Are New Windows Your Best Option?

With a one-time $1,500 tax incentive at stake, it's more important than ever to make sure you make the right choices when upgrading your home to a more energy efficient standard. But the question remains whether replacing your windows and doors is your first and best option?

Ask 10 people what their best non-renewable energy upgrade should be, and 9 of them will tell you "replace my windows." Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 people would also be wrong. As much as it pains me to say this, windows and doors are typically the last thing to upgrade in a home. Unless you have an inordinate amount of large single-pane windows in the house, windows are not something you should consider replacing. This is due to the fact that windows typically take up a small portion of the wall space, and the holes around them are usually very small, much smaller than, let's say, the holes in your attic or crawl space. Not to mention that the leaks through your window area brings in fresh clean outside air, so sealing them up would leave only dirty air from the building cavity (air that's being filtered through insulation and other building materials).

But what about the draft you feel when sitting near a window? Isn't that an energy loss? The draft you feel is not a draft at all, it's your body heat radiating toward the cold surface of the window, kind of like standing next to a water fall. Essentially the window's cold surface changes the mean radiant temperature of the room, which is something akin to a wind chill factor we might feel on a blustery winter day. Thus changing the windows out will only help the room feel more comfortable, they won't change the actual temperature of the room. You can fix the mean radiant temperature by simply covering your windows with a window film or closing the curtains. This will add a warm surface between you and the window, thereby eliminating your body heat radiating toward it, and eliminating the "draft." If you still think your windows are your best investment, have an energy audit done and get the windows tested, an infrared camera will be able to see the heat loss from your windows. Find out more at www.climatebydesign.com/videos and click on "Whole House Test."

So what's the best option? It's basically going to be a toss-up between your insulation and air seal, your furnace or boiler, or your hot water heater. An energy audit should be able to prioritize these for you. But in very simple terms, it's going to basically depend on how old your furnace, boiler, or hot water heater is. In other words, if your furnace is five years old and your hot water heater is two years old, then add an air seal and some insulation. However, if your furnace is thirty years old, you're going to want to update that first. The reason I suggest replacing the furnace is because your furnace loses efficiency faster than insulation. So even if the furnace started out at 80% efficient, it's probably closer to a 40% efficient now. Also, should you replace your insulation, or windows for that matter, before replacing your furnace when it's that old, you risk paying for your insulation and a new furnace (should your old one fail), and with a one-time tax incentive you won't be able to qualify twice.

Although windows can be a good investment when you consider all the factors that make windows great, comfort, aesthetics, and resell of the house. Windows are just not a good energy investment, and definitely not a great way to use your tax credit. Especially if you'd also like to see your utility bill go down.

Efficiency Matters

Whether you're a diehard environmentalist or a conservative capitalist, efficiency matters. Efficiency is what makes the world better, communication easier, and corporations more profitable. And yet, on the energy side, at least, it's something most businesses spend very little time considering.

If you ran a business and had a single employee who goofed off 70% of the time, you'd fire him. Right? What if you had ten employees goofing around, or a hundred, or a thousand? Unfortunately, that's your electricity bill. Take a light bulb for instance. That light bulb is lit by electricity that you, as a company, pay for. So in business terms that light bulb is your employee. Yet to get that light bulb lit you have pay for a massive inefficiency, namely the grid that electric power comes in on. Before it even reaches your light bulb 70% of your paid-for electricity is lost to the grid. 70%! Of money you've paid! To make matters worse, if you're still hanging around with incandescent light bulbs, you're getting 10% of the delivered power given off as actual light, the rest is simply converted into heat. So when you want your employees to give 110% at work, but you're letting your light bulbs off the hook with a less than 10% productivity level, what kind of message are you sending? Even if you have made the switch to fluorescent lighting, you're still dropping 70% of your money to inefficiency. I mean it kills me how many studies businesses do in regards to "employee productivity" or mapping out the best distribution channel, but how very little attention businesses give to efficiency in their office utilities like light bulbs, computers, and their heating and cooling systems.

It all comes down to money. If we want to stay profitable we can't spend our money on things customers can't see or experience, and besides light bulbs and turning the heat on aren't really major costs. So what would be the point in replacing that old rooftop unit, as long as it cools my space, who cares whether it's inefficient or not? In fact, who cares about even servicing the thing? It does not matter to my customers, so why should it matter to me? But it does matter to your customers. And I'm not talking about the "greenies" who knit their own clothes and reuse their bath water. I'm talking about any and all of your customers. Why? Because the money you're spending on all the little inefficiencies throughout the workplace is one less dime that you're not spending on your customers. It's one less customer service rep you could be hiring, or a website you could be making better, or a new product line you could be taking on. All of it adds up to one less way in which you aren't servicing your customers. Instead, you're servicing your utility company.

