Willowside Project, Day 14

John and Jane Doe's report is basically written. I have a template that I use that has been slowly built and improved over the past projects. It's a fine start but still requires a fair amount of custom writing, since each house has enough unique issues that need to be addressed.  There's report software out there such as Recurve's, EAI, or BizEE, but none have that personal touch that comes from a written report.  So here's some items from the report:


Target Infiltration: 0.25 ACH_n (1962 cfm₅₀, down from 3110 currently)
This one's controversial, or at least is a moving target.  BPI recommendations are currently 0.35 ACHnatural.  From there down to 0.7 of that, which is 0.245 ACHnatural, I must recommend that the homeowner installs mechanical ventilation in an amount that makes up the difference, ensuring 0.35 ACHnatural. Below that, below 0.25, I must require that the homeowner installs mechanical ventilation in the total amount of whatever 0.35 ACHnatural would be.  In the Doe house, that would be 133cfm, running continuously.  That's a significant additional heating load in the winter - heating that extra 133cfm of cold outside air - that a Heat Recovery Ventilator might be worth the investment.  The problem is, HRVs are expensive, in the thousands.  And since I believe in getting a house as tight as possible, my compromise is to aim for 0.25 ACHnatural and recommend that the homeowner install mechanical ventilation, but then also tell him my position on this issue and let him make up his own mind. Perhaps he's happy cracking a window if the house gets stuffy or having an intermittent time switch on a bath fan.  But I've yet to find anyone that wants me to stop air sealing at 0.35.  Anyway, that's my thinking and you're welcome to comment if you feel differently.


Insulation Improvement:
Insulation Improvement:Insulate attic access door in master closet with rigid 3.5” foam, cover a small attic kneewall in master closet with FSK as an air barrier, add loose fill attic fiberglass insulation to R-38, and insulate the floor to R19 and strap every 2’ to hold in place.  The problem with this floor is that, being built in 1968, it has 4X6 floor joists on 4' centers and holding batt insulation up tight against that is a real challenge.  Some may say it can't even be done and that spray foam is the only solution.  But, with a snug crawlspace as this house has, that's impossible.  I've considered stapling R4 FSK across the bottom as a support but plastic plumbing straps every 2' ends up doing an adequate but not perfect job.  If anyone has method think works better, share it.


I'm meeting with Zero Energy Associates in 3 hours to get a bid on replacing the HVAC & DHW with direct vent units.  Since those take their combustion air from the outside, we can seal up all the vents in the closet and no longer have to worry about combustion pollution entering the home.


I'm also proposing that the older recessed ceiling fixtures in the kitchen be replaced with ICAT LEDs, which I think is a great technology that outshines CFLs.


And last, the crawlspace can really use remediation. That is a sizable issue itself since there seems to be annual flooding and it's lower than the surrounding area outside the foundation. Ideally, we'd install a french drain around the outside, slope and channel the crawlspace towards one area where we'd install a sump pump, and then completely air seal over the soil with a 12 mil barrier glued and pinned to the stem wall.  Being a costly process with relatively minor financial benefit, it can be a tough sell. But it will still be a recommendation in my report.

Willowside Project, Day 10, part 2

OK, I'm back from getting the dimensions of Doe's house, enter all the information into EnergyPro, and do an initial calculation. It looks like the house as it is has a HERS of 147, which means that the model predicts that it will use about one and a half times as much energy as a 'reference home', which is this exact same home if it was built to today's energy code requirements and has by definition a HERS of 100. 147 is not too bad but way above what we want. Let's see if we can get it below 100.

I enter a selection of possible energy improvements into the software and recalculate. Great! There's a possibility of cutting Doe's energy use in half if all the improvements are done. I have a screenshot of the EnergyPro run showing the percentage reduction in energy use that we will get from each of the measures: air sealing the house, adding ceiling insulation to R38, insulating the floor, a new 95% furnace with R8 ducts and 13 SEER AC, and a new high efficiency water heater.

