Homeowners only have two more months to take advantage of up to $1500 in tax credits for energy upgrades. Eligible improvements include insulation, air sealing, high efficiency furnaces, and more.
Cut home energy use by 20-40% just by doing basic measures such as sealing and insulating your house. Find out how you can benefit from these tax credits before they expire on December 31, 2010.
Winter is just around the corner – time to think about how you can button up your house to make sure it’s comfortable without costing you a fortune in energy bills. The Daily Green has put together a great list of easy weekend projects to help you winterize your home.
For even higher impact on your home’s comfort and energy bills, contact Recurve so we can provide expertise on projects such as:
Fall is the perfect time to start prepping your house for winter. The U.S. Department of Energy suggests these 5 steps to ensure that your home stays comfortable this winter without costing you an arm and a leg:
In this illuminating post by Grist, we learn through a recent survey by The Earth Institute at Columbia University that Americans really don’t know jack about saving energy.
The largest group, nearly 20 percent, cited turning off lights as the best approach—an action that affects energy budgets relatively little. Very few cited buying decisions that experts say would cut U.S. energy consumption dramatically, such as more efficient cars (cited by only 2.8 percent), more efficient appliances (cited by 3.2 percent) or weatherizing homes (cited by 2.1 percent).
About 2.8 percent of those responding said they could save energy by sleeping or relaxing more, compared with 2.1 percent who said they could do so by insulating their homes (can you guess which is actually more effective?).
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist asserts:
The theme of the confusion was that participants tended to name steps that involved doing less or using less of things — turning off lights, turning down thermostats — rather than solutions that allow them to get the same amount of light and heat through less energy (via insulation and LED bulbs). That gets at a key difference between conservation and efficiency. The first means using less; the second means getting the same results through more intelligent use of resources. Both have a place, but it’s a problem if people understand all of efficiency as “sacrifice.” A home retrofit that cuts $500 off your heating bills for the year isn’t a sacrifice — it’s a financial and environmental win.
Here’s a piece written by Matt Golden and Jess Chamberlain for Sunset Magazine on best practices for keeping your house cool, the environmentally friendly way.
To keep a house cool, it’s really about either:
In a retrofit situation, you have to first assess what your possibilities are:
This really affects what the best approach to take is.
For an average house in a cooling climate with an attic, we’d recommend reducing the cooling load as much as possible and utilizing passive cooling:
1. Air sealing
2. Adequate attic insulation (min. R-38) to create a thermal barrier
3. Radiant barrier, if there are ducts in attic; on roof decking or in attic
4. Low-E glazing on windows
5. Whole-house fan
This route is very cost-effective from a long-term standpoint; i.e. you’re not paying to condition the air, you just pay for the equipment and installation.
The other option is to actively cool the house, in which case you’d invest in the fundamentals (such as air sealing and insulation), then install a high SEER-rated AC unit (min. 16-18 SEER rating) designed to ACCA’s manuals J, S, D & T. If air handling equipment is located in the attic we would recommend encapsulating the attic with air-impermeable spray foam and bringing the attic into the building envelope. This prevents hot attic air (150˚F+) from infiltrating the duct system.
Easy Cooling Tips:
Here are some easy and effective home energy fixes you can do around the house for $2 to $90:
The gaps you can find around the windows and doors of the average American house add up to the equivalent of a hole in the wall that measures 10 inches by 10 inches.
Your house has more leaks than the CIA. There are cracks all over the place. Your doors and windows don’t quite meet their frames; there are tiny spaces where the walls almost join the floor; there are open areas around your electrical and plumbing outlets. And these little gaps eat energy. In fact, an amazing amount of heat in the winter – or cool air in the summer – escapes through them. But you have two simple weapons to fight with: caulking and weatherstripping.
Energy Facts
Caulking vs. Weatherstripping
Leak Patrol
Excerpted from 30 Simple Energy Things You Can Do To Save The Earth, by The EarthWorks Group.
Leaking ducts can reduce the efficiency of your heating system by up to 20%. Ducts are a critical part of making your home energy efficient. If they’re leaking air – which they almost always do – or if they’re losing heat because they’re uninsulated, they’re contributing as much to global warming as they are to keeping you warm.
Energy Facts
Simple Ways to Save Energy
If your ducts aren’t insulated: Turn on your furnace and feel for air escaping around the duct joints. If you feel any (and you probably will), hire a certified contractor such as Recurve to seal them with mastic.
If your ducts are already insulated: It’s harder to find out if your ducts leak. You can expose the joints (where the ducts bend, for instance) to check – but it’s best to leave it to an expert.
Excerpted from 30 Simple Energy Things You Can Do To Save The Earth, by The EarthWorks Group.
A while back, National Geographic put out a great guide with 10 steps to cutting the excess carbon out of your life.
Weight control and health tend to go hand in hand—and what’s true for our waistlines also holds true when it comes to the weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and the health of the planet. Excess pounds of carbon dioxide are raising the earth’s temperature and putting coastlines, not waistlines, at risk. Yet for a lot of people, the idea of going on a carbon diet to reduce pounds, much less tons, of the stuff seems airy when there’s nothing to hold onto.
