Advanced Home Performance

Willowside Project, Day 69

2011-06-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

OK, here we go! Just got a go ahead from the EUC, already have the one from SCEIP, so I check in with Sue at Harmony Farms to make sure she can make the solar electric installation come together in time; she's ordering the materials first thing Friday morning. Then check in with Daniel at Zero Energy Associates to confirm he can get the furnace, AC, and DHW systems done within 2 weeks. Both say yes so we're going for it. Of course, the gods may yet smite me for my arrogance, thinking I can get it all done in two weeks but what's life without stress hormones, eh? Daniel's starting at 9 Friday, I'll get there about 10:30 and... I'll keep you posted. Plus photos. This is the fun part. Plus, unless I get smoted, I'll get paid on the first of July.

Willowside Project, Day 68

2011-06-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Muchtar Salzmann, the property ower, called yesterday and said that SCEIP has given up the go ahead to proceed, meaning his property assessed financing has gone through. Fantastic. The second half of the decision on when to start depends on the EUC (Energy Upgrade California) approval. They have an approval process because they will send Muchtar a check for, tentatively, $3,500 after the job is completed. That's a large incentive and represents more than 10% of the total cost of the job and we can't start until we get their approval also.

The problem now: I'm down to the wire on my ability to get everything done by June 23rd, the last date to get the final SCEIP paperwork in to get disbursement on July 1. I'm giving the EUC until tomorrow morning for their approval or I'm going to have to postpone this job for another month. Arghh. It's already been 2 months in the pipeline and 26 of my man-hours so postponing for a month puts a dent in my cash flow. I'll let you know tomorrow.

Willowside Project, Day 64

2011-05-31T15:37:00.001-07:00

Since we finally submitted all the paperwork to SCEIP last week, I know we have a certain amount of down time with this project, since we have to wait for both SCEIP an EC to go through their beurocratic before then will let us have funds. So we still have a week or so of time that I'm spending for other jobs and to get them in to contract. So not much news here; Muchtar called to say that he'd heard SCEIP would be quick.

On another note, here's a moderately done video bleeb on what constitutes an audit. It's done by the Redding Electric Utilities and it's well enough done to keep on you web site for a while.

Willowside Project, Day 50

2011-05-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

Wow, where do the days go? I thought I'd get the EUC filing done and uploaded to the EUC website yesterday but here I am, late on Wednesday, Day 50 finishing it up. After the monotony of assembling all the data and getting it all stuck in the right fields in EUC's Excel spreadsheet, I find I don't have one piece of information that they require: the account numbers from the Salzmann's gas and electric bill. Arghh. Too late to call tonight but will first thing in the morning that then it's assemble, zip the file, and hit Send. Whoopee.

Willowside Project, Day 48

2011-05-25T20:24:00.000-07:00

Today, we're finally getting the contracts together and signed. It's been a month and a half but we have an excellent package put together and one that they can afford. I've got a separate contract for the HVAC contractor and another for the solar electric installer, plus mine equals three. If the other two companies and I didn't know and trust each other, I don't think this would work because if one of us drops the ball or doesn't get finished by June 20th or so, we're all three screwed. The last day to submit the final papers, including all closed contracts and final inspections, to the funding agency - the Sonoma County Energy Independence Program or SCEIP - is 5pm on June 23rd. If all is complete and on time, SCEIP will send out a check for the full amount on July 1st. If we don't get it in by the 23rd....well..they'll be $60,000 that the three companies involved won't get until the next pay date on August 1st. Ouch. That'll put a dent in my cash flow.

So we're off to the SCEIP office, John Doe and I and 3 contracts. We were very careful to get all our little ducks in a row so an hour or so across the desk from Taylor and we're submitted. Right now, the SCEIP office has around a 10 day turnaround for approval, which is pretty quick. Next I have to get the Energy Upgrade California (EUC) files together and submit those online, another multi-hour project, because they need to approve the project before we can start, also. They're not doing any financing, but they will send John Doe a check for around $2,750 after the project is completed so it's well worth the application hassle.

But we all three swear that we can make it. The companies:
Zero Energy Associates from Sebastopol, doing the furnace, AC unit, ducts, and DHW.
Harmony Farms from Sebastopol doing the solar electric system.
And I'm doing the air sealing, insulation, miscellaneous framing, and shepparding this project through. Interesting way to do business, eh?

Also, John and Jane Doe have decided that now that we're in contract, they're willing to come out of the closet, so to speak. John and Jane are actually Muchtar and Rohana Salzmann on Willowside Road. They are the owners of Emerisa Gardens Nursery just west of Santa Rosa (my favorite in the County, and I didn't know they owned it when I first started this project). Besides going public with their names, I'll now be able to take more photos. That'll make the work much clearer.

Willowside Project, Day 43

2011-05-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

OK, John and Jane have decided. I calculated that they should have about $2000 left in their budget and they've decided to go over their budget a bit by choosing the 95% State water heater. This will send them about $2000 over budget, which they will have to pay for themselves.

Time to get all the contracts together and plan out the work schedules:

Harmony Farms in Sebastopol is handling the solar electric installation and will have their own contract.

Zero Energy Associates in Sebastopol will handle the HVAC and water heater and will have their own contract.

I - Advanced Home Performance - will handle the organization, oversight, electrical, framing, air sealing, insulation, permitting, and lighting and will have my own contract.

These are the logistical issues:

In order for SCEIP to pay out on July 1, I have to have the permit finalled and final SCEIP paperwork in to their office by 5PM on June 23. That's going to be tight for ZEA but they say they can do it. HF says it should be no problem. If one of us fails to finish, we all suffer through another month before seeing payment so it takes some trust in each other to step in to this.

Problem is, we can't start until SCEIP gives us approval for financing and Energy Upgrade California (EUC) gives us approval to proceed. EUC is a week or two, SCEIP is around 2 weeks and here it is, May 18th. It'll be tight but at this point, I'm going for it.

Today's job is to get all three contracts signed and head to the SCEIP office with John Doe for the signing, then work up the EUC file for submittal.

Whew!

Willowside Project, Day 42

2011-05-18T08:07:00.000-07:00

Met with John and Jane Doe today to go over their decision making process. It's something I see quite a lot: they've decided on the major items but dividing the small amount of their budget that's left after the 'have to's' can take a while. He wants this, she wants that, and that's what marriage is all about, eh? I think they're close to deciding.

Willowside Rd., Day 29

2011-05-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, John Doe called and said he was ready to discuss options. Great.

This morning, Daniel from Zero Energy Associates and I sat down at their dining room. John had examined how much the Sonoma County Energy Independence Program (SCEIP) would finance. SCEIP has a couple of limitations – not over x% of Loan to Value, or . The limit SCEIP would finance on his property, less the cost of his proposed solar electric system, was $20,000. Since I'd already modeled the proposed improvements we were considering to his home in EnergyPro and found a possible 50% improvement, I knew the Energy Upgrade California (EUC) program would send him a rebate of at least $3500 so his real total that he could spend on energy improvements was more like $23,500. OK. That was my target. Now how much could I fit in that amount? That's basically the question he asked me to answer.

