DIY Solar Power System
Fifty ways to cut your home energy bills right now!
December
Do It Yourself (1)
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You can easily conduct a home energy audit yourself. A simple walk-through can spot the more obvious energy losses, the one that cost the most. Drafts or air leaks can suck up 5 to 30 percent of your home’s energy, so that’s a good place to start. On a very cold or very hot day, walk around the inside of your home feeling for temperature differences around windows, doors, fireplace dampers, attic hatches, and window air conditioners. Also check under sinks for gaps around pipes and around electrical outlets, especially on exterior walls. The solution is insulation, weatherstripping, and caulking.
Next, take a closer look at those windows and doors. Depending on how much energy you’re losing through them, more energy-efficient windows may be a good investment. Before spending the money, though, consider hiring an expert who can give you exact costs and estimate how long it will take for energy savings to pay you back.
A better way to find drafts is to do a pressurization test. To perform the test, close all exterior doors, windows, and fireplace flues. For safety, turn off all gas-burning appliances with pilot lights. Then tur n on all exhaust fans, typically in the bathrooms and kitchen, to pull air out of the house. Finally, walk around inside the house perimeter with a buring incense stick or candle and watch the smoke or flame point away from flame or smoke indicates how much of a draft there is by making the results of the draft visible. Remember to restart any gas appliances you turned off for the test.
Besides drafts, many homes lose energy through walls and ceilings. Insulation is installed in walls, as they are built to keep expensive interior air inside the house. You can check your home’s insulation in various ways. The easiest is to look at the building plans if you have them, as they will indicate the R value of the home when built. An R value is a laboratory standard that defines a material’s resistance to heat transfer. The higher the number, the more it will resist the transfer of heat through it. Otherwise, you may need to crawl up into the attic and below the house to see what insulation is exposed and try to read or estimate its R value.
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December
Understanding Heat Transfer
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Here’s how it works: heat energy seeks equilibrium. That is, heat on the outside of a cooler house wants to get in. Heat on the inside wants to go outdoors and play. If only nice dense walls stood in its way, heat transfer would be very slow. But most houses have doors and windows and lots of little air leaks to speed up the transfer.
Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem if climate maintenance was free. Unfortunately, keeping a house cool in hot weather and warm in a cold climate costs lots of bucks. When purchased, that high-priced warm (or cool) air needs to stay where you put it. The trick is to minimize heat transfer through the house’s wall, doors, and windows.
How efficiently is your home using the energy you buy for it? You can get a good answer with a home energy audit . You can do the audit yourself, hire a contractor to do some or all of it, or ask your energy provider to do it for you.
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