The latest from Washington is a program that puts you in a position to make rapid gains in energy savings.  While what this means yet is still unclear, you can be sure that an Energy Audit will play a key role. Many local utilities, counties and cities have already made energy audits available. The word on the street is that Energy Audits will be free or nearly free for most Americans in the coming year.  What an audit provides is an assessment of the largest area of energy consumption as well as a diagnosis of the comfort in the home including air sealing & insulation.  A good auditor will include the efficiency of the heating, cooling and ventilation system in the home, which is the largest energy expense in every home.


A COMMON RETROFIT – hot water heating & furnace upgrades

A cold or hot room, a hidden draft or a noisy furnace that clicks off & on and running out of hot water are all are sure signs of needing an upgrade.  These are common discomforts that are easily resolved with simple energy saving retrofits… here’s why it works ->

 

Being true to the first laws of thermodynamics: Heat migrates to cold and moist migrates to dry. Also, latent heat contains moisture, so if we are able to remove or neutralize some of the dryness in the air, we will be more easily able to infiltrate colder rooms with heat. The long and short of it: warmer, moist air will more quickly find the cold and dry rooms.

So we can alleviate discomfort to a great degree by eliminating combustion air, and the only way to do this is to use sealed-combustion heating and water heating appliances. One of the more effective and efficient ways to do this is by converting an old furnace to a hot water air handler and installing a sealed-combustion tankless or high-efficiency tank water heater and using the heat exchange of water to air instead of direct firing (fire to air) to create space heat. This also opens the way for future energy improvements using alternative sources such as solar thermal. In any case, making sure we do not need to drag a lot of dry cold air into the building for combustion is a sure way to neutralize air dryness and make the building considerably more energy efficient.