Let's see, the definite items are:

Air sealing walls and ceiling, doors and weatherstripping: $1600

Replacing the 9 recessed fixtures in the kitchen w/ ICAT CFLs: $900

Tidy up the R19 attic insulation and blow more to end up with R38: $3000

Replace FAU with 95% direct vent unit with all new ductwork: $9900

Replace AC heat pump with SEER 15 unit: $3700

Test in, test out, SCEIP paperwork, EUC application: $1400

Weatherstripping and properly venting the DHW closet: $450

Repairing the floor where existing floor registers are removed: $1200

Total: $22000

OK, there's $1500 left. Here's the options:

Air seal the subfloor from the crawlspace: $400

Insulate the floor with batts to R19 (joists 48”OC): $4000

Insulate the floor with closed cell foam to R10 (less $400 because I don't have to air seal the subfloor: $6900

Replace the water heater with a 95% direct vent: $4200

Move the washer/dryer into the garage: $1500-2000

Ditch, drain, sump pump, and vapor seal the crawlspace & monitor: $TBA

If he chooses to insulate the floor with batts, I will have to air seal the subfloor; the upcharge to use spray foam under the subfloor is 6900 less 4000 or $2900. If he chooses to replace the DHW, I don’t have to do as much work on the closet so the DHW is 4200 less 200 or $4000.

If John is willing to go a bit over his $23,500 limit, which do YOU think is the best choice, considering both energy savings and indoor comfort?

Willowside Road, Day 23

2011-05-17T13:10:00.003-07:00

I'm taking an unexpected trip, for family health reasons, and will work from the road from the next week or so.

Willowside Project, Day 22

2011-05-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

John Doe wants my part of the work scope proposal included in the audit report to be broken out and summed up so he can see the blocks of money that the various parts of this energy efficiency project require and prorate them in terms of loading order and importance. The first parts - air sealing and insulation - add up to $7500, a State or AOSmith condensing water heater with direct vent through the roof is $4300 and the full HVAC system with all new balanced ducts, 2.5 ton AC instead of the old existing 5 ton,etc., is just under $10K. So we're over $20K without even touching the lighting or washer/dryer moving to the garage, nor any crawlspace remediation, which it *really* needs. Grand total will approach $30K if all measures are addressed.

The modeled improvement in EnergyPro is 53%, which qualifies for an Energy Upgrade California rebate of $3500 but it's still a chunk of change. It will, however, - and I keep coming back to this with them - greatly increase their indoor comfort and remove the vast majority of their indoor air quality issues: combustion byproducts from the HVAC closet, moisture and smells from the washer/dryer, crawlspace air drawn in through the floor, and more.

I hope they go for all of it, partly for the work that my company gets out of it, but more so because of how much better their home will function when they're done.

Willowside Project, Day 17

2011-05-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Zero Energy Associates has finished their bid for the HVAC and DHW systems, both of which really should be replaced with direct vented appliances so we can seal up the closet doors and don't have to worry about combustion byproducts in the interior air. Daniel and I are at John and Jane Doe's today to deliver their audit report and answer all questions.

Once again, they show themselves to be ideal clients. They ask a lot of informed questions that show they're not only listening, but thinking over what we're talking about and applying it to their vision of what they want. Since they're so engaged, the talk and report delivery take 2 hours and I stay another 45 minutes after Daniel leaves to talk about lighting options and other livability issues with their home.

Part of the lighting discussion revolves around the recessed ceiling cans in their kitchen which, besides being non ICAT and not giving any general lighting, are far enough away from the upper cabinets that a person working on a counter has their hands in the shadow cast by their head; an all to common occurrence and one that is just plain bad design. We'll try a new trim ring on one first to see if scattering the light with a fresnel lens creates enough ambient light and then undercabinet lights takes care of the task lighting.

Besides all the talk about HVAC and DHW changes, we talk about the reasons for an all new, balanced, duct system, whether to move their washer/dryer out into the garage (their's always pros and cons), and whether the patio doors in the dining room are worth keeping, adjusting, and replacing the weatherstripping or whether it's better to just replace them. All goes well and as part of the lighting discussion, I learnt that the lights in their range hood don't work; looks like the switch is broken/worn out, so I take the whole control unit home with me to fix it for them. Easy for me to do and well worth the effort.

Willowside Project, Day 14

2011-04-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

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:

2011-04-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

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?

Thursday, March 31st, 2011, pt.3

2011-03-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't think there'd be a part 3, but after a delightful dinner discussing possibilities and hopes, we moved on to a local bar where Mansfield Insulation and another un-remembered company (I apologize, little good that does) hosted an open bar for Efficiency First folks, of which there are many nowadays. Great discussions included Russel King and Gavin Healy arguing amicably about how low a RetroTec duct tester will accurately measure and whether it was possible in the real world to get only 0.2 inches of static pressure drop across an air handler and coil. Another topic covered ways to streamline the Energy Upgrade California's data entry requirements and piggyback them on to EnergyPro software. I know, I know, heady stuff and with fervently held positions, especially after a couple of free glasses of whatever they were serving.

Whew. Only one more day. ACI Conference: Energy Nerdism is alive and well.

Thursday, March 31, 2011, pt.2

2011-03-31T23:15:00.000-07:00

I have to confess up front, a couple of drinks magically appeared in front of me this evening and for whatever reason, my hand reached out and picked them up. Not my fault, OK?

That out of the way, the afternoon's first session was either a) not as captivating as previous sessions or b) I can't take much more in without other important stuff falling out the back. To continue the business development flagellation I seem to hunger for, I went to "Business Building Blocks" with Stephen Self. Stephen, if you're listening, it's nothing personal but I couldn't focus and didn't write a thing down so after 20 minutes, I slipped out the back and went to my little cave at the Mosser Hotel which, if all you want is a clean little cave in downtown San Francisco, is the best deal around. A room in downtown SF for $89? Almost miraculous. An hour alone for an hour for a recharge. Ahhh.

The Happy Alone Hour was enough that I chose "Selling Home Performance: Where the Mastic Meets the Metal.", which wasn't about either mastic or metal. Or even ducts.

There were 3 speakers. Jason Bowers from Recurve talked about how to present myself when across from a client at a table. Be patient. Summarize frequently. Spend the first 30 minutes mostly listening and asking questions. Tell a personal story about myself and my Company. Present with confidence. Talk about money early and be firm about costs: 'This is what it takes to get the job done right'.

Casey Murphy of ICF International was next and talked about how to sell using Indoor Air Quality as a sales point. As part of his talk, he threw out a number of statistics that were captivating: 1.8 million ER visits per year because of Asthma. 19% of households have someone with Asthma. Indoor Air Quality is important enough to discuss in almost all sales meetings.

Eric Howarth of EGIA was last, talking about how he uses an in-home display as part of his sales pitch, showing his company in a personal way with pictures of families and previous happy clients. Sell a Good/Better/Best because most people will choose the Better. Forget about myself; it's the client's story that is most important. Talk about how well we will take care of their home, using details. Have financing options at the tip of my tongue. Make it easy for the client to say yes.

As if 4 sessions today weren't enough and with a quick bite on the run, I managed to spend time with Peter Troast from EnergyCircle.com. Peter's business model is superb and if you're in the Home Performance field, I highly recommend that you look at Energy Circle. This is my personal, completely subjective feeling: they feel about me like I feel about my clients: that they really want the best for my company and are continually looking for new ways to make my business more successful. They're good folks. Peter, Lisa, Greg.