Think of pounds of CO2 as inflated balloons: One pound of CO2 would fill a balloon about two and a half feet wide, and the amount of energy each of us uses every day, just to power our homes and drive our cars, would fill 47 of them. Imagine that for each member of your family 47 of those balloons are added to your home each day. In a week, a family of four would pack in 1,316 balloons, in a month 5,703, and in a year 68,432—enough to fill a building nine stories tall and 100 feet on each side. You wouldn’t be able to find your house in it. It’s no wonder we’re smothering our planet in greenhouse gases. The more balloons of CO2 in the air, the more heat they trap in our atmosphere. So here’s a 10-step carbon diet—a program to keep the greenhouse gas out of 142 balloons every week.
1. Wash your clothes in cold water instead of hot.
• • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 9 per week
Start with something easy. Washing machines produce over 500 pounds of CO2 a year when run on hot water. But your clothes will be just as clean and may even last longer when laundered in cold water.
2. Use a drying rack.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 14 per week
Dryers produce about 1,450 pounds of CO2 per year and the high heat damages fabric. So get more life out of your garments, lower your electric bill and spare the planet by drying at least half of your clothes on a rack or line. Plus, sunlight is the most effective stain-remover around.
3. Seal and weatherstrip your home.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 17 per week
This summer, sealing your home will ensure you don’t lose the cool air you’re paying for. Caulking and weatherstripping doors, windows and any cracks or openings in walls will save about 225 pounds of CO2 per season to run your AC. It pays off even more in the winter when you need to trap the heat; every year, you save 640 pounds of CO2 if you have natural gas heat and 470 pounds if you have electric heat.
4. Insulate.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 41 per week (natural gas heating), 30 per week (electric heat)
Insulating your home is a bit more demanding and best handled professionally. There are a number of insulating options better than fiberglass, which presents a breathing hazard from airborne glass particles and formaldehyde released during installation. Some green-building specialists claim that spray foam insulation is the most efficient and cost-effective variety, even though it’s usually composed of petroleum-based polyurethane. If you choose spray foam, consider a blend that includes soybean oil, such as BioBase501, to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. Another alternative, recycled denim insulation, uses a more eco-friendly material but isn’t as efficient an insulator as polyurethane foam.
5. Wrap your water heater and turn down the temperature.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 16 per week
Insulating your water heater with a simple DIY kit, available at most hardware stores for $20, will save you 300 pounds of CO2 annually. As water heaters can account for up to 13 percent of your utility bill, set the temperature to 120° F. Turning it down from 140° F will save 479 pounds of CO2 annually. If you’re really up for a renovation and it makes sense for your household needs, switch from a conventional water heater to an on-demand heater.
6. Run the dishwasher only when full.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 17 per week
Wait until you fill your dishwasher before turning it on and always set it to the energy saver mode.
7. Turn off your TV, DVD player, computer and cable box.
• • • • •
Burst balloons: 5 per week
Even while idling in “standby” mode, your home entertainment center and computer consume energy. Plug them into a power strip and turn it off after you shut down your electronics.
8. Clean your refrigerator.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 15 per week
Take a look at the top of your fridge—cluttered much? Clear it off. Those piled-up plastic containers and cereal boxes can prevent your fridge from venting heat effectively. Then go for the more demanding project: Remove the grill at the base of the fridge (or turn the fridge around) to clean the coils.
9. Compost Your Food Scraps.
• • • • •
Burst balloons: 5 per week
Food waste stored in airless landfills is eaten by bacteria that release massive amounts of methane, a gas 21 times more heat-trapping than CO2. Composting ten pounds of food a week will keep five balloons out of the air.
10. Take the bus or ride your bike.
• • •
Burst balloons: 3 per week (bus), 12 per week (bike)
The average 12-mile commute to work produces roughly 12 pounds of CO2 (depending on your mileage, you produce one pound of CO2 for every mile driven). Even diesel buses are greener than cars when you factor in the number of passengers on board. Give the bus a shot once a week for a year. Or give your legs and heart a workout by commuting on a bike and save even more.
To sum it all up, after a year of these efforts, you’ll have kept over 7,000 balloons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. That’s about 3.5 tons of CO2 off the average carbon footprint.
Respiratory allergies and asthma issues are very common, and both are made worse by breathing irritants in the air. However, it is possible to make sure the air you’re breathing at home is clean and free of the things that aggravate allergies and trigger asthma attacks.
Symptoms such as coughing and wheezing due to allergens or asthma triggers are a sign that your home is not healthy or performing well, especially if you’ve already taken measures such as getting rid of carpet.
The common culprit behind poor indoor air quality is dirty air being pulled into your home through an unsealed duct system or through other leakage areas. Since the duct system is usually in the crawlspace or attic, it can pull in outside pollutants (like ozone or pollen from outside or mold spores and dust from the attic) and trap them in your home. Sealing leaky ducts can often make a significant difference at home for people with allergies and asthma, but it is often overlooked as a solution. For the same reason, air sealing in the attic and crawlspace are also highly recommended.
It is also important to properly ventilate your home and clean/change your furnace filter regularly – or better yet, install a high efficiency air filtration system. If you take all of these steps, you can breathe easy knowing that the air in your home is healthy.