Taking energy saving measures at home is worthwhile

Friday, February 11, 2011

In January the sun hangs low in the sky, but it reflects off the snow and floods through the big windows on the south side of our house. On Martin Luther King Day the thermometer read 21 degrees outside, but 70 degrees inside – and the furnace hadn’t run in days. The fire in the wood stove had burned out at 3 or 4 a.m., but the sun drove the indoor temperature up more than a degree each hour. It was still be in the high sixties at 9 that night, because there’s a lot of thermal mass in our center chimney and in the extra-thick sheet rock in our walls.

The power of solar heat shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has jumped into a toasty-warm car that’s been sitting in the sun on a cold winter day. And with that power comes the pleasure of sitting in a sunny room in the winter, with a view of snowy fields. But you rarely see homes that are built to take advantage of the sun;  hardly anybody designs a house to put the biggest windows on the south side, and few bother to clear enough trees to let the sunshine in. 

The reverse is also true.  Recently, we rented a house in Bethel, Maine, and found that there weren’t any shades or curtains on the windows to keep heat from flowing out into the cold northern nights.  Low-emissivity glass is partly at fault here, because it sharply reduces the heat of the sun coming in your windows – and provides a false sense of security for those who don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to put attractive shades in all their windows.  But even the cheapest shades or curtains can keep you cool in the summertime and warm in winter.

Twenty-five years ago energy-saving ideas were common topics of conversation.  Real-estate manias and falling oil prices snuffed out that flame, but at today’s energy prices it’s quite easy to save $2,000 a year in future energy costs by carefully planning the construction of a new home. Put $2,000 a year, over the course of a working lifetime, into an IRA account, and you can retire with an extra million dollars.  

There won’t be many new homes built in 2011, but three key principles can help you save energy in the home you’re living in now:

• Heat rises.

• Heat radiates

• When warm, moist air – even a little bit of air – escapes out through doors, windows or walls, there is a big price to pay.

If you put up a ladder in a room with a cathedral ceiling, you’ll find that it’s a lot warmer up high than it is at floor level.  If you have big rooms with high ceilings, your only reasonable course of action in the winter time is to close them off when not in use.  Heat also rises to the second floor of your house, so close the doors to all upstairs rooms before you go downstairs. And close your shades every night.    

A wood stove can, of course, cut your heating bill to zero if you’re willing to do the work and put up with a little bit of mess.  The trees you cut for firewood will grow back, taking carbon dioxide and pollutants out of the air as they grow;  and the fuel they provide won’t have to be pumped out of the ground, transported halfway around the world, refined, and transported again.  We use ours just on cold nights, but it’s awfully nice to have when the power goes out ...

That whistlin’ wind

Now let’s turn to those drafts.  Obviously, it’s a bad thing to have cold air come into your home, but there’s a much larger problem at work here.  Winter air is very dry, and it greedily sucks up any moisture from cooking, showers, or human breath.  It takes a tremendous amount of energy to heat or evaporate water, so the humidity in your home is a precious resource.  

Unfortunately, your precious water vapor is very eager to escape into the night – much more eager than warm, dry air.  Old homes, in particular, need to be tightened up, and even the tightest homes develop drafts over time.

The best time to caulk and tighten is on a cold windy day, when you can literally feel the drafts.  Even the newest homes can have leaks around electrical outlets (the ones on exterior walls), because the electrician has to cut the vapor barrier to access the box.  Wherever you feel a draft, install a gasket (an inexpensive piece of foam rubber made for the purpose) under the face plate.  If you have double hung windows – or anything other than casements – check for leaks and use rope caulk (wonderful stuff!) to neatly seal the cracks.

Doors are a bigger problem, because you can’t seal them up. Try buying new gaskets for the door frame, and if that doesn’t help seek the assistance of a carpenter. You’ll also want to minimize the use of your warm and wonderful fireplace, because the powerful draft that goes up your chimney is sucking all the heat out of your house.

Your clothes dryer does the same thing, but you can purchase a simple device for the hose to your electric clothes dryer – you can’t do this with a gas dryer – that will allow you to blow the warm, moist air of the dryer into your house.  Flip a switch, and the airflow will go back outside in the summer.  If you have a very “tight” house with a great vapor barrier you might find that the resulting air becomes too moist, but in most homes the winter air is dryer than a desert.  It takes a lot of energy to restore moisture, even with a “cool” humidifier, so this simple trick can save hundreds of dollars during the course of a winter. 

Summer cooling

The best thing you can do to stay cool in the summer is to plant a tree or several trees, on the south side of your house.  Keep your windows open all night to take advantage of the cool of early morning, and then shut them as soon as the temperature outside rises above the temperature inside. Trim the trees up to the 20-foot level so that they don’t cut off any winter sun.   

Gluttonous appliances

It goes without saying that you should turn off electric lights and appliances when they’re not needed.  Especially outdoor lighting, which dims everyone’s view of the night-time sky;  and you should also pay attention to appliances that suck a lot of juice.  How do you tell whether that old TV set or PC monitor is an energy hog?  Feel around the top and the back to see whether it’s radiating heat.  If it’s warm, you’re burning dollar bills.  A “Kill-a-watt” energy meter will tell you for sure.

In the summertime it can pay to unplug radios and televisions when not in use, because older models suck up energy – and radiate significant heat – even when they are turned off.  And replace that inefficient refrigerator, because it’s sucking up electricity and heating your house.

Gluttonous cars and trucks

Every time you burn a gallon of gasoline or heating oil the entire gallon has to go into the air as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or some other chemical compound. 

University of New Hampshire scientist Barry Rock says that the average car emits five pounds of pure carbon (think of a small bag of charcoal) for every gallon of gasoline burned; and those five pounds of charcoal are joined with a much greater weight of oxygen to make 18 pounds of carbon dioxide. And you have to consider the energy that was expended to get oil out of the ground, transport it to the United States, refine it, and transport it to your home or your friendly local Sunoco station.

While we’re on the topic of gas guzzlers, we’re still seeing a lot of trash fly out of the back of pickup trucks on the way to the transfer station.  Trash can lids, full trash bags, loose paper ... once I even saw a mattress that had fallen out.  How do you not notice a mattress?

For further information on home heating and all sorts of other energy-related topics, call Karen Cramton at Nashua Energy Options (located in the building attached to the Post Office; 465-7400), or visit your local library. It probably still has dozens of books from the heyday of energy conservation, a quarter-century ago.

John Lumbard is a partner at Lumbard Investment Counseling in Hollis. He also writes for a blog, http://WeElectedYou.org, which talks about the underfunding of Social Security and Medicare and the danger that compounding interest poses for our federal debt. He lives in Hollis.