperature in your home, thus saving you money.

3. Set back your temperature: The rule of thumb is you can save between 1-3% for every degree that you set your thermostat back for an 8 hour period of time while you are at work and sleeping. The Department Of Energy estimates that you can save up to $180 a year with this simple strategy. You can make this even easier by installing a programmable thermostat that you can have automatically adjust the temperature in the home and can have it start to heat the home before you wake up in the morning or get home from work so you do not have to contend with the cold temperatures.

4. Maintain your heating equipment: Servicing your heating units and replacing filters regularly can boost efficiency by 3-10% according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). It is recommended to have oil-fired boilers cleaned and tuned annually, and gas systems, every two years. Not only will regularly servicing your oil and gas fired heating equipment help improve efficiency, but ensure safety if your heating contractor performs combustion testing, in the hopes they catch high levels of carbon monoxide.

5. Seal those leaks: Excessive air leakage into the home can waste up to 25% of your homes heating and cooling costs. Installing foam gaskets behind outlet and switch covers on exterior walls is the simplest strategy. Sealing the gaps around window & door trim is another easy cost effective way to reduce infiltration and reduce drafts. However sealing those air leaks in the attic is where you will get the most bang for your buck as you will trap the warm air in the home as it rises.

If you are a handy homeowner and looking for other ways around your home to conserve energy and reduce your heating and cooling costs, follow my blog series Kill’n a Hog….an Energy Hog as my family reduces the energy consumption of our 1960’s home.

Energy Hog – Attic Air Sealing

The first of our home improvements projects to cut the energy usage in the home was air sealing in the attic. Now I have to admit that when I started doing the work in 2005, I did not fully understand the importance. Now that I inspect homes or follow up on insulation contractors’ work, I see firsthand how important air sealing work really is.

A simple explanation of what air sealing is, it is the work performed on the home to reduce the amount of air infiltration into the home by sealing small and sometimes large gaps and crevices. I utilized the DO–IT–YOURSELF Guide to Sealing & Insulating with ENERGY STAR to perform the air sealing in the attic before installing insulation. These holes in the home can waste approximately 25% of the typical homes heating and cooling cost and is almost always the most cost effective improvement that can be done to most homes to reduce the utility bills and increase the indoor air quality (IAQ).

Air sealing not only helps reduce your heating and cooling costs, but sometimes more importantly, air sealing helps to improve the indoor air quality and durability of the home. Tighter homes typically have less dust because not as much gets pulled in through these cracks; they are typically more durable because excessive air and moisture does not enter the walls or attic that could cause mold and rot.

The goal of air sealing your attic is to make the ceiling as air tight as possible to stop any air movement. Now most home owners don’t think of their attic being full of holes. However it is full of them, plumbing stack penetrations, wires, can lights and other ceiling fixtures. If you hold your hand over these holes, you can feel the hot or cold air from inside your home making its way into the attic, costing you money. Because as this conditioned air leaves your home, unconditioned air is being pulled into your home through other gaps or crevices in your home, typically in the basement (more on sealing the basement in a future post). When your home has low levels of insulation, it is easy to find these holes. However if you have good levels of insulation, you can find these holes by looking for discolored insulation, as most insulation types are air filters and the discoloration is a sign of air movement. So review the air sealing guide, buy a few tubes of caulk and cans of Great Stuff and seal up those holes and start saving.

Here is a video series on the Fine Homebuilding magazine website on air sealing your attic that is worth watching, or check out other attic air sealing videos on YouTube.

Why I Hate My Job

Well not much really. But let’s be honest, would you have even had interest in reading if the title was “Why I Love My Job”? So this is basically my year in review of working for Conservation Services Group performing home energy audits and to share a little more about my job that I did not get to share during the panel discussion at the AIA Ohio Valley Region convention in Dayton, OH last week.

So let’s stick with the title and what I do not enjoy about my job. First, 90+ degree days, it makes for very uncomfortable working conditions as the attic is 100+ degrees. However that is a condition of the job and is only an issue of comfort. The hardest, as well as worst part of the job is delivering news to customers as I was reminded of today. First is the customer that already has decent levels of insulation and based upon calculated paybacks and program goals do not qualify for very attractive incentives for energy efficiency improvements through the utility rebate program that we do work for. I get a lot of eye rolling, but that is easy to handle, just lots of additional table talk which can add a lot of time to an appointment that only allows 4 hours to inspect, test, generate a report and present it to the customer. However the absolute hardest part about my job is telling a customer, especially an assisted customer that is getting free work done that cannot have any air sealing or insulation work done until combustion safety issues have been resolved such as back drafting water heaters, or high CO levels. This can really tug on the heart strings when you are in a home that has little to no insulation and you can see they would greatly benefit from lower utility bills and truly cannot afford to make some of the repairs necessary, yet their income level is not low enough to qualify for weatherization assistance that would actually make these repairs.

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Kill’n a hog….an Energy Hog

Our home as it was purchased in 2005

Back in 2005 my wife and I purchased this ranch with a walk out basement. It is/was your typical 1960′s stick built home. Very low levels of insulation, single pane aluminum windows, with an unfinished basement and a huge backyard for the area, with lots of old growth trees. The view out of the dinning room window was the selling point. Some other nice amenities is that it is in a developed neighborhood with schools that are within walking distance, grocery within a mile. The town also has a very active year round farmers market. Plus the home was the mid point between both of our jobs at that time and is relatively close to a bus route.

The back of our home as it was purchased in 2005

However during the home inspection we found some troubling things. There was little to no insulation in the attic, the basement walls were uninsulated. And what makes that even worse is the fact that half of the house foundation is above ground. Not to mention the aging heating and cooling equipment. So we looked at this house as a blank slate, giving us the opportunity to not only renovate the home to fit our needs, but to do everything in an environmentally friendly way and to do it within our limited budget.

So this is where “Symbiotic Home” originally began. A website to help educate others on what can be done to green their existing home. Now with a good portion of the projects done, I will be developing this new series of posts that will backtrack and document each of the projects that we have tackled, and will even discuss future projects that we would like to accomplish. Giving you a glimpse of what we have been doing, how we have been doing it, and why as we green this energy pig.

So follow my home renovations as I walk the walk and show that green/sustainable construction can happen on the typical working families budget and I look forward to the discussions that this may create.

-Josh