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.

Residential Energy Modeling

Energy modeling is becoming more common place with the design of commercial buildings.  However it is primarily used by the mechanical engineer to design and size their systems.  Very seldom is it used in the early stages of a project as part of the design process for the entire building to maximize the energy efficiency.  In the residential sector of design and construction, energy modeling is rarely used.  It is more common place with Energy Star rated homes, even then it is only used to show compliance with the requirements of Energy Star standards, not a part of the design process.

 

Energy modeling in new home design, construction and renovations can be a very effective tool to weigh the cost effectiveness of any design strategy used to improve energy efficiency in a home.  Actually most energy auditors use some form of energy modeling to show their customers what kind of financial payback they could expect when implementing any of the recommended improvements.  So why is this tool not used more within the design industry?  Energy modeling is a standard service I provide with any home design work that I do, as well as a service that I provide to other design and construction professionals.  I offer this because some jurisdictions do require an energy compliance certificate.  Granted most design professionals and builders use REScheck as their preferred method.  However, REScheck will only demonstrate compliance using the trade-off approach and the prescriptive packages approach as described in the energy conservation codes.

 

More advanced software packages such as REM/Design which I use takes this a step further.  REM/Design and other software packages will not only provide you with a compliance certificate, but it will provide design loads along with estimated energy usage and cost to operate the home.  This can be helpful as a preliminary sizing tool for your heating and cooling systems.  What is also valuable about this feature is it gives you the ability to weigh the cost effectiveness of “upgraded” insulation levels or more efficient systems.  The software will even break up the loads into building components, so you know where most of your energy is being lost in the homes envelope.  For instance a recent project I was consulting on, I was able to determine that the six skylights the homeowner wanted in their passive solar home were more of an energy penalty than an overall gain.  So there was a compromise and the number of skylights was reduced to 3 as a daylighting strategy instead of one for heat gain in the winter time.

 

Component loads

 

In an article posted on the American Institute of Architects website (Sustainable AIA: 2031–Why Energy Models Don’t Predict Actual Energy Use), it discusses the criticisms that energy modeling does not predict the actual energy usage of the building or home.  To some degree that is expected, energy modeling simulates the energy usage of a home to determine design loads based upon your geographical region.  Each software package takes into account occupants; however they cannot take into account occupant behavior which has a huge impact on the performance of any building or home.  Of course each software package has its flaws and performs some calculations better than others.

 

In the coming weeks, Chris Laumer-Giddens with Energy Vanguard in Georgia who is a licensed architect and HVAC designer will tell us the basic differences in some of the more widely used energy modeling tools.

Friday Video – Blower Door Basics & Weatherization Training

So it is no secret that my career path has changed a little over a year ago from design and producing construction documents for projects ranging from home additions/renovations to multi-million dollar commercial and institutional buildings.  These days I am performing home energy audits and have been involved heavily in the weatherization industry, as I feel this is a good fit to keep me sharp and give me great field experience with building science issues that I can take back to the architecture profession if I ever decide to return to a traditional design firm.

During my conversations with customers I am always telling them it was an easy transition into the job because I am already knowledgeable of construction techniques and building science.  I just needed training on the equipment and testing procedures.  So for those that are interested in home energy audits, here is a great video on the basics of blower door testing that was produced by the Montana Weatherization Training Center.  Over the past year, they have produced a whole series of videos on their WXtv site, featuring different aspects of the energy auditing and home weatherization industry.

Check out the Montana Weatherization Training Centers WXtv to view more great videos geared towards training the weatherization industry.