Before we explore the wonderful world of your attic and we need to get into the mind-frame of looking at your house as one system made up of interdependent parts. So your air conditioning and heating system is no longer a separate system that only affects your comfort and how warm you stay in the winter but it can also affect your health and safety. That way builders typically build houses was that the framer would erect the frame of the house, then the HVAC, plumbing and electrical trades would come in and do their separate trades etc – and none of these groups would really talk with each other… and that’s were we get these inefficiencies from. Sometimes inefficiencies are from just laziness where an insulation contractor just laid fiberglass batt insulation on top of the attic studs because the drywall crew did not want to hit any staples when laying their drywall… opps. There are a number of reasons why homeowners are paying too much for their utility bills or experience different temperatures in their homes and that’s what energy auditors do, identify those deficiencies and make recommendations on how they can be fixed.
This series is going to be broken up into chewable sections and peppered with energy saving tips and self-checks. Each recommendation will detail the good and bad affects it can have on your home using the house-as-a-system approach and what you need to be aware of before deciding to work on your home. We will go into detail about duct leakage and sealing, insulation performance, your home’s heat gain, how a 2-story home differs from a single story home, water heating and many more topics so stay tuned.