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

2011-03-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

Saturation. I don't have it yet but I see it coming over the horizon. So far, most of my courses have been on business and marketing; I guess that's where I feel the weakest. It's also been great to meet people on the show floor. Putting faces to names I've only spoken to on the phone. It's funny: after I've spoken with someone a dozen or two times, done business with them, engaged in a little chitchat, and then meet them face to face, we're already sort of friends and it's a real treat to meet them. Lisa Fahay's a great example of several today. My pleasure, Lisa.

This morning's seminar was another tough call. I need you to understand: every time slot of 90 minutes has 15 to 20 different classes going on at the same time, in different rooms, so perhaps you can see the difficulty in winnowing it down to just one. This session, "10 More Marketing Tactics Worth Stealing' or 'Systems and Methods for Scaling Your Business'? Well, not too tough. 'Systems' had such a dry title that '10 More' won fairly quickly. It was a panel of 4 contractors of various stripes who, for whatever reason, now do Home Performance Contracting. It was led and moderated by a stub of a guy that was a delight to listen to, Ed Thomas. The 4 contractors were informative and had some solid nuggets but I could have listened to Ed for the whole hour and a half. What a great presenter. Vivacious, funny, and active with a solid, natural feel of his subject and an effortless delivery. Hope you read this, Ed. Great class.

The second morning session was a *real* difficult choice. "House Characterization", "Online Marketing Strategies for Home Performance Contractors", "Standards, Specifications, and Certification: Why They Are Your Business", and more. Sort of randomly, I chose "Online Marketing" with Aaron Goldfeder of EnergySavvy and Ben Gutkin of Warm Thoughts. Looks like I'm a glutton for marketing info, eh? I remember thinking part way through the session that perhaps this one was bit of a bust but now, looking back over my notes, I took a LOT of notes. They must have been more informative than I thought at the time. Lots of nuggets: customer reviews are everything. I won't get them unless I ask. A strong website has a lot of *inbound* links. Story, Snacks, Sneezes: make your company sound like a good story, offer visual snacks, and ask everyone I know to mention my Story. The new Google Maps search makes strong websites a larger size on the map. I only have 4 seconds when someone lands on my website to answer 3 questions: Do I have what they want? Am I local? Am I somebody they want to do business with? Otherwise, click, they're gone.

After more show floor shmoozing and a hurried bite, it's off to the first afternoon session.

I'll tell you how it went later.

March 30th, 2011, pt.2

2011-03-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

The Energy Efficiency event this evening was a bit of a bust except for the 2 drink tickets they gave out at the door and the open bar inside. It was organized well, with stations around the wall with subjects listed, but the individuals who were supposed to be in front of the placards were mostly.... not there. Still, it was well attended and there were lots of new folks to chat with. Turns out I'm not alone in my small-contractor-struggling-to-grow position. I am, however, better trained and better situated than most (mostly because of my SweetHeart). Much of what I'm networking for and talking about is how to grow my business.

Anyway, back to earlier.

During the lunch hour, I decided it was more important to wander through the main floor of the Conference, stopping at all the booths that looked interesting. Saturn was there with a computer set up so that attendees could take short online tests to get their RESNET CEUs approved but I didn't spend the time to take them. CalCERTS was there, as was BPI, EF, various training agencies that I looked at, insulation providers, etc. This took the whole hour and a half and before I was half way through the floor, it was time for the afternoon's first session. Just so everyone knows, this is not like the PCBC or West Coast Green conferences with many booths advertising 'green' products. This conference is for the believers, the Nerds, those that already work in the field or are starting to. It's not targeted to the public or consumer but to those who already have the religion that energy efficiency is the planetary future so it was both smaller and more focused than the conferences geared towards the public. That's part of why I'm having so much fun; I'm with others like me. Wow.

So for the afternoon session, it was a tough choice between 'Solutions for Wet Crawlspaces and Basements' or 'Beyond your Certification'. I checked out Beyond, then went down 3 floors to check on Solutions. It was packed; probably 200 in there already and few empty seats. Who could ever imagine that a seminar on wet crawlspaces could absolutely pack a room. After a quick internal check, I realized Crawlspaces would be a great thing to listen to on the Conference DVD I was going to buy and that 'Beyond would be a better choice in which to be present. (Note to self: don't decide I needed the exercise and choose to run three LONG stairs up before I sit, sweaty, in a busy auditorium). Turns out Beyond was a better choice, I think.

It was hosted by 3 pretty knowledgeable people: Sam Flanery, Courtny Moriarty, and Dan Kertzman (replacing Matt Golden with other commitments). It was an OK seminar It's take-aways were that the client sitting across from me was everything. That putting myself in their shoes and considering their position was the most important thing in the discussion. Yes, that's pretty much what the last speaker said and what I already believed but they each said it in a different way and I'm slow enough that I need to hear it regularly and a LOT before it actually sinks in. All in all, a good seminar but not great. It just added to the general internal world view.

The last seminar of the day, I chose "Outlast the Competition - and Price Profitably" with Vicki Suiter. It was a tough call between her and "Building Science Puzzles and Solutions" with a couple of Green Homes' speakers, who talked about weird things they've seen while doing home performance work in the East. As much as I love a puzzle and really wanted to 'stump the chump', when I spoke to Vicki before the seminar, her topic caught my interest. It turned out to be the best seminar of the day for me. She's the CEO of a company that helps Home Performance contractors navigate the shoals towards profitability. Not only was she an excellent, engaging speaker, but she spoke to my level of concern: small contractor struggling with the huge number of competing requirements and certifications. She was the first speaker to have hand-outs on which we could write notes. Perusing my notes of her seminar, her main points were that we, as Home Performance Contractors, must not only focus on our clients' pain - what their problems are - but also and moreso on what they want - their desired results or what they would want in a perfect world. Apparently, and research supports this, as clients talk about what they would desire, the gap between their desires and their original concerns or their Pain Points gets larger. They feel more strongly what they don't have, so any solution I then propose is more emotionally charged. Perhaps this sounds a bit manipulative but I see it as more helping a client articulate and clarify what their *true* issues are. And since I firmly believe that what I offer my clients is a Win/Win/Win, helping them get emotionally close to their concerns is just fine with me. All in all, the best seminar of the day. Plus, besides the highly descriptive handouts, she gave us a form in which to enter a message to ourselves, in a sealed self addressed envelope, which she is going to mail to us in 3 months. Absolutely fantastic touch that really encourages those in her seminar to step up and follow through with her concepts. I definitely have a few concrete nuggets to include in my sales. And how successfully she marketed herself and her business to us was a superb example of marketing at its finest: she not only gave us handouts with her info on them that we would write on and take home, but she got us to sign up for her newsletter with the 'mail back in 3 months' thing. I mean, she was *good*.

Then, after Sushi with a few folks, it's off to Efficiency First. But I've already told you about that.

More tomorrow. Good Night.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

2011-03-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

Wow! What a day! Nonstop from early morning til now: 6 PM.

OK, let me recap the day. Every day, they publish a new, color coded, double sided page of the day's goings-on. Just this morning, from 8:30 to 10:00, there were 17 different courses to choose from. After winnowing it down to 3, I checked each one out, asking the presenter for a synopsis of what they'd be talking about, to get a feel not only for the information but also for the quality of their presence.