All of these together add up to a significant amount financially for most homeowners, as high as $20,000. But one of the strong reasons I want to suggest installing high efficiency condensing furnace and water heater is that condensing units draw their combustion air from outside. The combustion air vents in the doors and closet ceiling can be sealed up and there would no longer be all the air quality and heat loss problems that come from combustion appliances in an indoor closet.  EnergyPro may model the percentage savings of the improved house but it can't show the increased comfort, how the HVAC system no longer constantly cycles on and off, how all the rooms are now an even temperature, how the owners are no longer breathing air from the crawlspace, and that there is no longer any possibility of carbon monoxide entering the house from the water heater's poor venting. All powerful reasons to do this whole package.

Plus, entering the Energy Upgrade California program should get the owners a $3500 check after the work is done and using our local property assessed program, the Sonoma County Energy Independence Program, means that John and Jane can finance the cost with only a few hundred in fees up front.  If we can cut their utility bills in half (which currently average nearly $300/month), then their savings of $1800/year should cover the payments on the assessment and in 10 years, it's paid off.  Sounds like this project is a win/win.

A few quick numbers from government research papers:
40%+ of inside air comes from the crawlspace because warm air rises, drawing in crawlspace air through all the little holes in floors, also known as the Stack Effect. (anybody know the cite?);
30%+ average duct leakage in the US, though my guess is it's in the 20s in California;
Far more people die of Carbon Monoxide poisoning in the US than are struck by lightning and CO causes 15,000 to 20,000 ER visits per year.

The recommendations going into my report:
Air sealing the ceiling, the floor, adjusting doors and replacing weatherstripping as needed to reach the minimum target of 1962 cfm50 (it's 3110 right now so that seems reachable);
Insulating the floor to R19;
Replacing the recessed ceiling fixtures or building boxes over them;
Blowing loose fill fiberglass into the attic to reach R38;
Replacing the FAU with a 95% condensing unit of much smaller size, with R8 ducts properly sized and sealed;
Replace the DHW with a 90%+ condensing unit and insulating all how water pipes;
Deal with the flooding issues in the crawlspace and cover the soil with a 12 mil vapor barrier.

Caution: numbers alert. FYI and if you are interested, 1962 cfm50 is the minimum that BPI currently allows without requiring mechanical ventilation, which is 70% of 0.35 natural air changes per hour with an n factor of 22.

Next, the report.

Willowside Project, Day 10

Well, it's taking a bit longer to get to John Doe's report than I'd expected and I've one molar less than a few days ago and a big hole in my jaw.  But, here we are.

I use EnergyPro because I learned it some years ago and I'm familiar with it. Plus, it's the one that's accepted by EUC (Energy Upgrade California), which I plan on applying for this project. Looking over the audit form, everything looks good. We should be able to easily improve Doe's house enough to get a couple of thousand rebate. One of the things EnergyPro (I have no financial ties with EnergySoft, just a user of the software) does is model each wall of the house with windows, the roof, and the floor. So it needs the square feet of each wall and the size of each window. What's this? The sketch of the house has all the windows listed but no measurements of any of the walls. I can't calculate the wall sizes without wall lengths and we didn't get that information on the audit day. Arghh! I had my intern, whom I won't name and I doubt will ever make this mistake again, do the window takeoff and didn't notice there was no dimensions on the walls.

There's not much I can do but call John Doe and make another visit, just to dimension the house.  So I'm off to Willowside.

AHP Project, Day 7

Note: the following is not a comprehensive listing of all the details involved in a full audit.  It's meant to be a general description of the process so please don't think that you can read this and do one yourself.  Your and the homeowners' safety requires a full Building Performance training, at a minimum.



John and Jane are delightful. Pretty much your ideal clients: interested in not just the audit findings but the process itself, close by but not in the way, curious and open to learning about efficiency and building science, and John makes good coffee. Sweet. After getting a copy of their utility bill history, something I prefer to have beforehand but was unavailable til today, and a friendly meeting to check in about any issues and to let John know the logistics of the day, we were ready. Start my personal CO meter and clip it to my belt, make sure I have spare rechargeable batteries for everything, clip blank forms to the clipboard, turn my phone ringer down, and think through the day in my mind. Move all the equipment onto a pad in the living room and decide we will wear socks instead of booties over our shoes.  My helper for the day is Dilip Sinha, an intern breaking in to the business. Though mentoring can be time consuming, it's also gratifying and a way to give back to those who helped me when I was just beginning.

