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.