So this morning, for the first session, "Eight Simple Things to Enhance Your Business" won, with Michael Rogers. My take-aways:
1) find out what business I'm in. What do I want to focus on/what are my strengths? For me, it's residences rather than commercial, existing rather than new, and low hanging fruit rather than only whole house retrofits (thought I wouldn't turn those down).
2) Make it easy for my customers. Show up. Call. Follow up. Look professional. Help with their paperwork. Have answers ready for their financing/money questions. Listen and be concerned for their family. You know: all the stuff I already know but sometimes don't actually do as well as I should. I know it's basic, but I still like to be reminded.
3) Get good help. The guys I have working for me make a huge impression on my clients. Dirty clothes, muddy boots, smoking; there's a lot more ways to lose a job than keep one.
4) Reward what I want to see. Compliment good work. Create a mindset of quality and customer satisfaction. We all work towards the same goal: helping the customer fix the problems with their home.
5) Marketing. People want to know "What will you do for me? What will I get?" Be bold in my marketing. Upsell; offer customers more than they ask for: If they call with mold problems, perhaps they need floor air sealing and insulation. Remember 'building as a system"

Oops, didn't make it to the afternoon sessions. Gotta go to the evening Soiree (loveya, Hon) with Efficiency First. Then with Home Performance with Energy Star contractors.

More later.

ACI Conference - Tuesday, March 30th, 2011

2011-03-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Never having been to an ACI Conference before and, more importantly, never having been to a conference at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, any normal person (me) would Google the place to find out where to park. Entering the address of the Marriott Marquis placed it right in the main part of the Moscone Center and since I'd been to a couple of other conferences at the Moscone, I assumed it must be there. After parking in the cheap seat parking garage a few blocks a few long blocks south of Moscone, I find no one at Moscone has heard of the ACI; in fact, there's a completely different conference there this week. Yank out the smart phone, try and make out the minuscule print and find the Marriott is actually several blocks *north* of Moscone. Drag my bags.. anyway, you don't need to hear all this. I made it.

Monday is what's called the "Pre-Conference Summit", costs an extra several hundred bucks and did not include enough of interest for me to attend. If you're interested, the ACI Conference website lists what went on that day. I want to talk about my personal view of the Conference so this Blog starts on Tuesday.

Tuesday has two parts to it: it's the second and last day of the Pre-Conference Summit but it also has several 4 hour classes in the morning and several more in the afternoon and are included in the Core Conference, even though the Core Conference doesn't start until Wednesday. 4 of the 5 morning courses were designed for specialty trades - insulating sidewalls, optimizing HVAC, etc. - so I went to the 5th, which sounded right up my alley, House as a System.

David Keefe is an experienced, quality speaker who has apparently retired from a few decades of working in the Efficiency field and now speaks. It's not easy to speak for 4 hours with only a 15 minute break. He warned us early in the session that it would be a fairly basic but complete going over of the Home Performance field and that's what it was. He spend an hour or more setting up and describing concepts and history, and the rest of the time talking about how things are done and going over in detail why we have to be so careful about indoor air quality issues when we tighten up a house. Using several detailed examples, he kept coming back to the idea that Home Performance Contracting is a large and complex discipline and if people are considering entering it, they must buy in to the 'house as a system' or risk serious health and safety consequences. 4 hours is a long time when I already know and believe what he was talking about so I sat in the back rows where I could micro-nod off in peace. I slipped out for a while to check in to my hotel before returning in time to get CEU credits for the course. (Oops, did I just say too much? BPI?)

The afternoon selection was an easy one: John Snell and Matt Schwoegler of the Snell Group were here from Vermont to talk about IR cameras and that course was GREAT! Fun speakers in a tag team fashion, plenty of humorous examples of mistakes made amd enough new tips to keep me busy with my camera for months. Great stuff. I've been wanting to take Snell's Level 1 Thermography class but it's $1500, which is out of my budget for the foreseeable future but apparently they're trying to put together a simpler class just for us Building Energy Nerds who will only be certified to use our IR cameras on building and promise we won't try to explain why the sky measures -22 degrees or other non-building questions. The down side is that RESNET, one of my HERS certifying agencies, is eventually going to require this certification.

I've met several folks that I know already and I expect to meet more on Wednesday, when more people arrive for the main part of the Conference. An impressing number of people fly in from other States. So Wednesday morning - it's off to the Main Floor to meet up with quite a few people that I only know from phone conversations. It'll be great to put faces to the names.

The Single Use Plastic Bag Blues

2011-03-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

I love to visit Mexico. I like the climate, most things about the culture, and it's nearby. Possibly my least favorite part is one that's most obvious in the open desert: the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. Festooning (or is it infesting?) the low growing shrubs, hanging on by their well-designed handles, blowing sideways in the wind. My (ex) brother in law had an apt turn of phrase for it. He said “The Bag Bushes are in bloom.” Of course, we're far from immune on this side of the border. The sheer quantity of discarded bags is less here but not the eyesore-ness.

Not to mention the sheer waste. Plastic food store shopping bags, made from HDPE – high density polyethylene – are made from natural gas. About 600 BTUs worth. That's a relatively small amount; a therm, the unit of natural gas we see on our monthly utility bills, is 100,000 BTUs and we only pay a couple of bucks for that. But let's multiply that by roughly one hundred billion, the number of single-use plastic shopping bags made and used each year in the US. I think numbers are more graphic than the written word here: 100,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeros. Multiply that by 600 BTUs and, well, you can do the math.

A few quick facts to bludgeon the subject with: World wide, there are roughly a trillion bags produced every year. More than 97% are thrown away. 10% or so eventually make it in to the ocean, where they drift for years or sink to the bottom. One report estimates that every square mile of the ocean averages 46,000 floating pieces of plastic. When a plastic bag does eventually start to break down, it releases BPA, PCBs, and other nasties which are known hormone mimics or are implicated in cancer. 4% of the entire world's oil production goes to making plastic bags. An average car driving one mile uses the same amount of energy as it takes to make 14 single use plastic bags. An estimated one billion seabirds and sea mammals are killed every year by ingesting plastic. The numbers are staggering.

Oddly enough, one thing that's worse is paper. It takes more than 4 times as much energy to create a paper bag than a plastic one and it takes twice as much energy to recycle a paper bag as plastic. The plastic/paper choice at the checkout stand is not so easy.

Which brings us to reusable bags. As you can guess, they're not all made the same. Polypropylene, cotton, HDPE, LDPE, they each have their own sized carbon footprint. Cotton, though the best feeling of the lot, takes roughly a hundred uses to pay for itself at the '600 BTUs/single use plastic bag' rate. If you wash your cotton bags, the payback pushes off even further. It turns out that the simple polypropylene bag is the most ecologically economical, with a payback of 4 to 6 uses.

Other countries are far ahead of the US in the push to eradicate the invasive desert 'bag bushes'. California requires food stores to provide bag recycling, which could be considered a start. San Francisco was the first American city to actually ban plastic bags even though opponents argued, with some validity, that the ban would actually increase pollution. Seattle followed soon after by charging a fee per plastic bag used.

Other countries, though were far ahead of the U.S. Australia, many African countries, China, and Europe have all been controlling plastic bag use and production for much of the last decade.

So why are we still using so many? I'm a perfect example of American laziness. Half the time I forget to put my reusable shopping bags back in the car after I unload in my kitchen. And even when I remember to take them in to the store, I still tear off two or three of those clear vegetable bags to hold my vegetables on the way to the checkout. Why? Why is it so hard for me to completely shake those Single Use Plastic Bag Blues?

