Photo by Mike Forbes

The cold is upon us and our houses are going to see the challenge of keeping us warm soon enough. Hopefully we can go into the winter with a house that does this efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. I hear stories of people’s electric and gas bills regularly and can’t help think that some improvements in their existing systems’ efficiency couldn’t do anything but help and certainly not hurt.

This month, I’m going to write a bit about what little things you can do that will improve your ability to keep warm. I’m going to stay away from the utility bill pamphlet style of ignoring the do-it-yourself improvements and telling you only to turn your thermostat down and buy a new water heater. Those are good things to do, but I’d like to offer a couple up that you might not hear of as often…

#1: Have an energy audit done of your house by someone that knows what a blower door is (and has one too) and will do a thermal scan to boot. The gist of this audit is to identify air leaks in your house and help you strike a balance between good indoor air quality and leaky to the point of heating the outdoors with your furnace. There is actually a calculable number of what is termed Air Changes per Hour (ACH) that you want your house to do. Anything less than optimum means you live in a plastic bag and is bad for your health and anything more than optimum means you are losing precious heated air to the outdoors. An audit will tell you these numbers and the auditor will tell you what leaks need to be fixed or what other air handling methods you need to implement (i.e. running your whole has fan as was designed when you built the house).

Another critical thing that an audit will do is a test of your heating ducts. This is obviously something only done on houses that have forced air systems, but since most people have this I’ll address it here. It is interesting to note that most HVAC contractors are not able to install ducts properly. I know this will ruffle the feathers of some, but it is the case. If I remember correctly from my days of audit training, more than 40% of the heat you generate is lost to leaky ducts. Unless you live in a house where the ducts are completely in the living space, this heat is lost to the outdoors. Ducts in your attic or crawlspace are leaking heated air into those spaces in turn heating them. There is one way to seal ducts and that is with duct mastic available at Home Depot and it’s non-toxic, water based and easy to apply. I’m sure you can hire someone to apply it, but I would say it’s easy to do yourself as well. The gist is that you slobber it on all duct seams in a thick coating. I advocate all ducts be sealed tight, but some aren’t as accessible as others. The person performing your audit will do a duct test with the blower door and will show you which of your ducts are leaking most. The only auditor I know of in the area is Palouse Synergy Systems (www.palousesynergysystems.com).

#2: Get good window blinds. We installed double cellular shades on all of our windows and noticed a huge comfort improvement in our house. If you think about how much colder a window feels when you are near it versus a wall, you can see that blocking that heat transfer is a good thing. Manufacturers will claim outrageous R-values, which is misleading since the blind isn’t sealed on the edges. The benefit comes from blocking the radiant heat loss going toward and out the windows. I recommend the cellular shades that are either double or triple cell. If you are interested in who we used, e-mail me and I’ll let you know. We spent approximately $70/window.

Hopefully these two items spark some interest and can help you improve your bills/comfort during the winter.