Your utility bill is not a tax. It is not something you have to live with. I feel like most of the time we don't do anything about our utility bill because we treat it as a tax, we treat it as though we have no choice in paying it every month. It's kind of like hiring your cousin Billy. We know he's a great guy, and we have to hire him because we want to make Thanksgiving an easy affair, but we know he's not really getting the job done. We recognize Cousin Billy's inefficiency, and simply look the other way.

Even really environmental companies, don't do a whole lot about their utility bill. I go to environmentally conscientious grocery stores and restaurants all the time. They spend a whole menu telling me about where the beef was raised, how it was raised, what it was fed, but I take one look around the restaurant and can immediately spot hundreds of dollars going out the door to keep the lights on and gas firing up. These companies compromise on their environmental promise because they convince themselves that doing a little bit to help is better than doing nothing. But the fact of the matter is, they're acting like the big corporations they pretend to compete with. If you're going to be environmental, then go all the way. Fix the entire system. Fix the entire way you approach your business. Demanding better standards for feed lots and not demanding a better physical store is a compromise, not progress.

So what's the solution? I know we all can't simply go out and turn our 60 year old building into a modern LEED certified structure. And certainly staying where we're at is more efficient and environmentally friendly than building an entire new building (green or not). So where's the balance? Knowledge. I can't tell you how many business owners know every little detail about their customer demographic, product line performance, and employee progress, and yet can't tell me anything about their rooftop unit (except that they know they need to change the filters regularly). They make zero plan, and budget zero dollars, to adequately take care of their most important building components. They've done zero research and have no plan to replace the system before it fails. They simply hire their cousin Billy (who works for cheap) to handle all the non-customer centric elements. And in the end, they pay more to replace their system in an emergency, and then keep paying that same high utility bill, which in turn makes them less competitive.

Think I'm stretching the facts here? I can assure I'm not. And I'll tell you the story of a little airline named Southwest, that just did this. Before the fuel crunch of 2006, 2007, and 2008, Southwest hedged its fuel cost at $35/barrel of gas. At the time, $35 was $10 more than other airlines were paying for a barrel of fuel. But then gas prices skyrocketed from $25 to $50 to $75 and finally leveled off at around $125 a barrel in the next few years. So while other airlines we're paying $100 a barrel more in gas and either filing for bankruptcy, going out of business, or charging bag fees, Southwest was gaining market share and keeping their fares low. They did not have to file bankruptcy, lay any employees off, or cut customer service. In fact, they increased customer service by adding more routes, flying more planes, and they were able to expand their advertising. I don't know about you, but I see more Southwest commercials than all the other airlines combined.

So what does Southwest have to do with how efficient my light bulbs are? After all, fuel is obviously a huge part of the transportation industry. But is it the same in every industry? Sure it is. Just think of your store or office like a plane. It too uses fuel. The only difference is, it doesn't land and turn the engines off every few hours, it "flies" 9-5 every day of the week (maybe more). However, in the example I just gave, if another airline had been able to fly planes with more efficient engines, they too would have offset the gas price spikes. Except, they would retain the competitive advantage even when gas prices came back down because their fuel costs would always be lower. The same goes for your company and your competition. The less you have to spend on overhead, on energy costs, on keeping the doors open, the more services you can provide to your customers. The more profitable you will become. If your 9-5 office flies for cheaper, you have a competitive advantage.

So my advice to you: Fire your utility company! Fire your current service company, unless they are helping you with a long-term efficiency plan! And fire all those inefficient employees, starting with your light bulbs. Don't let yourself become complacent in thinking that you have no control in your utility expense. Discover what's out there and make a plan. Make a plan that puts efficiency paramount in all facets of your business. The Energy Store is great place to start. (www.theNRGstore.com)

Although you may find yourself all alone in your industry with this kind of thinking, that's exactly the type of mentality that takes once-inefficient businesses to the top. Efficiency matters, no matter what side of the political aisle you're on. You just have to make it matter to you.

Can A House Ever Be Too Tight?

When it comes to insulating your home, you’ve probably heard the old adage that you can’t make a house too tight because every house needs to “breathe.” Kind of a funny way of saying that the air in your home becomes more stuffy and stagnant the tighter it becomes. This stuffiness effect is in fact due to every house actually needing a proper air exchange (the breathing metaphor), which is why we don’t typically build our homes the same way we build refrigerators. A refrigerator is well insulated, sealed tight against its surrounding environment, and would basically kill us unless outside air was piped in from the outside. Unfortunately, this constant breath we and our homes need, limits how tight we can actually make our living space, which in turn limits how energy efficient we can actually become. Or does it?

