Green & Active
By far the worst energy problem will be air losses around the house. Your 117 vac wall outlets will generally always be leaking air, and there goes your cool in the Summer and your warm in the Winter. Get some expanding foam in a spray can and after removing the wall plate and the electricity, give each outlet a generous shot of expanding foam behind the outlet, filling the whole cavity.. This will be a major smart energy server. Inspect the weatherstripping around your doors and replace it so that all the doors are tightly sealed. Most houses have ventilating fans for the bathrooms and kitchen but unfortunately they seldomly perfectly seal. Fireplaces usually have a Louver that can be closed when the fireplace is not in use. And these seldomly close well. Chimneys and furnaces are generally a long way from airtight. What we are looking for is a rating that shows that there is about a single air change an hour. Some are looking for an air exchange of less than one an hour, but I have long felt that this is just too tight, and particularly if this is new building which will be leaching formaldahydes from the glues used in plywood. Several companies now have a special door that can be temporarily instaled to measure the air loss.
Caulking around the windows and seams is also important, of course. So the general recommendation is to tighten up the house first before anything else. The next step is insulation and the standards are continually rising on how much is needed. R13 used to be the magic number for wall insulation; now it is R40. Attic ceilings at R40 are reasonable, and a nice attic thermostatically controled attic exhaust fan should keep the ceiling heat down nicely.
Another simple way to save money (and CO2) is to turn off the heating and cooling of unused spaces. All the various areas around my house are zoned and I have a gozinta and a gozouta valve at each zone which is usually a room area. I do not heat the kids bedrooms in the Winter, since they do not live here any more. But when the kids all come home for Christmas, I turn their respective bedroom heaing valves back on a few days before their anticipated arrival..
A final point that you should consider is hydronic heat. It is very quite and very efficient compared with forced air heating. One little green pump extracts the heat when needed from a 250 gallon hot water storage tank supplied by 8 hot water solar panels. The affect of the hydronic system is very different from the forced air systems in my previous houses. With a tight house, there is very little air movement and things do not get dusty as much and the air stratafies, with the warmest air being at your feet. Your brain uses the temperature sensation of your feet to determine whether your body is hot or cold. Since the floor is heated, the end result is you have a warm fuzzy feeling even when the overall temperature is about 3 to 4 degrees cooler than a forced air system. Similarly, in the Summertime, if you circulated cold water in the floor instead of using an airconditioner pushing freezing air at you, your feet once again would determine that you are cool even though the temperature is 3 to 4 degrees warmer than the setting you would use on your airconditioner. This will be a major savings in airconditioning unneeded. The same solar panels could be used to cool water during the cooler nightime temperatures. Four water switches and another tank for storing the cold from the previous nightime would be all that would be required.
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