The Greened House Effect

There’s a hole in my house.  I’m not kidding.

Actually, there are hundreds of holes in my leaky old house, and all together, they add up to a size which is roughly equivalent to me leaving one of the windows wide-open all year round.  That’s right – it’s as though, through the bitter cold of winter and the sweltering heat of summer, I’m trying to heat and cool the great outdoors.

How did I find this out?  I hired a “HERS” Rater to do a full diagnosis of my energy use at home.  “HERS” stands for Home Energy Rating System, and is administered by RESNET (Residential Energy Services Network), a non-profit organization which helps to set standards for energy performance in buildings.  Basically, a RESNET trained HERS rater has the knowledge and tools to come to your home, tell you how efficient or inefficient your home is, and point you in the right direction to solve your energy use problems.

Our HERS rater was Andrew Frowine of SaveGreenUSA (www.savegreenusa.net). “Often we aren’t brought in soon enough,” Andrew said.  “The best approach is to evaluate what you have before you start throwing money into it.  I tell people, let’s look at the basic shell of the home, make it as tight as feasible, and then we can help you draw a roadmap to lay out what repairs might have the best benefit to you.”  First, we sat down around our kitchen table for a cup of coffee while he asked why we were interested the HERS testing and what our goals were.  We told him about our goal of bringing “this old house” into the new energy economy to help solve economic, climate, and national security issues, and he actually listened with a straight face.  Andrew really “got” what we were after, and after our talk he began setting up his equipment to show where our little blue house was failing us.

The testing began with a series of blower-door tests.  This contraption mounts in one of the open doors of your home, completely covering the opening except for a fan mounted in the bottom.  The fan is connected to a digital air pressure meter and is controlled by a computer which interprets data generated by the various tests.  Essentially, it’s able to determine how much your home leaks, allowing heat and humidity to escape in the winter time, or heat and humidity to enter during the summer, compromising the efficiency and comfort of your home.  It then assembles other data collected by the HERS rater to give a whole picture of your energy use.

After the automated tests, Andrew made the rounds testing different zones in our house and even individual switch-plates and electrical outlets to see exactly where our big leaks were.  We learned how recessed lighting is a major culprit, but also how I opened up a whole slew of gaps in the building “envelope” when I cut into the knee-wall in the kids’ room to put in built-in book shelves, failing to properly seal around the frames.  Aside from those “aha!” moments, some of the known leaks, like the rotting old attached garage, came as no surprise.

Next, he used a special camera with thermal imaging capabilities to show where heat was leaking into our air-conditioned home (or ouut in the winter time), bringing southeast Ohio’s signature high-summer humidity with it.  Andrew measured the size of the home, the size and number of windows, input data from our electricity and natural gas bills.  He also told the computer what type of insulation we had, and the size and efficiency ratings of our furnace, air-conditioner, and water heater.  No stone was left unturned, and we were amazed at how thorough the information gathering was.

A few days after Andrew’s battery of tests, we received a detailed packet of information from him which spelled out the failures in our home’s energy use.  It included some easy-to-read graphic displays of issues in our home and Andrew’s expert opinions as to where our energy-efficiency dollars might be best spent.

In the end, our house scored better than we expected – a HERS score of 84, which beats the benchmark house which is set at the baseline of 100 (scoring above 100 means your house is relatively inefficient, while scoring below means it’s relatively more efficient than the benchmark test home – a score of zero would be a “net zero” home, which means that it uses only the energy it creates, as through solar or wind power).  Shortly after moving in ten years ago, we hired a contractor to blow cellulose insulation into the walls, which had no insulation whatsoever.  We had also changed out a few of the worst doors and windows, so we had expected a better than average score.

Still, a HERS score of 84 is a long way from zero, and we realized that we had a long road to travel.  The map we’ve chosen to get there?  A Deep Energy Retrofit – taking a whole-house, all-systems approach which would bring us as close to net-zero as possible, and help the Wilsons have the biggest positive effect on the economy, climate change, and national security that we can.