I've just realized part of what I want from writing this: embarrassment. I want to stand there in the checkout line and know you are watching me with my vegetables in plastic bags. Of course it's silly, but if it's that little extra internal push that helps me remember my reusable shopping bags, I'll use it. Similar to smoking, peer pressure is what will make the plastic bag choice visible. I'm ready to change my behavior, to do my part in making reusable bags the social norm.

Somehow, I suspect our grandkids would thank us for it.

Seal It Tight Video

2011-02-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

I don't know how they did it but they're making caulk and foam fun and sexy. I love this:
Seal It Tight

and I'm going to link it on my website.

I'd rather ignore this blog, but it's probably prescient

2011-01-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Shelton, CEO of the Shelton Group wrote a thought provoking opinion piece on the immediate future prospects of the Home Performance field. She states "In fact, the availability of more generous federal tax incentives has been a primary driver for the increase in energy efficient home improvement activity we’ve seen over the past year."

Since I haven't seen any excess of activity this year, I'm not sure what increase she's talking about though I suspect that the US as a whole has seen a noticeable uptick in Home Performance contracting in 2010. But the part I dislike - only because it's a somewhat bitter taste - is that the forecast for 2011, which I and many other Home Performance Contractors hope will be substantially busier, is that on third of possible clients is lost this year because of the decrease in tax incentives. As Shelton says, "Thus at a minimum, approximately one third of the population who made their home more energy efficient would likely not have acted or would not have purchased the more efficient unit if it weren't for the incentives offered."

Granted, California utilities have stepped up their rebate plans, rolling many of the individual existing rebates for insulation, high efficiency furnaces, etc. into the new Energy Upgrade California (EUC). The requirements for a Contractor to get in to the EUC are set high enough to keep out the casual and untrained, but the program itself is fairly robust and is funded by everyone's utility bills so it's not going away for the next few years. I've heard that cash rebates are available to qualified homeowners using qualified Home Performance Contractors up to $4000, though I haven't been able to get more than $3500 for a client so far. And as it should be, the rebate amount is dependent on the tested and modeled percentage increase in energy efficiency of the home, so it's both science based and verified afterwards by both 3rd party Verifiers and by following the homeowner's utility bills for the next year or two. That's a lot of what I like about the EUC: the building science, or home-as-a-system approach, helps us understand why certain efficiency measures are more important than others, the the verification system helps homeowners trust us as contractors.

The Shelton Group's Blog: http://www.sheltongroupinc.com/blog/?p=2106

Energy Upgrade California: http://energyupgradecalifornia.org/

PGandE Releases Energy Efficiency Estimates

2011-01-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

Sonoma County reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 161 million pounds in three years

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PGandE) announced last month new estimates that demonstrate the significant impact energy efficiency investments made by Sonoma County customers have had on reducing harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. From 2006-09, PGandE customers in Sonoma County saved 248,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity through energy efficiency and helped avoid 161,000,000 pounds of GHG emissions - equal to the emissions from burning about 8,185,000 gallons of gasoline.

Many Sonoma County-based businesses achieved significant savings through energy efficient upgrades and retrofitting projects. PGandE supports these measures with customized energy efficiency incentive programs that are available to all local governments, businesses and residential customers.

“We congratulate Sonoma County for its focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and its great results,” said Randy De Caminada, manager of Energy Solutions and Service for PGandE. “PGandE is here to help all of our customers with energy-saving solutions.”

Climate Protection Results 2006-2009

Area	GHG Emissions Avoided (lbs. CO2)	Equivalent homes powered for one year	Equivalent Gallons of gasoline
Sonoma County	161,000,000	42,630	8,185,000
Santa Rosa	72,920,000	19,294,000	3,705,000
Rohnert Park	28,058,000	7,345,000	1,425,000
Petaluma	22,186,000	5,870	1,127,000
Cotati	3,070,000	812	156,000
Cloverdale	3,238,000	856	164,500
Sebastopol	6,198,000	1,640	315,000
Sonoma	7,798,000	2,063	396,000
Windsor	6,538,000	1,730	332,150

For more information, contact Kera Smith at (707) 577-1082 or visit www.pge.com.

Surprising results

2010-12-02T17:50:00.000-08:00

Just did an audit on a VERY high end home up on the ridge above San Rafael, above the ferry building. Built in 1913 for a well heeled ship's Captain. Wild layout but was ready for a remodel, something the new owners were doing. A brand new high efficiency furnace system was already installed with all new ducts and they looked *beautiful* from the outside. Very neat and clean, beautifully finished and taped, we expected very low duct leakage. So we sealed up all the registers we could find and pressurized the duct system. Surprise! It was off the charts high. First thought: perhaps the manometer was hooked up wrong or was on the wrong setting. Nope. Then perhaps we missed a register and that was why we couldn't pressurize the system. After crawling all through the house; attic, upstairs, downstairs, basement, crawlspace, we couldn't find any open registers.

Next: get out the smoke generator so we could blow theatrical smoke in to the duct system and perhaps we could then see where it was blowing out. Running around the house while the smoke generator was sending smoke in to the duct system, the whole place was slowly getting smoky. Everywhere. After working on this simple duct pressure test for 2 hours and going over everything multiple times, we finally had to face the fact that this beautiful duct and furnace system leaked like a SIEVE! I mean huge leakage. We had the duct pressure fan up to max and still barely were able to get a number of CFM leakage. Ready? Over 1100 CFM25. Perhaps that doesn't mean anything to you but we were expecting around 100 CFM from a new, correctly installed system and we got over 1100. 1100 CFM is another way of saying that the duct leakage was around 50%, meaning half, HALF, of the heat put out by the furnace was lost to the outdoors before it ever got inside. And in a brand new system, no less. I was floored. Part of the report will emphasize that the contractor MUST get the HVAC sub-contractor back out there to do his own test and fix the system. It won't be easy and there may be some metaphoric blood spilled but the owner has the right to a correctly installed system.

What an example of a beautiful façade hiding a lousy system. Note to self: put aside your snap assumptions until the data is in with the real story.

From the DOE's Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy News

2010-11-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently released a report on how governments and industry can spark homeowners to seek out home energy improvements, or retrofits, which save energy and money for consumers. Energy efficiency upgrades include energy saving improvements such as adding insulation, sealing air ducts, installing high-efficiency lighting, enhancing or replacing windows and doors, and replacing furnaces, heat pumps, water heaters, and air conditioners. Called "Driving Demand for Home Energy Improvements," this study will help ensure that the Department's investments in energy efficiency provide taxpayers with a high rate of return on their investments, deliver the maximum impact in local communities, and support a self-sustaining industry for residential energy efficiency improvements that will help grow America's economy and create new jobs.

