After years of exhorting readers to make their houses more energy efficient, I decided it was time to take a hard look at my own.
Last fall I engaged a home performance specialist for an energy audit. The results showed that our 50-year-old house was performing only slightly worse than a brand-new house built to the standards of the 2006 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which all new houses in 22 states, including Michigan, where I live, are required to meet. (Virginia is one of the states that mandate compliance with the 2006 IECC. Maryland and the District require compliance with the 2009 IECC, which is stronger.)
We achieved this degree of energy efficiency because we had replaced our home's windows and added insulation to the walls and attic.
Nonetheless, the audit showed that there was room for improvement in two areas: air leaks throughout our house and heat loss in areas I had never considered -- our basement and the perimeter between the basement and the first floor and between the first and second floors.
Plugging the air leaks was an easy sell; we were well aware that many rooms were drafty in cold weather. Adding insulation did not take much persuading, either, once I saw the auditor's infrared pictures of our living and dining rooms, with wide blue streaks across the ceiling showing cold air pouring in through the space between the first and second floors.
Our auditor also had a few miscellaneous recommendations: using a panel to cover the leaky, louvered opening of our attic exhaust fan during winter, sealing the exposed ducts in our basement so our heating and cooling system would run more efficiently, and replacing a broken window in such a remote corner of our basement that we didn't notice that it couldn't be closed until the audit flagged it.
Now that the work is complete, we're happy with the results: added comfort and energy savings. Our Home Energy Rating System index, commonly called the HERS index, would qualify us for an Energy Star rating if our house was new. Compared with our initial HERS index of 106, our score improved by about 20 percent, going down to 84. (A HERS index of 100 means a house meets the energy standard of the 2006 IECC. The lower a HERS index, the more energy efficient the house.)
And our initial rate of air changes per hour, known as ACH, was .50, meaning half the entire volume of our heated or cooled air was replaced every hour. Our ACH improved by 20 percent to .40.
We also learned that some aspects of remodeling never change. Even a job as small as this one will cost more than you expect and take longer than you imagine -- in our case, four weeks instead of the promised two days.
When Nate Munson of EverGreen EnergySavers in Manchester, Mich., who did our energy audit and the follow-up work, arrived with his two-man crew to begin the job, everyone was confident that the work could be completed in the two days he had scheduled.
It was soon apparent that this time frame was overly optimistic.
The first problem was the rigid Thermax insulation for the basement walls. For the first time in his nearly seven years of home energy upgrading, Munson said, every outlet within 50 miles was sold out. Apparently many other homeowners in southeast Michigan also had decided to make their houses more energy efficient.
By Katherine Salant
Article Source: The Washington Post
Back to Ceiling Insulation Articles & Resources
