'We are happy to do an energy audit of you home and help you begin to not only save money on your utilities but also to help our planet for a greener tomorrow.''
We bring “Green Building” to a time where clients are concerned with long term cost of living in their home. From total encapsulation to tank less water heaters, every detail is attended to so you have the latest in the home building industry combined with classic and timeless detail.
Many of the country’s leader on energy efficiency suggest :
1. Make sure your walls and attic are well insulated.
Effective insulation slows the rate that heat flows out of the house in winter or into the house in summer, so less energy is required to heat or cool the house. If your house has no wall insulation, and it has more-or-less continuous wall cavities (such as conventional stud walls), blown-in insulation can greatly improve your comfort and save enough energy to be very cost-effective. (It rarely pays to blow additional insulation into already insulated walls.) If your attic is unfinished, it often pays to upgrade its insulation. Our expertise is more important than the insulation material you choose. Properly installed fiberglass, cellulose and most foam insulation materials vary little in their R-value (a rating of a material’s resistance to heat flow) or the heat conduction of the completed wall system. The key is “properly installed.” Ideally, the contractor will use an infrared camera during or after installation to look for voids. Stop air leaks!
2. Upgrade or replace windows.
If your windows are old and leaky, it may be time to replace them with energy-efficient models or boost their efficiency with additional weather-stripping.
3. Plant shade trees and shrubs around your house.
If your house is older, with relatively poor insulation and windows, good landscaping (particularly deciduous trees) can save energy, especially if planted on the house’s west side. In summer, the foliage blocks infrared radiation that would warm the house, while in winter the bare branches let this radiation come through. Of course, if your house has very good insulation and Energy Star or better windows, the effect is much, much smaller because the building shell itself is already blocking almost all the heat gain.
4. Replace an older furnace with a high-efficiency system and check you HVAC
If your furnace was built before 1995 and has a standing pilot, it probably wastes 35 percent of the fuel it uses, and it may be near the end of its service life. In this case, in climates with at least 4,500 to 5,000heating degree days, ACEEE recommends early replacement with a condensing furnace with annual efficiency of at least 90 percent. This type of furnace wastes no more than 10 percent of the natural gas you buy, and may save you as much as 27 percent on your heating bill. Today's best air conditioners use 30% to 50% less energy to produce the same amount of cooling as air conditioners made in the mid 1970s. Even if your air conditioner is only 10 years old, you may save 20% to 40% of your cooling energy costs by replacing it with a newer, more efficient model.
5. Improve the efficiency of your hot water system.
First, turn down the temperature of your water heater to the warm setting (120°F), particularly for fossil-fuel water heaters with their high standby losses. Second, insulate your hot water lines so they don’t cool off as quickly between uses. Third, use low-flow fixtures for showers and baths. While storage water heater standards were raised in 2001, it was probably not enough to justify throwing out an existing water heater that is working well. Advanced contractors are now installing “on demand” hot water circulating loops that use a small pump to accelerate delivery of hot water to remote fixtures, which works great with low-flow fixtures. These are activated when users turn on a bathroom or kitchen tap, and turn off when hot water reaches the fixture. In ACEEE’s opinion, a continuous recirculating “hotel” loop wastes enormous amounts of water heating energy, and electricity for pumping.
6. Replace incandescent lights with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs).
CFLs can save three-quarters of the electricity used by incandescent. Most people don’t think about the fact that the electricity to run a light bulb costs much more than the bulb itself. One of the new CFLs costs about $3, but it lasts 10,000 hours and uses only about 27 watts to generate as much light as a 100-watt incandescent bulb. During its life, it uses about $22 in electricity, so the total cost is about $25. A 100-watt incandescent bulb costs 50 cents, but lasts 1,000 hours so you need 10 of them ($5 to buy) to last 10,000 hours. In those 10,000 hours you will use 1,000 kilowatts of electricity, which will cost more than $80 at a national average price. So the lighting cost of the CFL is less than one-third of the cost for the incandescent. The best targets for replacement are 60- to 100-watt bulbs used several hours a day, because usage affects how long it takes to recover the investment.