GRCCL Newsletter Jan 2010
View the PDF with images (starts on page 1, continues on page 7) or read the transcription below:
Hello Energy Check! It's the innocuous name for a Blacksburg- based company that performs Home Performance Assessments, aka Energy Audits. I was initially squeamish about the $350 price tag of the basic audit, but I ran some calculations. My house uses roughly 1,100 therms during six heating months (in excess of the monthly usage for heating water). At an average cost of $1 per therm, my heating bill is $1,100 per year. In the three summer cooling months, our family is fairly conservative. We just open a lot of windows, making our cooling cost about $40 per month in addition to our normal electric consumption. So we spend over $1,200 a year to heat and cool our house. If I could find a way to cut that by 20%, I could recoup the cost of the energy-saving advice in the second year.
Joe Mugavero, the enthusiastic Building Analyst Professional, aka The Auditor, was at my door at 9:00 am on a rainy Monday morning. We sat down for a few minutes and he explained the audit process and asked about my house's quirks and my personal goals for the outcome. The first step was the exterior review. He measured the dimensions of the house to use later in air movement calculations, and surveyed all facets of the structure's exterior. It turns out the audit process isn't just about energy savings. It's also about long-term durability, and looks at things like positive drainage of rainwater and gutter/downspout performance. My house was OK, although I was a little embarrassed by the fresh plant springing out of my chock- full gutters. Time to get on the roof.
Next up for the audit was a combustion check on my gas-fired water heater and boiler. Chalk up another point for the assessment process. Energy Check takes a hard look at any health and safety issues in the house. I learned my boiler is in good shape, but the 15-year-old water heater is inefficient and doesn't exhaust very well. Under worst case air flow conditions, Joe showed me how the unit could actually backdraft and leak carbon monoxide into the basement. Yikes! Joe, ever cool and collected, said "Relax. It's the worst case condition. Install a CO detector next to it, and work on a replacement plan. No need to evacuate the family."
The final activity, and the one usually associated with the audit, was the blower-door test. Energy Check installed the test apparatus across my front door and induced a vacuum throughout the house to check overall performance. Guess what? The old gal is pretty leaky. I scored a 0.59 ACH (Air Changes per Hour). In layman's terms, the air in my house is completely exchanged for outside air every 100 minutes. The goal, for optimum efficiency and health, is 0.35 ACH, or an exchange every 3 hours. While the test was running, Joe used a nifty infrared camera to show me all the places in the house where I was losing my expensive heated air. I thought I knew my house pretty well, but was surprised. In full-color detail of red and blue infrared, we noted missing insulation areas, a lot of leaky window trim, and a host of other trouble spots.
After all the action, Joe sat down and wrote up a detailed report, complete with a long list of recommendations. During our closing discussion, he pointed out that Energy Check also serves as a contractor, and can provide estimates for a wide range of efficiency- related services. A higher level energy audit would have provided me some detailed cost-benefit analyses of all the suggestions. However, Joe was helpful in explaining the basics of building science and highlighting the areas of greatest bang-for-buck.
In total, it was a great experience. I highly recommend it to any homeowner in our neighborhood of lovable, leaky houses. I'm confident the knowledge and direction will pay for itself in short order, but for the skeptics out there, I plan to provide updates on my progress and utility bill savings over the course of the next year.