A Contributed Post: How to Make Your Home More Energy Efficient for 2017
As we enter into the new year it’s a perfect time to look around and find ways that you can make improvements and changes around your home. For students currently enrolled in Ohio University who are working towards a degree that will land them health administration jobs, it’s an opportunity to put some of your problem solving skills to the test.
One area that you can make adjustments is in the energy efficiency of your home. By making your home more energy efficient you’ll be able to save money on those utility bills, plus feel good knowing you are reducing your environmental footprint. There are a number of small and large steps you can take, all of which will have a significant impact on the energy efficiency in your space.
Windows, Doors, and Roof
If you’ve got a large budget to work with, then you will want to look into the condition of your windows, doors, and roof. Once these become old and show signs of wear, you can start to lose quite a large amount of air through them. Air can pass in and out, which means all that hot or cool air you are trying to circulate in your home, is also being lost to the outdoors. This causes your furnace and a/c to work harder and more often. You want to improve upon your home’s air tightness.
Think About Your Landscaping
While there is a lot of focus on what we can do inside the home to keep it more comfortable and energy efficient, there are actually steps you can take outside to help this process along. If you get a lot of sun on one side of your house you may want to consider planting thick trees, which will add shade in the summer and help to block out some of that sun from warming up your house.
Replace Old Appliances
If you have any old appliances that you use, there’s a good chance they aren’t very energy efficient. Consider swapping them out for newer models that will use much less energy to operate. When you shop for new appliances be sure to specifically ask about the energy efficiency of the various models, as they tend to differ quite a bit.
Switch to Low-Flow Showerheads and Toilets
Often we think of saving on our hydro/electric bill, but water is another area we can reduce our use. Just by installing low-flow showerheads and low-flow toilets you will use up to 40% less. This not only helps the environment, it means you’ll be paying less on your water bill.
Change the Lightbulbs
This is a very simple step you can take that adds up to huge energy savings. Go through your space and replace all those incandescent bulbs with either LED or CFL lights. They will save up to 75% on energy usage, and they have a much longer lifespan so you won’t need to replace them as much.
Taking these proactive steps to improving the energy efficiency in your home will put to use the many problem-solving skills you’ll need to succeed in various MHA careers that you are studying for.
From the article:
“Go through your space and replace all those incandescent bulbs with either LED or CFL lights.”
NO!! Not ALL of them!
Every home has some light bulbs which are seldom used or used only briefly when they are used. It makes no sense to replace them with CFLs or LEDs. Incandescent bulbs are just fine in those places unless you really want to spend several dollars to save perhaps five cents per year.
However, incandescent bulbs should not be used in places where they are used enough to consume significant power. The cost of CFLs or LEDs can easily be justified for lamps which significant ON time.
Don’t forget to install a drain water heat exchanger where possible to recover heat in drain water that only gets used for a few seconds once it leaves the shower head or faucet before it goes down the drain and is wasted. This will make a big impact on the amount of energy and money spent heating water, prolong the life of your water heater no matter what kind it is and improve recovery time of tank type water heaters.
Dear Craig and other contributors of this blog,
While it is nice to see tips on saving some energy in buildings with often simple upgrades, your missing out on the really big savings.
The IEA the international energy agency, remarks that about 1/3 of energy is used in residential and commercial buildings. The biggest consumer of energy in a building is used for heating and cooling in our developed countries. The passive house institute (PHI) has embarked on a mission to prove that most of that energy is not needed.
Compared to a typical German house from 20 years ago, 90% of the energy for heating and cooling can be saved. While initially it was intended for the German climate, it has now been applied for warmer and colder climates. Of course this kind of improvements can only be done for new and extensive renovations.
It is not for free neither but substantial savings can be made in energy costs afterwards.
Thousands of houses in Germany have been build according to this standard, which proves it is affordable. More than thousand are build or planned in the US. The same happens in other countries.
The passive house standard is not a green standard but is does not prevent green ideas neither. If your house complies with the PHI standard, you can easily make it energy neutral by adding a bit of renewable energy like PV. You can combine it with a lot of the other tips on this forum.
If you are serious about energy efficiency in buildings you should read the basis of the PHI standard.
For US citizens, got to: http://www.phius.org
The inernational website is: http://passiv.de/en/index.html
Have a nice and energy efficient new year
Mark