The more control you have with your indoor air against its surrounding environment, the more energy efficient your indoor environment becomes, the more durable your house becomes, and the potentially the more healthy the inhabitants become. But before we can achieve an extremely tight house, we must first take a look at the missing link in most efficiency upgrade plans: ventilation. That’s right, we must purposely create new holes in our house that we can mechanically control. Then, we eliminate all the old holes in the house where outside air would either infiltrate in or out of the structure. The difference, however, between these new holes and old holes, is that we can control the airflow with the new ones. We can temper the air, so we’re not dumping 10 degree air in our 65 degree house. We can filter our air to eliminate dust and other harmful allergens and pollutants from entering our indoor environment. And we can exchange the humidity, allowing us to eliminate mold in wet climates or capture more humidity in dry climates. We can even set how much air we need or want depending on the type of day we’re experiencing.

Without mechanical ventilation, the holes we have in our house are dumb. They bring in the extreme opposite of what we want our indoor air to be. In the summer they let in hot, humid air into our dry, cool indoor climate. In the summer, they do the opposite, they bring cold air into our warm environment. And if this weren’t bad enough, most of the holes in our house are located in places we typically wouldn’t want to be breathing. Places like moldy crawl spaces, or fiberglass-filled attics, even CO vents from our furnace and hot water heater. In fact, very little of our air exchange comes from windows and doors, and unfortunately this is a place we’re encouraged to seal first, which totally eliminates the only true “fresh” air source we have in the house, leaving only extremely polluted air to enter.

There is a solution to all this mess though. It’s called an Energy Recovery Ventilator, or ERV. The system mechanically creates an air exchange in your home, which means you can eliminate all the other dumb holes in the house. And when I say eliminate, I mean try and seal up the entire structure. Seal the attic by pulling out all the old insulation and laying down a layer of polyurethane air sealant before blowing in new insulation. Seal the crawl space by sealing and insulating the concrete walls and sealing the dirt floor. And seal your gas appliances, like your furnace and hot water heater, with direct vent appliances which get their combustion air from outside. Then you turn on your ERV, and you’ll find you can almost heat your house from cooking a tv dinner and turning on the television (both of these generate heat which are usually lost from excessive infiltration). The ERV will act as an open window in your home with all the benefits and none of the drawbacks, it will bring in fresh clean outside air 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, tempering, filtering, and exchanging your stuffy, polluted inside air with fresh, clean outside air (or at least fresh and clean once it passes through the HEPA filter). Then, and only then, will your air be clean and your home energy efficient.

All of this comes down to breathing and control, and if you’re in yoga, or are a swimmer, or a runner, or a zen master, you know that controlling your breath is the path to a healthier and better you. The same is true for your home. But without control you’re left with bad air constantly infiltrating in. Air that you have to pay the utility company to heat, which brings in the dust you constantly have to clean up, and produces the mold you seem never to be able to get rid of. All of these are symptoms which say our home’s air is out of control, which can lead to not only a sick house, but an unhealthy you. Yes, a house, like any living thing, needs to breath, but how a house takes its next breath is totally up to you.

What’s in an Energy Audit?

Our homes are a great place to start when lowering our carbon footprint. In fact, there are lots of things we can do for our homes, which are energy efficient or environmentally friendly, that have little to no impact on the aesthetic value of the home and come at little to no cost to you. But where to begin? The infamous energy audit of course. I say infamous because there is really no standard for an energy audit. Most homeowners don’t know what they should be looking for when they ask for one, and so most don’t really receive any valuable information about their home once they complete one. Follow along with me, and I’ll explain what all of us should be asking for.

Let me start out by explaining why an energy audit is necessary in the first place. For one, there are a million products out there claiming to be energy efficient and/or green. And while many of these products and their installation providers can make magnificent claims regarding performance, not all products will react the same way in all houses, all climates, and even for all operators. Second, your house works as a system. Changing one thing about your home without addressing others not only has the potential to yield poor results, but can actually create an unsafe indoor environment in the home. Not to mention some advertised energy efficiency upgrades on things like appliances can inversely affect the output of other appliances, effectively negating the expected results on the utility bill. This is typically why most people stray away from efficiently updating their house, or have been extremely unsatisfied with the “greener” products they’ve purchased. But an energy audit is a very helpful tool to use prior to investing in any upgrades, it should allow you to measure the synergy between all your household energy uses and prioritize them. Even if you’re sure it’s your windows which leak like a sieve, it’s important to find out what changing your old windows will do to your indoor air quality, your furnace, and air exchange among other issues. Remember you cannot change one thing without changing the performance of everything. In other words, by changing your windows, you have tightened the structure, which means you won’t need as large a furnace, and without changing your furnace to a smaller size you typically will see no drop in your utility bill.