The report is aimed primarily at policy makers and energy efficiency program designers, especially those new to the field. The authors examined 14 residential energy efficiency programs, conducted an extensive literature review, interviewed industry experts, and surveyed residential contractors to draw lessons from first generation programs. The report highlights emerging best practices, provides insights into how to increase the effectiveness of incentive programs for comprehensive home energy improvements, and suggests methods and approaches to use in designing, implementing, and evaluating these programs. The report's findings will guide future investments for DOE's residential energy efficiency programs and similar state and local programs. The report's conclusions include:

It is not enough to provide information, programs must offer something people want: High home energy use is not currently a pressing issue for many people. It is more important to identify an issue that people are drawn to such as health, comfort, energy security, competition, or community engagement to attract interest.
It is important to know your target audience: A blanket marketing campaign to reach "everyone" will likely be ineffective and expensive, especially at the start of a program. The more effective approach is to find and target early adopters and tailor messages directly to this important audience. Demographics can help program administrators better understand the market and select optimal strategies. Organizers can also segment the market by interest in hot issues such as health concerns or the likelihood of getting savings.
Partner with trusted messengers: Larger subsidies and more voluminous mailings don't necessarily win over more customers. Programs can and should have a local face, with buy-in from community leaders. Tapping trusted parties, such as local leaders and local organizations, builds upon existing relationships and networks.
Language is powerful: Avoid meaningless or negatively associated words like "retrofit" and "audit." Use words and ways of communicating that tap into customers' existing mental frames. Encourage program staff and contractors to use specific vivid examples, personalize the material wherever possible, frame statements in terms of loss rather than gain, and generate a public commitment from the homeowners.
Contractors are program ambassadors: Contractors, more than any other party, are the people sitting across the kitchen counter making the final sales pitch to a homeowner – contractors are often the public face and primary sales force for the program. Most programs that succeed in performing a significant number of energy upgrades have worked closely with contractors. Conversely, poor first impressions or shoddy work by contractors can reflect poorly on the program.
Make it easy, make it fast: Offer seamless, streamlined services such as packaged incentives, minimized paperwork, and pre-approved contractors. By making it simple, it will make the decision to invest in home energy improvements even easier.

The report concludes that success will require multifaceted approaches that acknowledge a deeper understanding of what motivates homeowners and what contractors are concerned about. Effective programs will tend to be tailored to the location, thoughtfully researched and piloted, personalized to the target audience, and more labor-intensive than simple incentive programs.

California takes another Giant Step

2010-10-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago, on Oct. 14, the California Public Utilities Commission introduced Engage 360 to the public. Engage 360 is a new brand name and a web portal that the CPUC hopes the public will as a place to go for information an to participation in energy-saving activities.

Commissioner Grueneich of the CPUC says "This new name, Energy Savings Assistance Program, is clear and concise. Customers will immediately understand that this is a program that provides energy and cost savings, resulting in a true benefit for customers otherwise unable to take advantage of energy efficiency programs."

According to the new website: Engage360.com, the program was developed through a year-long process based on an in-depth, collaborative approach between CPUC staff and the utilities. The brand is built on the core attributes of conveying progressive inspiration, meaningful change, and a trusted information source with the aim of galvanizing Californians to adopt more clean energy solutions throughout their lives.

Another part of the new program is called the Energy Savings Assistance Program. The CPUC acknowledged the importance of a single recognizable and trustworthy name for these programs. The name, Energy Savings Assistance Program, will be used by all CPUC-regulated utilities for programs providing weatherization and energy efficient measures to low income households.

So far, the site is pretty simple with a mainly social feel but since there's quite a bit of government funding behind it, I expect it to move more in to public education on the hows and whys of energy efficiency and conservation.

Check it out and let me (and them) what you think.

Another voice is added

2010-10-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

“Convincing millions of Americans to divert their time and resources into upgrading their homes to eliminate energy waste, avoid high utility bills, and help stimulate the economy is one of the great challenges facing energy efficiency programs around the country,” says Merrian Fuller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBNL).

LBNL has a research and information dissemination program that has been doing some fantastic research into how to best get homeowners to buy into the deep energy reductions that are necessary for us to control our national energy policy. Some of their more interesting findings - to me, anyway - are that the words 'audit' and 'retrofit' don't make homeowners weak in the knees like they do me. They are better sold on comfort, protecting their home's structure and value, or that their entire community is coming together to do this work en masse. And the best inducement is seeing their local community leaders have it done to their homes and then give voice publicly on how much better their home is.

And since I'm considering going door to door, covering an entire targeted neighborhood, I'm particularly interested in a report on how well that worked out for a few that have already done it. Haven't got around to reading it yet but will.

I'd like to see this on the front page of the newspaper, talked about by the morning commute radio personalities, and billboards beside the freeway. This *must* cover deep reductions in the proper loading order, not just 'let's put solar on the roof'. Solar companies that are cold calling everyone in town and trying to sell them a solar electric system without talking about what's more cost effective - efficiency improvements first - drive me nuts, and I hope this clarification is part of any and all or the advertising strategies that are getting near (Yah!).

Certifications, Certifications....

2010-09-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

Wow, do we got certifications. It seems like every agency out there wants to have a piece of my bank account.

WARNING - feeling sorry for myself session ahead

Even though I was certified through CalCERTS as a HERS provider last year, it turns out that now I had to take another written test and field test, at my expense, to maintain my certification.

My original certification through the Building Performance Institute as a Building Analyst was fine up to this year but now, for the Home Star Program, I have to get Company Accreditation, also. For that BPI requires another certification with another costly written and field test and extra insurance riders. Then they want $1,500 on top of that as the Accreditation fee - just for the first year - and without it I can't access most of the Home Star funding or business.

PG&E's Whole House Pilot Program requires a different set of requirements to access that program and, of course, more money.

Build It Green has their own classes, tests, and fees.

There's more but that's a taste of the current confused certification picture in California. Oh, I forgot, each of the above also requires varying amounts of CEUs (continuing education credits) every year, all costing hundreds or thousands apiece and few fulfilling more than one agency's requirements.

OK, OK, enough complaining.

What I've received for all of the above: one fantastic education in building science. I often think, "If only I had known this years ago.." The house as a system was hardly considered until less than 10 years ago and 10 years from now it will be de facto for ALL new construction. The world needs this if our kids kids are to have a healthy future or for US to all live in healthy houses.

Yes, you've just read paragraphs of complaining about how much it's all costing but the work is there, it's fulfilling work, and a living is still to be made doing it. A lot more fresh faces coming in to this field are required for us to meet, or even approach, two of our local Sonoma County goals:

13,000 existing housing units retrofitted by 2012 (!)
Greenhouse Gas reduction to 25% below our 1990 levels by 2015 (!)

Holy Cow, Batman, we need every SuperHero we can muster.

New products on the market

2010-06-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

Just got back last night from PCBC in San Francisco - the Pacific Coast Builders Conference. Lots of new technology and products on the main floor and plenty of speakers and seminars upstairs.

The State of California had a booth (amazing, eh?) where the Department of Housing & Community Development was tasked with getting out the word about next year's new and considerably more stringent building codes. The new code system is two tiered in 2011, where - if I got this right - a mandated list of items in many areas such as site development, energy and water efficiency, materials conservation and waste stream, pollution control, indoor air quality and moisture control, and installer qualifications are all part of the prescriptive path. And a 15% improvement in these areas above today's standards for the performance based path. That's for the lower tier. And in 2012 will kick in the higher tier of all the above except a more stringent prescriptive path and a 30% improvement for the performance based. All good and necessary but/and there will be more inspections and more contractor training required. So start now and be prepared for January 1, 2011.
http://www.bsc.ca.gov/CALGreen/default.htm for the website and http://www.documents.dgs.ca.gov/bsc/documents/2010/Draft-2010-CALGreenCode.pdf for the whole thing. Note that it's still a draft.