At 8:30, it's still brisk out and warm inside so a quick tour through the house with the IR camera clearly shows a few insulation problems. The ones in the attic, R19 with the normal mediocre installation, should be easy to fix. The ones in the walls are what they are, impossible to repair without serious demolition. The floor is uninsulated. Even before we set up the blower door, it's easy to see the rays of cold air streaming in under the french door shoes and along some of the baseboards so I know that will be even more obvious later.

First, safety checks and Worst Case CAZ (combustion air zone) test. The FAU (forced air unit) is a 10 year old, 80% Carrier downdraft with powered vent. It's big. 93Kbtu output. Way oversized for this 2200 square foot house and a perfect example of how we used to think: the solution to almost everything is a bigger system. It shares a vent with a standard 40 gallon DHW (domestic hot water heater), then passes up through the attic and out the roof. In this house, both are in a closet in the middle of the house, behind double hollow core doors with no weatherstripping. Further, there is a 4X14 vent in the ceiling of the closet, no vents in the floor, and a 2X14 vent into the living space in each door. Two immediate problems: the total size of the air vents into the closet is considerably undersized for combustion air for both appliances and much of the combustion air is drawn from inside the house.

When both appliances are off, air from inside the house flows through the door vents and up into the attic through the ceiling vent. A quick peak behind a receptacle cover plate shows no insulation in the walls between the closet and the adjacent bedrooms.  And later, when the attic has warmed up in the sun, the blower door shows warm attic air being drawn into a bathroom next to the FAU closet *under* the wall between them! Common practice 50 years ago but poor from an energy and indoor air quality viewpoint. So the tests: the FAU passes easily since the flue has an excellent draft and the DHW would pass except that it has a flat plate under the draft hood, meant to reduce standby losses, that causes significant spillage of combustion gases. The whole concept of a DHW and an FAU in an uninsulated, poorly vented closet in the middle of the house is a poor one and is no longer even legal.
One final thing: the entire return duct system in the attic has no insulation at all. Nearly 100 square feet of duct surface exposed in the attic with an R value of 0. The heat loss or gain is substantial. All this goes into the report.

Next, the blower door test. Since all the exterior doors are french doors, including the front door, I decide to put the blower door into the door to the garage and open the main garage door. Start the pressure at -10 pascals, make one more trip through the house to make sure the wood stove inlet is closed tightly (a messy disaster if it's not) and to check all windows and doors, then run the pressure up to -50 pascals. 3365 cfm50. Moderately leaky and about what I'd expect for a 40 year old house. Drop the pressure back down to -20 and take John on a tour through his home with the IR camera. There's nothing quite like watching a homeowner clearly see where air is streaming in under baseboards, around sink plumbing in the wall, recessed ceiling fixtures, and through switches and receptacles. It's difficult to say no to air sealing the shell when the air infiltration is right there in full color. A moment of mea culpa: an unusual cold area in a bath, while touring with the IR camera, shows that I missed a window being open a crack behind a curtain. At least I caught it and redoing the blower door test yields a new and corrected number of  3110 cfm50. Check and recheck.

Now for the duct test.  John has replaced the ducts a few years ago because of rodent damage so I'm hoping for a low number and the test shows 255 cfm50. This calculates to 13% leakage, which is fairly good when I calculate for the oversized furnace which should have 2000 cfm of flow. But the true measurement of the flow with the furnace fan on shows 1050 cfm, only half what it should be. This is another all too common problem. Undersized ducts that are partially kinked somewhere in their length, creating enough back pressure to cut the flow in half. Using the true airflow rather than the 'should be' airflow shows a 24% duct leakage, quite significant. One thing I noticed, within a minute of the FAU shutting off, the floor registers showed up as blue or cold, indicating that crawlspace air was being drawn into the leaky ducts by the normal stack effect.Too bad John's paid to have his ducts replaced already because they need some serious attention. One final point to notice: the high water lines on the pier blocks in the crawlspace. Wow, there's some serious flooding during the winter. In fact, and this photo doesn't show it well, it touches the bottom of the supply plenum in the distance.

