We all depend on heating, cooling, lighting and hot water to provide comfort and convenience to our daily lives. But each of these necessities consume energy…expensive energy. And if you’re like most Atlanta-area homeowners, a large portion of your household budget goes toward these ongoing energy expenses.
If you wish your utility bills were lower, you are likely interested in learning ways to minimize your home’s energy consumption. Reducing your household energy usage not only lowers your monthly bills, it also lessens the amount of harmful emissions released into the environment. Plus, an energy-efficient home provides greater interior comfort and maintains a higher resale value.
Below are five areas of your home that have a major effect on energy efficiency and energy conservation:
1) Heating & Cooling
Without question, your biggest energy expenditure is the cost to heat and cool your home. On average, heating and cooling accounts for 56% of a household’s energy budget.
Regular maintenance is a significant factor toward keeping your heating and cooling systems operating at optimal efficiency. Dirty or malfunctioning components can make your system work harder, causing it to yield poor output while using excessive energy.
In addition, heating and cooling systems consume more energy as they age, so it costs more each year to provide your home with the same level of comfort. If your system is getting up in years, it may require an upgrade to capitalize on the technological advancements that boost energy performance. For example, variable-speed blowers and high-efficiency heating and cooling units are specially designed to produce greater comfort while using dramatically less energy.
Programmable thermostats are another excellent way to conserve energy with your heating and cooling system. These thermostats allow you to pre-program the interior temperature you wish your heating or A/C system to maintain. For example, you may wish to adjust the home’s temperature so the system does not heat or cool as much when nobody is home or when everyone is sleeping. Programmable thermostats can store multiple daily settings and also have a manual override feature that won’t affect the rest of the daily or weekly program.
2) Air Tightness
Visualize your home as a large energy tank. During the summer months, your A/C pumps the tank full of cool air. During the winter months, your furnace pumps the tank full of warm air. If your tank has leaks, you have to repeatedly pump in more cool or warm air to maintain a consistent indoor temperature. However, if your tank doesn’t have leaks, your A/C or furnace doesn’t have to work nearly as hard, thus conserving energy.
In other words, the more air tightness your home has, the less chance that your heated or cooled indoor air will leak out and the less chance that drafty or humid outside air will leak in. Air tightness is achieved by adequately insulating and sealing the shell of your home.
Adding insulation to your attic, exterior walls, floors, and other vulnerable parts of your home is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce household energy consumption. In fact, increasing your home’s insulation can reduce energy usage up to 40%.
In addition to insulation, caulking and weather-stripping also play a major role in improving a home’s air tightness. Sealing around doors, windows, vents, utility pipes and other gaps in the home’s exterior shell will help prevent costly air infiltration and exfiltration.
3) Air Ducts
Your home’s duct work is a branching network of large tubes. The ducts move air from your heating and cooling system into and out of each room. To do this, the ducts must run within the walls, floors, and ceilings, as well as go around bends and travel over long distances.
In most cases, the duct work is fashioned together from various sections. This creates a seam at each point the sections are joined together. If these seams are not sealed properly, they can leak air. This means some of the air you are paying to heat and cool is actually leaking out before it makes its way into your living areas.
This air could be leaking out behind walls, into the attic, within crawl spaces, or other places that it isn’t really needed. When this happens, the heated or cooled air just goes to waste. To compound matters, dust from these remote areas could also be leaking into the duct work through the poorly sealed seams.
You may be surprised to learn that air duct leakage is actually a very common problem in homes. Many people are losing up to 20% of their heated or cooled air this way.
4) Water Heater
Heating water accounts for about 13-18% of a home’s energy use. And most households have inefficient and poorly insulated tank-type water heaters. These systems work very hard at keeping an unnecessarily large volume of water hot all the time, even when it isn’t needed. As a result, tank-type models are generally the most inefficient type of water heater to own.
Conversely, tankless water heaters only heat water as it is needed, so they are much more energy-efficient than tank-type water heaters. They are also more compact in size than a conventional tank-type water heater. However, because there is no reserve of hot water in a tankless system, they can sometimes have trouble keeping up with a high demand for hot water, such as when a large household is using bathroom showers and the clothes washer simultaneously.
Hybrid-type water heaters provide the benefits of both tankless and tank-type water heaters. Like a tankless system, they do not keep a lot of hot water continually on standby. But similar to a tank-type system, they do maintain a small reserve of heated water. This reserve feature allows this unit to provide uninterrupted hot water to multiple locations simultaneously.
5) Lighting
Lighting accounts for approximately 10% of your home’s energy bill. Many homes still use traditional incandescent lighting, which is rapidly becoming an outdated technology. Traditional incandescent lighting wastes your energy dollars because 90% of the energy is given off as heat, not light.
The energy-efficient household lighting choices that are growing in popularity include the Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) and the Light-Emitting Diode (LED). Both CFL and LED bulbs use about a quarter of the energy that a comparable incandescent bulb would use. But CFLs last up to ten times longer, and LEDs last up to 25 times longer, than traditional incandescent bulbs.
In addition to bulbs, the proper placement of lighting fixtures also has a big effect on how efficiently they can illuminate an area. Furthermore, lighting controls such as timers, motion sensors and automatic shut-offs can also help improve the energy-efficiency of interior and exterior lighting.
Reliable is Committed to Helping You Save Energy
Reliable Heating & Air has a huge selection of high-efficiency heating and cooling systems, and we can perform a thorough sealing of your duct work. We can also upgrade your water heater, insulation, and lighting to reduce your home’s energy consumption.
In addition, we offer complete whole-house energy audits as well as home assessments. Before your home can be made more energy efficient, you need to know where you currently stand. That is the purpose of the home energy audit and the home assessment.
The Complete Home Energy Audit
Our whole-house energy audit is performed by a Building Performance Institute (BPI) certified auditor. This audit will include a thorough inspection and tests with specialized tools to identify problems with your home’s thermal envelope, leaky ducts, leaks around lighting, leaks around attic access doors and many other items that can make a home a poor energy performer.
After the inspection and testing is complete, the auditor will compile a thorough report to outline the recommended steps it will take to increase your home’s comfort level and decrease energy consumption.
The Home Assessment
Our home assessment is a walk-through and visual inspection performed by a BPI certified auditor. This visual assessment can help uncover potential energy-wasting areas in your home, such as inadequate insulation, duct problems, and air leakage.
Unlike the complete energy audit, no testing is performed or written report is given as part of the home assessment. However, if problems areas are noticed, most homeowners upgrade to the full and complete energy audit that includes the use of test equipment and provides a written report with the recommended steps to follow.
An Energy-Efficient Home Saves Money for Years to Come
An inefficient home wastes expensive energy, and will continue to do so until problems areas are corrected. But an energy-efficient home saves you money for many years to come. That’s why it is so important to have Reliable Heating & Air visit your home to check for proper energy performance.
After all, you and your family deserve the comfort, health, safety and cost-savings that a high-performance home can provide.