The Progressive Team
Your Resource for Smarter Home Choices

The typical American family spends close to $1,500 a year on utility bills, and as much as half of that expense could be unnecessary if a home is not energy-efficient. An inefficient home not only puts needless strain on your wallet, but on the environment as well. The fossil fuel-generated electricity consumed by a single house puts more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than two average cars.

With heating fuel prices on the rise again, it's a good time to conduct an energy diagnostic of your home. Whether performed by you or a professional, an energy diagnostic can help you determine where your house is losing energy and what changes would most improve its efficiency. The five steps to a High Performance Green Home include:

• Seal—Warm air can escape your home in the winter and enter it in the summer through leaks in the attic, ducts, basement, walls, fixtures, stacks, window and door frames, baseboards, electrical outlets, fireplaces, and foundations.

• Insulate—Insulation helps keep a home warm in winter and cool in summer. A standard feature of exterior walls, it should also be used in ceilings, floors, attics, crawlspaces, and around pipes and ducts in uninsulated spaces (such as basements).

• Upgrade—Household appliances account for about 20 percent of annual home energy consumption. Refrigerators, clothes washers, and dishwashers are prime candidates for replacement by Energy Star-rated models. Read more..
  Energy is also often wasted by lighting empty rooms, lighting an entire room when only a small part of the room is occupied, using brighter lights than necessary, and using traditional incandescent bulbs rather than the new generation of compact fluorescent bulbs.

• Replace—Many water heaters are set at a higher temperature than necessary (120°F is sufficient) and units with a water-holding tank are often uninsulated, allowing heat to escape. Replacing your water heater with an on demand water heater or a an energy star tank water heater  is an important step towards  higher performance. Heating and cooling systems consume more energy than any other system in your home. Older furnaces, boilers, and air conditioners are often inefficient, and leaky or uninsulated ducts exacerbate the problem. Replacing your existing furnace with a closed combustion, 95%  efficient  furnace  will lower your bill and make your home safer.

• Generate—The last step in creating your high performance home is generating your won energy. Local utilities offer subsidies to install solar panels and state and federal tax breaks are available making solar panels a viable solution. In many cases wind and geothermal heating and cooling are viable solutions too.
  

   

  You can take most of these steps on your own; several websites offer help for the do-it-yourself energy auditor. For a more thorough inspection and assessment, hire a Home Performance professional who can run specialized tests such as a blower door test, which finds air leaks by forcing air out of your home, thereby lowering the internal air pressure and causing air to flow back into the home through any leaks. Alternatively, an infrared camera can be used to produce a thermographic scan indicating where heat is escaping from your home. Though a professional audit can cost several hundred dollars depending on the tests being done, some local utilities, municipalities and non-profits offer existing customers discounted audits.