So what’s in an energy audit? Well, for starters there are a few organizations which teach whole house energy audits and testing. They are the Home Energy Rating System (provided by RESNet), the Building Performance Institute, The Comfort Institute, and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED provided by the USGBC). All of them require at least the use of an infiltrometer blower door as well as some way to measure duct leakage, which in turn is calculated through a software program. If you're not using a company which is a member of one of the aforementioned organizations, make sure they are at least providing a blower door test. Other tools used, however, are duct blasters, combustion analysis, infrared cameras, and static pressure manometers to name a few. Now don’t worry if you’re not quite sure what all of this is, because I’m going to tell you what you need to know by the end of the audit.

A good energy audit should last about three to four hours in the home (it will be shorter the less square footage you have). Also, a good energy audit should provide you with a minimum of the following information:

1) An exact air exchange rate based on ASHRAE, which sets the ventilation standards for buildings. This number will tell you if your home is too tight and needs more ventilation before sealing the home further. You will need this prior to changing out windows, performing any weatherization, and even upgrading insulation.

2) A duct leakage measurement. This will tell you how much air is being lost or gained to the outside through your duct work. Because ducts are mechanically pressurized, they can be the greatest energy loss in the home. You will need this prior to upgrading your furnace.

3) Insulation measurement. This will tell you, along with the air exchange rate, whether you have enough insulation for optimum efficiency and whether you have any infiltration from the outside through your insulation. You will need this prior to adding an air seal and/or adding new insulation.

4) An infiltration tour of the home. Your auditor should allow you to follow them through the house, while the blower door is running, to spot where airflow is coming in at. The auditor should have some kind of smoke generator or even an infrared camera to help illustrate where the air is coming in at. This along with the air exchange will allow you to accurately pinpoint where you should tighten your home.

5) A combustion analysis. This will let you know that all of you gas appliances are venting properly. The auditor may also tell you how much energy is being wasted through draft-vent gas appliances.

6) A static pressure test on your duct work. This will tell you how well air is balanced from one room to the next and why hot and cold spots persist in the house.

7) If an auditor is really good, they will also perform a Manual J heat load/loss calculation on the home. This will tell you whether your heating and cooling equipment is correctly sized for the house.

8) And if an auditor is exceptional, he should also evaluate your landscape water usage.

9) And at the end of it all, your auditor should be able to discuss with you the various efficiency upgrades you can make (many of them you should be able to perform yourself) and help you make a priority of those upgrades based on safety, budget, and indoor air quality requirements.

Notice that I didn’t list kitchen appliances, like refrigerators and microwaves, or Energy Star listed electronics, like your television or computer. I didn’t list any of these consumer goods, because they aren’t typically the energy issue in the house. I mean, unless you’re running a large sports bar out of your house with several big screen televisions running at the same time, only a small portion of your energy bill is spent on running your television. Remember, 70% of your bill (on average) is spent on heating, cooling, and hot water, so taking care of those issues is typically a priority. Also, I didn’t list electronics because you do not need an energy audit to tell you how much energy a consumer good, like a refrigerator, is going to use or is using. That information comes on the box or can be found on the data plate attached to the product. Also, electronics and kitchen appliances don’t change with their environment. Meaning they will use the same amount of energy in Florida as they do in Wisconsin. Your furnace or air conditioner on the other hand may not only work different in different regions, but from one house to the next in the same neighborhood.

Don’t go it alone. Unless you test, it’s just a guess. Find out all the facts before making any decisions on efficiency or environmental improvements. Although there’s typically a cost to an energy audit, it’s well worth the peace of mind you’ll have in knowing not only what the real problems in your home are, but also that you’re making the right decisions in any improvements you decide to proceed with. Nothing’s worse than wading through a million “green” options, and then investing in one that doesn’t yield the results you expected.

You can watch a quick video about a good energy audit, produced by The Comfort Institute at www.climatebydesign.com/videos and click on "Whole House Test."