Halo now has a line of LED 4" recessed cans that look *great* and they have a retrofit version. Plenty of light and color temps from 4000K down to 2700K, or daylight to warm. They'll be a big seller. And I found out something new that I wish I'd known before: the module for their 6" LED recessed cans can be screwed in to an older existing non ICAT housing (which I'd known) and they make that non ICAT housing airtight, or AT (which I *hadn't* known and which I had after retrofitting so many cans in the last several months to get the AT rating). FYI, their 4" line is different and can't be retrofitted to a standard can. They've come down in price to below dimmable fluorescents, though still above standard CFLs. Definitely competitive and I personally believe are the future that will make CFLs old school.

Eco - specializing in LED lighting - was there. A newish brand from China, they do a lot of outdoor street and decorative lighting but also have a line of interior screw-in replacements for interior bulbs that are rated fairly good as far as lumen output but some were pretty weird looking. They also had an extensive line of LED T8 and T12 fluorescent tube replacements that fit in the standard 2 pin on each end fixtures. Might be good and can they also had some T5s that could be used under cabinet. Unknown quality and the reps there couldn't answer my questions about longevity & lumen testing. Innovative and could be good but I want to see 3rd party testing.

There were several spray foam companies there that tout soy oils, recycled content, and no ozone depletion. Their words are carefully scripted to make them sound all green when they're not, but at least the percentage of non-nasty stuff is growing. I am NOT against spray foam; I love the stuff, recommend it, and think it's the cat's meow for many problems, but it has a large and nasty upfront environmental cost.

I saw some new synthetic decking products that looked great. Very realistic, in fact, I could hardly tell they weren't real wood. Still as expensive as Ipe or high end wood, but though they're not made from post consumer recycled content, the long life span makes them at least worthy of consideration. I'd love to see a real life cycle analysis and footprint of a synthetic deck product and high end wood like redwood or ipe. Anyone have numbers on this?

Missing this year, and that WERE there last year, were a couple of water products. Last year, there were two different companies coming out with plug and play type solar water heater products; basically a water heater/storage tank with an integral pump and control system so all one needed was to plumb to a solar panel on the roof and plug it in. All electronics, freeze protection, etc. were included in a nice, compact package that would fit in a standard hot water heater closet. I wonder why they weren't at PCBC this year. And last year there were 2 different companies offering wonderful graywater storage systems. Where were they?

Lots more, of course. Hundreds of vendors and many great products but I focus on efficiency products that can be used in retrofits and that have either a small amount of embedded energy - meaning they're cheap to make and use simple, renewable materials - and/or are cheap to run and use. All that other stuff used to get me excited but I'm a lot pickier nowadays.

Putting a Face on the Gulf Oil Leak - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com

2010-06-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

I try not to get political and I'm guilty of burning as much petroleum as the next person but dammit, this hurts:

Putting a Face on the Gulf Oil Leak - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com

Let there be light. And let it be from LEDs.

2010-05-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

The following link takes you to one of my favorite blogs. And this one has a few thought provoking nuggets. Each one of us can make a difference, however small, that our grandchildren will thank us for. I want to leave as good a world as I can for them and this blogpost talks about one way.

Let there be light. And let it be from LEDs.

Is Europe ahead of us?

2010-05-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a wonderful vacation to France: 4 days in Paris and a week or so in rural southern France, in the Pyrenees. The French are so French and the buildings aren't considered old unless they were built before the 1400s. Fascinating history that dates back millenia, though occasionally rather bloody. And while my lovely wife and I were soaking up the history and culture, I was also taking in how they used energy - how they modernized and heated all the old stone buildings, what their energy package was (electricity production, natural gas for heating, etc.), and their cultural beliefs around indoor comfort, personal space, and expectations. Luckily, she was tolerant of my constant musings on buildings and energy use.

I expected and was familiar with Europe's smaller, more efficient vehicle size, excellent public transit system, higher percentage of scooter use, and the fact that walking is so much more a part of life than in the States, even in rural areas. Transportation issues in the cities, and even interurban, are a whole topic in themselves and I won't go in to them here. But the first thing that struck me as different and unusual inside a building was as soon as we got to our first hotel in Paris. We tended to stay in what I'll call low-end-fancy or high-end-budget. Michelin two and three stars but the cheapest of them. As we walked in to the hall on our floor, it was initially dark but the lights turned on the moment we turned the corner, dim but adequate - aha, they're on motion detectors and turn off after a few minutes. A little strange for us because the area is dark until you approach it but very effective as far as energy usage. Then we enter our room and there is no light in the room until one sticks the key card in to a slot on the wall that turns on all the electricity in the room. This was so common and expected there that they didn't even tell us about it at the front desk. Granted, I've seen it in a few hotels in the States but it's still relatively rare but I suspect saves a LOT of energy. No more lighting unoccupied rooms or endlessly droning room heaters. Then we turn on the lights and find that they're CFLs in the ceiling and LEDs on either side of the bed. LEDs, no less. They're investing in LEDs on a public scale. Small, excellent for reading at night, and probably draw less than 5 watts apiece. There's more, but you get the picture: our carbon footprint while we were staying there was far less than the average hotel in the States (and yes, I'm making a point out of ignoring the huge carbon cost of our flight there and back - I'm still working on that area).

The other hotel we stayed at was similar, and what came to mind was a difference in cultural expectations. The quality of life there is comfortable while the average person's energy footprint is considerably less than ours. Hotels are actively investing in energy reducing technology: central boilers that not only provide the hot water but also feed individual, quiet water-to-air heaters in each room, either fan fed in a dropped ceiling or passive white radiators on the walls; modern LED directed lighting; services that are only available when needed, controlled by motion detectors or key card controllers. These things cause a small amount of bother. The room isn't perfectly warm for us when we enter, it's dark until we approach an area, there's more task lighting and less area lighting. And we're conditioned to expect to not be bothered by little niggly things like that. But the net savings from those actually very small adjustments are substantial.

Which brings me back to expectations. I didn't gain anything directly from having to make little adjustments to accommodate these energy saving features. On the contrary, they cost me slightly according to my American expectations. But they saved the country substantially as a whole. This takes me back to my college philosophy class and the concept of The Commons: the area of our cultural life that we all have to share with each other. Water, air, roads and transportation, public spaces, most things the government does for us. We take care of The Commons even where it costs us some personally because it's better for all and in the end, that's better for us. We all do it to some extent. We pay taxes, we share the road, we recycle and try not to pollute. In Europe, with it's much older, denser history of human occupation, they just have a bit more developed sense of The Commons than we do here in the States, with our sense of unlimited space and resources.

As our population grows and we strive to keep our standard of living while not destroying our environment, Europe has a few things to teach us about resource usage in our buildings. And I haven't even gotten to the windmill farms, bullet trains, our plenty big turbo diesel rental car - full size for Europe - that got nearly 50 mpg in hilly, stop and go, and freeway driving while passing stringent air quality requirements and giving us standard amenities that most American cars don't even have as options.

Come on, America, we need to be on the *forefront* of energy efficiency, not lagging farther and farther behind. Because the country that does more with less will end up leading. And right now, that's not us.

Now how can I import that turbo diesel we drove there. Mmmm....

To model or not to model…thoughts on building energy modeling software.

2010-04-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

The home performance field bases itself on what it calls ‘building science’ and its results are supposed to be measurable, quantifiable, repeatable, and numerical. We test in to a project when we start, we do whatever energy related improvements, and we test out at the end. And the numbers are supposed to prove both the theory behind our choices and the practice of our actual improvements.