Last, Dilip does a full take-off of the house, measuring each of the outside walls and windows. Tomorrow, I'll enter all this information into EnergyPro software and model John and Jane's house. With a few tweaks and adjustments, it should tell me roughly how much each of the upgrade features I plan on suggesting to John and Jane will reduce their utility usage.

Five hours later, we're packing up the final bits. Tomorrow, I have the day blocked off to write John and Jane's report. I have found, from talking with other Home Performance Contractors, that I'm slower than most when it comes to auditing and writing up the report. So be it. My belief: it should take as long as it takes to do it right.

Willowside Project, Day 6

The batteries are charged, camera's in the truck, and the blank forms are in the briefcase.  Two of us will arrive at John Doe's at 8:30 tomorrow - Wednesday - morning.  It should be a brisk and partly cloudy day, enough difference between inside and out to get good, clear IR camera pix.  First a short sit-down with the owner, then quick walk through with the camera, a Worst Case Combustion Zone test (let me know if you want more info on that; I'm may write a post about why it's vitally important), a blower door test, duct pressure test, and lastly a complete sketch or take-off of the house so we can correctly computer model it.

Looking forward to it.  It should be a fun one.  I'll take plenty of pix.

Comments are enabled and so feel free to ask question or post suggestions.  In this new field of Building Science, or House-As-a-System, we're all learning from each other.

Willowside Project, Day 2

I caught up with John Doe while he was on the way to work this morning, apologized for not getting back to him last night, and checked in about Tuesday of next week, April 12th, for his test-in Audit.  The weather forecast is for a perfect day: cool and clear, which should allow distinctive IR photos of air infiltration pathways during the blower door test.

I stopped in at Harmony Farms, my favorite farm & garden store, on Hwy 116 this afternoon to talk to Ali Ghorbani, who is going to be doing John Doe's solar electric system design.  Since the Doe residence has a bit of tree interference and only an East Southeast facing roof for the panels, it's going to take a largish system to cover even 2/3 of the Doe's electric usage.  Even 2/3 of their bill will, however, drop them out of the upper tier rates on their electric bill and hopefully down in to the lowest baseline rate.  Just FYI, the approximate current PG&E rate structure is a baseline of 300kwh or so - more in the winter, less in the summer - at $.12/kwh, $.14 for 101%-130%, $.29 for 131%-200%, and $.40 for above 200%.  Those get to be some expensive Kwhs and lopping off those above the baseline is a worthwhile target.

Willowside Project, Day 1

I have an idea: I'm going to take the job that just came in today and blog it from beginning to end, Day 1 til Day X, every step of the way. Initial call, initial visit, second visit & audit, 3rd visit & report delivery, on through contract phase, our local PACE program called SCEIP - Sonoma County Energy Independence Program - approval, Energy Upgrade California approval, permitting, doing the work, final approvals, disbursement and final check. I plan on giving details. What worked, what didn't, where I messed up, where I nailed it. And since I'm not a company who does 5 or 10 projects a month but a relative small fry with a small crew and a small budget, perhaps you'll find nuggets here that you can use to make *your* business more successful, or at least to avoid whatever pitfalls I end up blundering into.

There'll be days, sometime several in a row, where nothing happens. That's the way it goes. I haven't received the approval of the homeowner yet so I'm going to start him out as John Doe on Anywhere Road, but I will tell you it's in Santa Rosa, California, 95401, and if he/she allow it, I'll be more specific. Perhaps there's other Home Performance Contractors who've already done this but I haven't found them so hang on, here we go.

