EnerGuide Audit

[da]

Thanks to a heads-up last month by nobodyhere & psychedelicbike, this morning we got our house re-assessed by the local energy-audit services. This is the twilight days of the federal grant which reimburses homeowners for energy upgrades, and we squeaked in for a small (but worthwhile) cash savings.

Surprises: our old score (from the first assessment, four years ago) went down, due to a few evaluation criteria changes in the intervening four years. The old score went from 49 to 45, which worked to our advantage in terms of the grant: a tidy $378.00. That's actually more than I expected, because all we've done in the interim is insulating. In the balance, I guess I'm not surprised by our new EnerGuide score, which is... 50.

Oh, and according to them, our retrofits are estimated to reduce our energy needs by 13%, and reduce CO2 emissions by 1.5 tonnes per year. Go, us.

He recommended wall insulation in the basement (which continues to look prohibitively expensive, but he claims could save us 25-50% of our energy needs), caulking around the basement headers to reduce air leakage (which I suppose I could do myself, if slowly), a better seal on the attic-access door in our bedroom, outlet covers (the childproof kind) throughout the house to reduce air leaks, and lastly, replacing windows, as a lower priority item. I sort of take issue with their low priority for windows: their claim is that you don't see so much of an improvement replacing them; they will continue to radiate a fair bit of heat. He joked that they could rename their program "The don't bother replacing windows program." But in our case, I think we are leaking a lot of air around the windows, which are metal and slide horizontally. We can't add storms, we can't even easily put up the shrink-wrap stuff, due to the window design.

Still, their list of recommendations is shorter than it was the last time, since we've done all of the weatherstripping and insulating they recommended for the main and 2nd floor. And the house is warmer and less drafty than it was beforehand.

At the end I chatted with the assessor about their work. They've been around longer than the federal grant program, and they don't see their amount of work going down too much after the program ends. There will be a new grant program from the Conservatives, which should start up soon. From the looks of it, the new program will cost the consumer more at the outset, and get them a bigger grant afterward, so it's a shell-game that hurts people who can't lay out $300 upfront. Why is this a good idea? Only in that it improves the odds that people will sign up for the reassessments, I suppose.

...Now for this morning's second bit of fun, I'm waiting for Urban Wildlife to show up and (ideally) install a temporary Skunk Exclusion Barrier.

Comments

[nobodyhere.livejournal.com]

They told us we didn't need to replace windows either, but we replaced a couple anyway. Scraping and painting wooden window frames isn't my idea of fun. (Plus our house only had four windows that needed replacing -- two 1945s (done) and two 1978s.)

They're keen on having us insulate the basement walls, too. I like the idea of insulating the basement walls from the outside, which is even more expensive.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

We probably will replace some over the next few years, in our never-ending quest to test philosophically whether if you replace the entire house, it's still the same house.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they're aware of this, but perhaps you can pass some info to me: it's clearly bad to seal off all the airflow in and out of your house. There is certainly too much airflow (and I'm biased because in the dry west evaporative coolers work really really well provided your house isn't too sealed up) but how do you make sure you have enough air transfer to keep the house livable and not subject to all the problems a hermetically sealed house has? It is just so complicated to reach that point that it is practically impossible for the average homeowner to do?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

bats22 is of course the expert on this sort of thing. But my understanding is that it's damn hard to make this happen in a house as old and leaky as ours is. After all, we're still sucking in some air from the outside for the heating system, which runs a lot on days like the ones last week when it was -18°C outside.

The bigger concern, I think, is where your airflow into your house is coming from: I'm sure I read a while ago about people who somehow had managed to be sucking a lot of their incoming air in through their garage. Yum. CO. Yum.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

The quote from the auditor was: "You're getting a bit more fresh air than you need to be."

My understanding is the only kinds of houses that need to worry about being hermetically sealed are construction from the last decade (or maybe less or more, dunno. "new construction").

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Huh. I am interested in whether any sort of cheaper basement insulation setup could actually work out. bats22 did give us a set of suggestions before...but they still sounded like huge DIY projects, or very expensive to hire contractors for.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I asked him about the supposed $10-per-linear-foot solution that the other auditor gave us, versus what Duane and the other contractors told us, but he shrugged. I guess we could have a look-see at Home Despot.

[psychedelicbike.livejournal.com]

My suggestion - when they say caulking around the basement headers, just go to Home Hardware and buy a big can of spray foam insulation. It seals, and it fills gaps much faster than trying to apply caulking, and is in general just much easier to use.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's some good stuff. The right material for the job, even though it's a bit pricey.

The only problem is that our basement ceiling is covered with these fibre-board tiles that are a real pain to get under, and they drop all sorts of crap into your hair when you do manage to. So, I've procrastinated with that little project. ;)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's pretty cool!

We can't really do anything in our condo. *sigh*

I can't wait to someday own a real house.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to someday own a real house.

Want this one? It only slightly smells of skunk, still... ;-P

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

We went from 42 to 52. Half the points were from insulating (yeah, we need to do the basement too) and the other half from air sealing.

The assessor guy was pretty interested in our interior storms. We were interested in his laser thermometer.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

We were interested in his laser thermometer.

Damn, I didn't get to see my guy use a laser thermometer. ...what was he measuring? My guy just sat at his computer, mostly.

42 to 52 is pretty darn good.

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

The thermometer measured the surface temperature at the glass/plastic of the windows. There was a difference of a couple of degrees between the interior storms and the door lights, which have the old-fashioned ill-fitting storm window setup.

I went to look for LJ entries describing our work on the attic and only came up with this (stripping the floor, which we did after the walls and ceiling had been gutted and rebuilt) and this overview from 10000 feet. I guess the work left us too shagged out to blog about it much.

[catbear.livejournal.com]

Curious if your REEP guy was a sort of gloomy fellow who seemed far more comfortable wielding a computer, flashlight and other tools than having conversations. And really, really discouraged about the lack of progress on the environmental front the government is making. A very smart guy, but not too chatty.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

He was gloomy/introverted, but he didn't seem very discouraged. (seemed to be positive about their work, and that the new government programs would be reasonably effective).

Wonder if it was the same guy, different day.

[catbear.livejournal.com]

From the look of the snow melt patterns around the house, insulating our basement is essential. We shouldn't have bare ground next to the house!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

hmmmm. that does sound suspicious. Though, can you rule out that the snow wasn't shallower there anyhow, since it was next to a Big Blocking Thing?

I hadn't thought to check snow-melt around our house; I'll try and remember to take a look tonight.