Last year, I paid several hundred dollars for a software package that models a building’s energy use and then projects it’s use after improvements – and several hundred more for a class to supposedly teach and certify me to use it – and it wasn’t a couple of hours in to the class I was both lost and confused, and also floored at the relative ease with which small changes to my input caused large changes in the output. The software felt like a black box: I put numbers in here and results came out there and I had noooo idea what relationship the latter had to the former. Then I’d put in other very similar numbers and whoa, why is that result so different?

I have to say, it WAS partly the software: it was freshly on the market, I was in the first class to try it out, it wasn’t even going to be approved for use for another few months, and even the instructor was pretty lost. And he’d been using the previous version for years. OK. I wasn’t a total numbskull. But only now, the better part of a year after that day and after many hours of puzzling with this program, finally, today, after a real class on the software from one of the guys who actually *wrote* the software (plus they’re now on version 23), do I finally feel like I’m getting a handle on it.

OK. So now, even though I think I can use this software to generate better numbers more reflective of the actual home I’m actually modeling, I also now see how easy it is to fudge or subtly shift numbers around to move the output around. Mmm, all of a sudden I feel like I’m playing Moral Scruples.

Of course, there are checks on the system. My final numbers are sent in to a central database overseen by my certifying agency. And a certain number of my projects are actually visited by another unknown auditor who checks my test numbers. He goes there, interviews the person I did the work for, and verifies my findings. And any pattern of strangeness found in my numbers causes me to be subject to even closer scrutiny. So there’s someone looking over my shoulder, even though from afar.

I’m not alone here; I’ve heard others in my field say that they could make the software say pretty much whatever they wanted. I guess what I’m grasping at here is that on one hand I’m amazed at the complexity of modeling software systems, convinced of the absolute necessity of them, and humbled by the trust placed in my honesty and integrity by the system. The whole concept of home performance rests on our ability to quantify what we’ve done. Without it, there’d be no home performance/energy auditing field.

And I know how fragile trust is and how hard it is to regain it after it’s lost.

Whew. So, when’s the next class in this software? I need to get better at knowing what I’m doing. I can’t afford any mistakes.

Home Star

2010-04-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

In the final stages of its tortuous path through the House and Senate, the details of the 6 billion dollar Home Star program have become mostly clear. In a nutshell, Home Star is a federal job creation stimulus fund that presumably will create jobs by making home energy retrofits and improvements more affordable to homeowners. Though the details are still being worked out as of this writing, it will do this by providing strong, short-term homeowner incentives for air sealing, insulation improvements, new appliances, and possibly other improvements. This will be a win-win for our economy: one estimate is that it will create 168,000 new construction related jobs while reducing the energy use and utility bills of homeowners who take advantage of the Home Star rebates. There are two main incentive tracks to choose from, named the Gold Star and the Silver Star.

The Silver Star incentive track is a direct payment for the purchase and installation of certain proscribed items: insulation, high efficiency furnaces and hot water heaters, and other measures that directly reduce residential energy use. These payments are based only on the appliance or installed measure, require a proof of purchase or invoice of the installation, and pay up to 50% of the cost of each measure up to a max of $3000.

The Gold Star is a performance based incentive, requiring a full energy audit prior to any work being done and then a test-out afterwards to quantify the improvements. It pays up to $3000 for demonstrated improvements in energy efficiency of 20%, determined by the modeled difference between the test-in and the test-out. For the homeowner who wishes to go further, the Gold Star track pays a further $1000 for each additional 5% of modeled energy savings up to a total of $8000 or 50% of the cost, whichever is less. Being performance based, this track will push homeowners towards measures that offer the biggest bang for the buck; these are often the more labor intensive ones such as air sealing, crawlspace measures, and insulation improvements. The contractors who perform the improvements must be licensed and specially certified, so you can't claim the Gold Star rebates if installed by your uncle Joe the plumber.

As you can see, the Gold Star track has higher requirements including tested numbers that show (at least as far as the modeling software can) the expected energy savings. It also has the possibility of higher payouts. The Silver Star track is available to any homeowner and *may* even be available at the point of sale for certain energy saving purchases. Homeowners who buy and install measures themselves can only claim the cost of the merchandise towards Home Star rebates, while those who pay a contractor to buy and install can use the total contractor invoice when claiming rebates.

Home Star has a planned roll out of this month - April - so stay tuned. Hopefully, homeowners will realize monthly cost savings immediately. I'll let you know as soon as I hear.

LED residential lighting

2010-02-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

2009 is the year I saw LEDs finally come down in price, up in lumens per watt, and with a broader selection of colors. Enough so that they’ve become competitive with CFLs for the claim of the Greenest Light. But luckily for us research is being done on manufacturer’s claims of light output and longevity, and unluckily for some manufacturers the research is showing that not all LEDs are being created equally. In fact, the worst are so bad that their initial light output is a small fraction of what’s advertised and within a hundred hours of use their already small amount of light falls off to miniscule. And that’s what I want to talk about here.

The EERE – Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, an arm of the Department of Energy – has enough of a budget to contract with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to put out a report from time to time called the CALiPER or, take a deep breath now, Commercially Available LED Product Evaluation and Reporting. Say that three times fast. Started in 2006, there have been 9 research reports or rounds in which various LED and CFL lamps and fixtures were bought on the open market and then put through their paces. And if you’re nerdy enough to not be put to sleep by technical reading, you may find them fascinating. I did which makes me a Certifiable Energy Nerd.

Available to the public, you can find the series at the EERE website and, though they’re all informative, the last few here and here are more so. To sum up in a nutshell what was found, there are a LOT of brand X LEDs coming on the market of poor quality and the buyer, you, must beware. But there’s also a few that are as good as or better than their claims. How are we to know? The reports describe the LEDs that were tested but for some reason (if you know why let me know) they don’t give the Brand names. Small pictures of each product are included so you can make a vague guess as to what brand they are and apparently they tend to be the ones sold at the big box stores. The cheap ones.

Other reports, available at Home Energy Magazine and here at the EERE (it's almost 4 years old - an eon in LED development - but still apropro), lay out the possibility that the increasing marketing of the low end LEDs to the public may cause a backlash similar to the ones CFLs experienced when they first came out. I know I’m showing my age but I remember how poor the quality was of SOME of the early CFLs and how the failures of the cheap ones colored public perception of CFLs in general and set the CFL industry back a few years. I suspect LEDs are in for a similar perception unless manufacturer honesty and federal oversight of the wild marketing claims keeps the poorest performers off the market. But the major brands – Cree, Halo, and a few others – have fixtures that ARE competitive.

If your incandescent lamps are burning out or costing you an arm and half a leg to keep lit, or if you’re tired of your CFLs being so dim for the first minute they’re on and you want something better, LEDs are becoming Prime Time in 2010. And when you're in the store looking them over, remember this label:

It's a voluntary Truth in Labeling program run by the Department of Energy. Read about it here. The major manufacturers who sign on to the above labeling alliance can't afford negative publicity and their products appear to be well designed and with actual quality control.

I’m installing an increasing number of the new generation ICAT (insulation contact, air tight) LED modules and my customers are raving about them. They come on quickly, have a high enough Color Rendering Index (CRI) that objects appear as they should at night, are now available in various color temperatures (see this article for why CRI and color temperature are important), they dim adequately with standard dimmers, and the cost of the recessed lighting fixtures are similar to CFLs. Personally, I’m sold on the technology and it’s improving all the time.