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About one-third of the $2,000 that a typical U.S. household spends each year on energy goes toward heating and cooling the great outdoors. And as the price of fuel climbs, that wasted energy takes a bigger bite of your budget.
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Protect Your Home This Winter | ||
This winter, the Department of Energy forecasts, the cost of natural gas will increase by some 18% compared with last year, and residential heating oil (most commonly used in the Northeast) will rise by 23%. Electricity rates will rise 10%.
One easy way to keep utility bills in check is to do a home-energy audit. Although an audit's scope depends on the age, size and design of the house, a typical audit takes three to four hours and costs $250 to $600. The resulting report can serve as a road map to improve your home's energy efficiency and comfort.
Getting personal. My husband and I ordered an energy audit for our northern Virginia house last summer. We hired Bill Gray, of Gaithersburg, Md., an energy auditor certified by Maryland's Home Performance With Energy Star program.
Gray arrived with his black bags of tools and diagnostic equipment in the company of Glenn Dickey, technical-services director of the Maryland program. The duo then inspected our house like Holmes and Watson. For the next three hours, they peered inside and out, basement to attic. They measured our home's volume, poked their flashlights into voids, and ran tests designed to measure the efficiency of our furnace and the leakiness of our home's exterior.
The "blower-door test" provided a big clue to the results of our audit. Gray covered our front-door opening with a ripstop nylon cover, into which he inserted a large fan that depressurized the house. As I stood in the basement stairwell, I felt a door-slamming breeze rush upstairs as air was sucked into the basement through gaps in our home's exterior.
Later, on the second floor, Gray held up a thermographic scanner, which translates heat and cold into color images -- from blue to black for cold, and from yellow, orange and red to white for heat. It was a hot August day, and I could see white halos around our canister lights and the attic hatch from 95-degree air infiltrating from the attic.
When we reviewed the results, we learned that, among other things, the air flow in our house was twice what was necessary for healthful living -- the equivalent of leaving a window half-open all the time.
The fix list. The top three items on our punch list, as with most audits, are to seal the house's exterior, plug the ductwork and add insulation. Gray recommended that in the basement we seal the gap between the top of the foundation wall and the framing above it with inexpensive foam insulation (such as Great Stuff Insulating Foam, $5 for a 12-ounce can), and add fiberglass insulation to the band board (or rim joist) to which the floor joists are attached.
In the attic, he found unsealed joints in the ductwork and gaps between the drywall and framing at the tops of our second-story walls -- both common problems and a likely source of dust in our house. The solution? Several hours in the attic with a $20 bucket of duct mastic, a special sealant, and more foam insulation to seal the tops of the walls.
We also need a new attic hatch ($200) to keep hot and cold air out of our living space. Or we could upgrade our current hatch for about $35 (visit www.ehow.com and search for "attic hatch"). And we need to seal the gaps where utility hoses and lines penetrate our home's exterior (cost: $3 for a 1-pound block of Duct Seal from an electrical supplier). Thermal shades for basement windows are about $100 apiece, and replacing a leaky cellar window with an Andersen window with a low-E coating would cost $103, if we do the work ourselves. New weatherstripping around our doors will run about $50. (I'm not sure how to keep the cats from destroying it this time.)
Other items on our to-do list include a furnace tune-up, at a cost of $80. Turns out the combustion efficiency of ours is less than the rated 93%. And we're losing heat from our hot-water heater. A blanket and top cost about $25; preformed foam pipe-insulation sleeves are $3. Or better yet, because the water heater is 11 years old, we should replace it with a higher-efficiency model. A GE 50-gallon natural-gas water heater costs about $800. Beginning in January 2009, you'll find Energy StarŠlabeled gas, solar and heat-pump water heaters (about $1,000 to $2,000 installed, excluding solar).
Finally, unplugging the nearly empty refrigerator in the basement will trim about $70 a year off our electric bill.
POSTED BY: Sean Zobaa (October 30, 2008 03:16 PM)
A great resource for homeowners to find independent auditors and contractors is HomeEnergyTeam.com
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