Painting the Town Red!
Jim went out on the town one night recently with our MIT buddies and their super new high resolution thermal camera.
Here's a Hyde Park panorama, showing the riot of energy life in a typical urban street after dark! Remember that lighter colors in the scan are higher temperatures: if all the homes were well air-sealed and insulated, they would show up as boring blue. The brighter the yellow, the more that area is radiating expensive heat from the home into the night.
Points to notice:
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Some of the brightest areas in the home in the center are foundation exteriors
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Windows are obviously a generic weakness: but compare the (relatively cool) windows on the home in the center with the "white hot" windows on the next house but one to the right: that house had single pane windows with no storms!
- The front wall of the home in the center needs some extra insulation
Watch out for further images from around the city in this blog!
High resolution version here.
The 50% Solution: now that's progress
Steven Chu, our Energy Secretary, is showing the way in home energy efficiency. And he is not taking the 3% baby steps that National Grid is advocating.
He is weatherizing his new home in the Washington DC area, although according to a Reuters report of a speech he made at a DC conference "“weatherizing” isn’t a word he likes. “I’m decreasing its energy consumption and making money,” was how he put it........Chu figures his energy bills are about half what the home’s previous owners paid."
The 3% Solution: Pragmatic or Cynical?
One of our local utilities, National Grid, is running a new energy efficiency campaign: the 3% less initiative. "If we all reduced our energy consumption by 3% per year for 10 years, the impact would be huge."
There's a lot to like about the campaign: it has - for a utility energy program - an unusually fresh and contemporary feel. And on the surface the logic makes good sense: people are resistant to major change, so get them to reduce consumption a little at a time, one small change every year. They will hardly notice the difference, but after 10 years the overall impact will be a reduciton of more than one third in household energy consumption. Bold but pragmatic.
Or is it cynical? Little more than a feelgood, image polishing campaign to ride out the current recession and environmental storms with as little fundamental change as possible to the prevailing "big power" ethos? With annual variations in weather patterns and shifts in household composition, who could realistically track their progress in reducing consumption by 3% per year? There are some who will fastidiously track the number of heating and cooling degree days and people in the home month after month for 10 years, but it will be a tiny number....most will not get started, and most of those that do will lose attention after a year or two, or sooner if energy prices trend much lower.
And check out the planning tool, which generates a blizzard of ideas. So many options. Too many options. And too many options which will not hit home with most consumers: how many families are likely to start eating buffalo meat? Or adjust heating settings when they light a wood fire? Or start taking family vacations 100 miles closer to home? (Which for our family would mean vacationing in beautiful Natick, home of Doug Flutie and a great community, but not previously renowned as a vacation destination.)
The current crisis is too good an opportunity to react with 3% reductions. The consumers we audit want to take big bites out of their energy usage. 25%, 50% or more: and in most cases these levels of reduction are not just readily attainable, they are also economically attractive and will leave the homeowner with a less drafty, more comfortable and healthy home!
Learn to Love Your Attic.....
As home energy auditors we often re-introduce our customers to places in their home they would prefer to forget. The basement crawl space with no vapor barrier, the original window that has been cracked open so long that people have forgotten it isn't closed, the water heater with storage boxes stacked all around.......and so on. But it's the attic, which for many is truly the land that time forgot. "I haven't been up there since we moved into the house over 20 years ago" one homeowner told us recently about his highly accessible attic - "and quite frankly I don't intend ever to go back." Yet when it comes to energy efficiency, saving money, reducing carbon and making your home less drafty and more comfortable, you have to learn to love your attic - because it is the first place to look for quick wins. Your expensive conditioned air likes nothing better than to move up and out of your home. And most homeowners, if you take the time to look, will discover that you are making it easy for that expensive air to blow out of your roof: there are gaps and cracks around pipes and ducts and chimneys and wall partitions - and sometimes there are literally 18" square open spaces where you can shine a flashlight and see down to the basement. Oh yes, there may be a thin layer of old rockwool or fiberglass insualtion - but the air moves right through that with little or no problem.
So fall in love with your attic. Get some help to seal up and block out all those cracks and gaps and holes: and then get yourself some real insulation. Blow in a thick, and I mean thick, luxurious carpet of cellulose or, if you can afford it, consider putting icynene foam on the slopes. It may never be your favorite place to hang out, but if you make some fairly modest investments (especially after rebates and tax credits) you can make your whole home cheaper to heat and less drafty.