Being Green: A Statement of a Reality

Sometimes we meet our destiny on the path we choose to avoid it. This seems to be the way our society has approached environmental responsibility. We are doing a lot of things which make a strong statement about ourselves as being “green,” but we’re hardly making a dent in actually becoming a green culture. This is because we typically can’t see the whole environmental system, and so simply choose the solutions that are the most convenient or perhaps make the biggest statement about ourselves. However, convenience rarely is the real solution to anything, and statements fall very short of action…unless you’re trying to sell something.

The cash for clunkers idea may have been a great way for the U.S. economy to sell a few more cars in a tough economy, but it may not have been the best idea to green up our air. After all, cars have very little impact on our surrounding environment from actually driving them. What impacts our earth a great deal though is the building of that car, the transporting of that car, and even the marketing of that car. Not to mention where does that car go once it gets traded in? Back to the earth? I don’t think so. One might guess that it might be better to stick with that old clunker than to throw it out and buy a new one…high gas mileage and all.

But what do we do? I mean high gas mileage cars are a problem. Aren’t they? The reason we perceive this is because we see the exhaust from cars coming out of our tail pipe, and we might even see a slight haze in our city air. This gives us the perceived impression that the majority of airborne pollution comes from cars and trucks. It does not. The fact is the majority of airborne pollution actually comes from large industrial farms and ranches. Cattle put more pollutants in the air via methane than all of our cars combined. However chances of consumers switching from steak to carrots are slim.

So perhaps the reason consumers are scrambling over hybrid cars is because they want to do something, and skipping that burger ain’t one of them. Well, there might be a better way. And it falls on the second biggest pollution source…our homes and offices. Yes, that’s right, our homes and buildings are the second largest contributor to CO in our air. But the problem is that typically greening our homes doesn’t quite make the same statement as driving my hybrid car around town. After all, no one can see my 95% efficient furnace in the basement. But they can see my car with the large hybrid logo on the back of it. However, the earth and consumers would be better served by sticking with an older car (one that didn’t need to be manufactured in the last five years) and update their heating and cooling system instead. That’s right, I said it. Buy a furnace, not a car. 55% of your household energy bill goes to heating and cooling your home, and the leading cause of human generated greenhouse gases on earth is generated from our homes and buildings. You do the math.

In fact, you can even hybrid your home, utilizing basically the same concept as your hybrid car. It’s called a dual fuel system and it heats a home on natural gas when it’s most efficient to do so and then on electric power when that becomes most efficient. The technology is not new and it’s an extremely cost effective way to bring down the utility bill and save the environment. I mean even the manufacture of heating and cooling systems are more environmentally sustainable, and with 100% of an old system recyclable it's also more sustainable to dispose of our old ones. Now, I know, many of you will say that a ground source system would be the best bet. And I agree. However, not every older home is easily converted to a ground source system, and for a lot homes it’s a financial possibility (even if the payback is within ten years). But all homes are easily converted to a hybrid heating system.

But how does this hybrid work you ask? And is it really that efficient? A hybrid simply is a furnace combined with a heat pump (which is like an air conditioner in reverse). The system will move from using the gas furnace to heat your home, to using an electric heat pump to heat it. The point at which the gas turns off and the electric turns on is called your balance point. This balance point is set for your region, utility costs, and typical weather (most times it’s between 35 degrees and 45 degrees). The system will make the utility switch automatically and the balance point can be adjusted to reflect current energy prices. The furnace is up to 95% efficient and the heat pump is greater than 100% efficient because it’s working off of a heat transfer as opposed to generating it’s own heat through combustion. Then, in the summer, the heat pump is capable of reversing and will cool your home (as efficiently as an air conditioner).

In this manner, a hybrid system is even better than adding solar panels to your house. Because unless you’re using solar panels to operate your heating and cooling system, you’re doing very little to either stem the tide of environmental pollution or save money on your utility bill. And yet solar panels are sold much more often than any hybrid system. You have to ask yourself whether adding solar panels is actually an effective solution for your home or whether it is simply making a statement about your “environmental stewardship.” Even windows and doors aren’t a better option than replacing your old heating system. Although windows and doors can change the mean radiant temperature (or the temperature it feels like) in a room, they do very little to actually bring down the cost of running your heating system. This is because windows typically make up a small portion of the wall space in a home. But we sure do buy a lot of windows and doors, because they look good…and they make us feel like we’re contributing to an eco-solution.

So what does green really mean? Most of us know that it probably has something to do with recycling, driving a little less, and probably saving a few whales while we’re at. But most of us don’t really consider the real causes of man’s impact on the environment, or what really is an environmental priority, or what makes fiscal sense to the average consumer. It is only with a systems approach to environmental solutions that our society can become truly sustainable.