How homes use energy

Every homeowner (or renter for that matter) is familiar with paying utility bills. Unless you make all of your own energy with solar panels, a not so small portion of your paycheck goes into the various pieces of equipment in your home that use energy. I’ll identify the main components in your home that use energy and talk about some of the inefficiencies that SolAir Solutions is here to help you find and resolve.

Here in the midwest, the average home will pay two energy related utility bills. These are natural gas and electricity. The natural gas goes to the furnace to heat the air inside your home and to the hot water heater to heat the water for your showers, sinks, washing machine, and laundry. That’s the average household. Other potential users of natural gas are gas burning fire places, gas heated clothes dryers, and gas ranges.

Also in the midwest, everyone will have and air conditioning unit of some kind. This will always require electricity. Other big users of electricity in the average home are the refrigerator, washing machine, electric clothes dryer, dishwasher, and oven and range. Obviously everyone has electronics that they power throughout the year like lights, TV’s, computers and a never ending list of small devices. These things are getting more energy efficient every year and are a much smaller load than the first list of big users that I mentioned. Other potential big users of electricity are electric heated air heaters (instead of furnaces), space heaters, on-demand water heaters, and hot tubs.

The biggest users by far for both gas and electricity are for heating and cooling the air in the home. This system is referred to as HVAC (Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning). Gas bills are always high in the winter and low in the summer to reflect annual heating loads. Electric bills are always the opposite with high bills in the summer and low bills in the winter to reflect cooling loads. These loads are so significant that the gas and electric companies supplying homes have to plan for these higher loads so that they can meet the demand.

The reason why I bring this up is that when looking to save money on your energy bills, you have to start with the biggest problems. This will give you the biggest bang for your buck as you work to make improvements. So the question that you need to ask yourself is: “Where am I loosing heat in the winter?” and “Where am I gaining heat in the summer?”. There are three big offenders for energy leaks into and out of your home. These are insulation, fenestration, and infiltration. You have probably heard of insulation used in a variety of ways, but I’m sure most of you have never heard of fenestration or infiltration when talking about homes (or even at all).

Insulation is what is put in the building envelope (the heat barrier between the inside and outside of your home) to reduce the transport of heat across the building envelope. This is something that depends a lot on how the home was designed and can’t be changed much after the fact without a significant financial investment that will likely push the ROI (return on investment) too far into the future for it to be worth it.

Fenestration has a few definitions, but when referring to a building it means the openings in it like windows, doors, and skylights. In the sense of energy loss, I’m using it to mean the openings that transmit radiation from the sun. Having large windows that allow a large fraction of sunlight in on south facing (for the northern hemisphere) have a huge impact on the cooling load of a home. windows on the east and west will also see this effect for morning or evening sun. Windows also allow more energy to be transmitted through them (energy other than radiation) than walls do which leads to larger cooling and heating loads.

Probably the biggest culprit for energy thirsty homes is infiltration. Infiltration is the air that leaks into and/or out of a home through holes in the building envelope. These energy leaks are the easiest leaks to fix. You just need some caulking or tape most of the time. The problem comes in finding them. This is where SolAir Solutions’ services come in. We can perform what is called a blower door test that will tell you if your house is losing more energy than average through leaks. We can also find these leaks for you and recommend fixes as well as work to get them fixed for you. We do this through an array of tests and work with local contractors to get you taken care off.

Keep checking back here for more articles on the different aspects of what I’ve discussed here and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.