Protect the Environment and Your Pocketbook by Implementing Energy Efficiency in Your Home
Energy efficiency measures pay for themselves when the payback in energy savings exceeds the cost of the improvements. A percentage reduction in energy costs through energy efficiency retrofits completed today, will provide significant benefits at today’s energy prices, but will have an even greater impact as energy prices continue to rise.
There are many easy, low cost ways you can save energy in your home. Some of these include:
• Unpluging electronic equipment that isn’t being used or use a power strip to turn items on and off to reduce “phantom loads.”
• Installing a programmable thermostat so your heat or air conditioning is not on when you are not home.
• Using a ceiling fan to save energy on heating bills by setting it at a low speed in a clockwise rotation. This mixes the warm air trapped at the ceiling with cooler air at the bottom of the room—warming up the living space.
• Using curtains and shades on windows so you have the option of letting the sun’s warmth in or blocking out the cold air.
• Planting deciduous trees on the south and west side of your home to provide shade in the summer.
• Using window units or ceiling fans instead of central air conditioning. Central air conditioning uses about ten times the amount of electricity that ceiling fans do.
• Replacing all your light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, which use one fourth the energy of incandescent bulbs and last much longer.
Typically, the most cost effective professional home performance improvements in existing homes are air sealing and insulation. The effectiveness of insulation is measured by its R-value, the higher the better. But just as important as insulation is sealing all of the little cracks and gaps where air can flow in and out. Fiberglass batts are often used for insulation, but batts must be installed very carefully in order to be fully efficient. Small air leaks around fiberglass batts will seriously reduce the performance of the insulation. Other choices for insulation are blown in cellulose, blown-in fiberglass and spray foam. Dense pack cellulose is the method of choice for low-income weatherization programs. It is a recycled content product that can be blown into existing walls from the inside or outside of a home, and can be used in attics.
What about windows? Windows are so expensive that window replacement is not recommended to save energy. It’s more cost effective to reduce air leaks around existing windows by sealing and caulking. If you are replacing windows for other reasons, then purchase high efficiency windows. The efficiency of windows is measured by U value, the lower the better.
Low-income programs provide free weatherization services to residents with incomes up to 150 percent of poverty levels. A lot has been learned from the experience of these programs, which has weatherized more than 300,000 homes in Ohio since 1977. In Ohio, weatherization programs spend approximately $3,000 on each home, and achieve an average of 25 percent annual savings on heating bills. Each home is analyzed to see if common improvements will be cost-effective for the particular home. The priority measures determined to be most cost effective in homes by the Ohio Home Weatherization Assistance Program are:
• Air sealing
• Water heater insulation where safe
• Furnace tune-up if needed
• Duct insulation in non-heated spaces
• Duct sealing
• Install low-flow showerhead
• Insulate attic floors or ceilings to R-38
• Insulate walls to R-15
• Insulate floors over non-heated basements to R-19.
For homeowners who don’t qualify for the low-income programs, the first step to weatherization is to have an energy audit done on their home by a certified energy rater, which typically costs between $300-$500. The energy audit will recommend the most cost effective improvements for each home, and will estimate the payback time. A new program from First Energy called Home Performance with Energy Star (www.firstenergycorp.com/homeperformance) offers incentives for energy improvements. The program provides rebates to homeowners who work with a certified contractor to do an energy audit and make the recommended improvements. It also offers incentives to contractors to join the program.
Deep energy retrofits address the challenges of climate change and peak oil by upgrading existing homes to use very little energy, or to produce more energy than they consume. It is possible to spend as little as $50,000 to turn an existing home into a net zero energy home. Deep energy retrofits focus first on the building envelope by adding insulation on the outside of exterior walls. This drastically reduces the size of the heating and cooling system needed. Renewable energy, including solar thermal and solar photovoltaic systems, is used for the remaining energy needs of the home. A grid-tied solar photovoltaic system can produce excess electricity that offsets the electricity used by the home.
No matter which route you take, implementing energy efficiency in your home will help protect the environment and your pocketbook.
For more information, contact Mandy Metcalf at 216- 961-4646, mmetcalf@ehw.org or visit www.ehw.org.