Environment
2007-07-30 15:23:00
Any new ways to save on energy costs?
ANSWER: Most folks don’t realize it, but the cost to heat and cool all of the homes in the U.S. is now averaging more than $115 Billion a year for the fuel and electricity. The average cost to heat and cool a home takes about 45% of the total energy a home will use. Then you add for water heating, about 14%, plus operating the appliances, electronic gear, such as TVs, recorders, garage door openers, light bulbs, which totals about another 41%, and you can see that there are quite a number of ways your money can “leak” out of your budget. But even though the amount of energy consumed will vary among different homes, there are a lot of ways you can lower your bills for energy related costs.
There are a number of capital investment systems you can purchase that are designed to allow you to operate your home much more efficiently than perhaps you do now. Before buying those systems, it makes some sense to do your homework to establish that the claimed savings that you “might” enjoy will actually come to pass. An energy audit can be as simple as you making an examination yourself to see if you can discover obvious places where “leaks” of energy are occurring now, and also to determine whether your appliances are working properly. Leaving lights on in rooms where no one is currently occupying space consumes some energy, and we usually don’t even think about that. Missing caulking or spaces around doors or windows where air can move is another item usually missed by a homeowner.
Alternatively, you can hire a professional team of inspectors to conduct a thorough energy examination of your home, wherein they use special equipment such as blower doors, infrared cameras, furnace efficiency instruments, and surface thermometers. This equipment allows them to find inefficiencies that a visual inspection could not detect, and they can also analyze previous energy bills, and might suggest implementing some alternative energy efficiency measures at the time of the audit. This professional energy audit, however, can be relatively expensive. Some utility companies offer energy audits for free or for a nominal charge. The extent of these audits can vary. Auditors from utility companies may or may not use special equipment, such as blower doors, or infrared cameras, and they may or may not check the performance of your heating system. You tend to get what you pay for, in most of these cases.
Before you purchase an energy-related product or system as a result of having an energy audit conducted, though, you should answer a couple of important questions. Questions like: What are my budgetary limits, if any? Which areas have I defined that are causing my greatest energy losses? How long am I willing to wait for the investment to pay for itself in energy savings? How much total time and money am I willing to spend on maintenance and repairs? Am I investing solely to save on my energy bills, or are other factors also important to me? Although installing caulking, weather stripping products, and insulation may not be as exciting or impressive as a ground-source heat pump, those energy efficiency measures are very often cost effective. And before you decide to install a heating or cooling system, you should first ensure that your home is properly and as completely as you can determine, weatherized. Using energy efficiently means reducing the demands for heating, cooling, and electricity, thereby allowing a smaller, more efficient, and less expensive system to be used.
Because of the high percentage of your energy bill that goes toward conditioning the air in your home, detecting heat losses and gains is a great place to start when deciding what measures may improve the energy efficiency of your home. Leaky windows and doors, open fireplace dampers, poorly insulated attics and walls, and cracks and holes in the walls and ceiling are all areas where heat can escape in the winter and enter in the summer. Heat can also escape through light fixtures, switches, and electrical outlets.
Appliances and equipment can also have a tremendous effect on your energy costs. Hot water heaters, stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers and clothes dryers can contribute to excessively high energy bills when they operate inefficiently. Poorly maintained, sized and inefficient heating and cooling systems can lead to high costs for space conditioning. When you decide to implement energy efficiency measures, you can determine the most appropriate product or system by investigating the options with your heating and air professional. More next month...