Day 1
While cleaning up from an EUC (Energy Upgrade California - if you don't know what that is, Google it) 3rd party verification at another just-finished project in the country outside of Santa Rosa, the phone rings. A guy with a pleasant voice and just enough accent that it's hard to understand him outdoors speaks and says he got my number from a local solar electric vendor who I sometimes work together with. And that the solar vendor already did a site survey, sized the system, and mentioned that perhaps John should consider getting some efficiency work done to his home, also. That the 6kw +- solar system would get John out of the upper tiers (we're in Pacific Gas & Electric - PG&E - territory where both gas and electric are tiered with a baseline) and down into the baseline but should only produce 70% or so of his electricity. And that adding some insulation might bring that up to 80% production or so. So John called me, saying he was looking for someone he could talk to about adding insulation in the attic. Having some flexibility for rest of the afternoon, we made an appointment to meet at his home this very afternoon.

First, about the house. It was a 1968 ranch style home in a bedroom community out at the western fringe of Santa Rosa. John and Jane, his wife who wasn't there at the moment, had been in the house for 10 years, had replaced all the windows with new double pane vinyls, replaced all the ducts because of rodent damage (and hopefully closed all the rodent holes in the crawlspace), and the house looked sharp inside with newish floors, kitchen, and paint. There was a 12-14 year old natural gas furnace with all ducts in the crawlspace, an outside air conditioner heat pump. A smallish dining room, 10 X 10 or so, was added on to the end of the kitchen, had large french doors west into the back yard, and it was always cold in there. A large, 20 X 20 or so, living room addition was out the west wall into the back yard, possibly on a slab, and IT was always cold, also. One of the original bedrooms tended to be cold and had very little flow out of the supply register.

John and I spent a half hour or so getting acquainted, sitting at his dining room table. He turned out to be a truly interesting man, older, well traveled and thoughtful, and now worked at a nursery. After trading enjoyable and increasingly personal stories for a while, we started discussing his thoughts and questions about what he thought his home might need and why. From there we moved on into more holistic full-house efficiency concepts and I was pleased to see he was open to wider possibilities than just insulation. We discussed air barriers, thermal barriers, crawlspace issues, insulating the roof vs insulating the ceiling, furnaces vs heat pumps, and more. And then we agreed that I would do a full audit of his home.  Running low on time before the next meeting meant that much of my fact finding about John and Jane's home would have to wait til the day of the audit.  I did, though, ask for a years' worth of utility bills.

Now I need to be sure you know a few things.  John already knew about our local SCEIP program and wanted to finance the whole project through them.  SCEIP strongly encourages a full audit prior to applying but at this time doesn't require it.  However, the EUC program does and bases it's rebate on the percentage modeled improvement to the home's energy usage, which requires both a test-in and a test-out.  Second, my audits are not cheap.  I charge $700 for a full audit.  They're pretty comprehensive but I still lose some possible clients because of the price.  I'm not saying that's good or bad, that's just my business model.

Well, I already did a minor faux-pas: when I left, I told him I'd try to move a few things around to get to his audit next week and call him between 6 & 8, and here I was writing this blogpost and missed the time til 8:30, at which time my call to him went unanswered.

Oh well.  Day 1 and I'd already blown it.

What I missed at the ACI conference:

I was startled to hear that I missed the secret Standards Committee meetings they were holding at the ACI conference in SF- since I'm *on* a Standards Committee.  But while I was just sitting around on my behind at the normal ACI seminars, these meetings were held behind closed doors, so to speak, and were in flagrant abuse of the Brown Act, which clearly states that when two (or more) people with the same idea in mind meet, they must advertise their meeting before hand so that anyone else with ideas to insert may do so during the meeting.

Never the less, apparently a number of ACI attendees with questionable morals led by one Peter Troast of EnergyCircle.com, followed closely behind by two henchmans/henchwomans who shall remain nameless, have issued new wording for our previously spotless Home Performance Field.

I have little time before I must go, so I'll let Peter's words speak in his own sonorous voice:

http://www.energycircle.com/blog/2011/03/31/total-home-proctology-new-brand-term-home-energy-efficiency

signed,
Anon E. Mouse
It's only a few days past the 1st, eh?