Home, sweet light crude heated home

In my last piece I offered some energy saving tips relating to your car, and the 9.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil that goes into the collective American gas tank. Fuel oil and propane combined account for 7.3 million bpd, or 35% of our total consumption. In this post I’d like to offer a few hints on low cost ways of conserving fossil energy at home.

Your house will lose about half its heat because air is leaking into and out of your house. Even a new, well built house will experience a complete change of air once every two or three hours. Good thing, too, or else we’d die of the stink. Older, leakier houses might exchange air at twice that rate or more. The ideal situation is to have your house as airtight as possible and then voluntarily adjust the air exchange rate as needed. Luckily, it is not expensive to work on this.

Look around the outer walls of your house. Every place where two materials meet is a possible leak: windows, doors, outlets, utility entrances, vents. To start with, get a roll of rope caulk, a roll of self-adhesive foam tape, some tubes of good silicone caulk and a caulking gun, and a can or so of expando-foam. Get the $17 caulking gun, not the $3.99 one – the cheap ones only last a week or so before something bends or snaps. The rope caulk is good for temporarily sealing the sliding joints in old double hung windows. The foam tape is for butting surfaces around windows and doors. Don’t forget the door or hatch up into the attic. The silicone caulk is for around the outside of windows and doors, and the expando-foam is for those huge Grand Canyon gaps between the concrete in the basement and the wood framing on top of it. You can also get little foam pads for underneath switch and outlet plates.

So far you have spent less than $50 and you have done a lot to keep the precious oil heat in your house. This will probably pay back in the first winter month.

Windows are a weak point in the thermal armor of your house. A standard 2x6 framed house with decent windows and insulation can lose 20-30% of its heat through the windows. Even double pane windows are pathetic insulation compared to walls, and even with low-e coatings heat still radiates through them. A decent double pane window might have an R-value of 3.3. Really good ones approach R-6. A 2x6 stud wall with fiberglass insulation is R-28 or better.

I recommend insulated curtains. You can get window blanket material at a local fabric store and make your own Roman shades. You can go to Blinds Wholesale (the cheapest place I’ve found so far) and buy so-called honeycomb shades, which add R-4 to R-6, depending on the style. This will knock you back $100+ a window, depending on size, but will pay back. If you are really strapped for bucks, go to your local camping store or army surplus outlet and get some of those silvery survival blankets. They are just rectangles of aluminized reflective mylar – one of the elements in that window blanket material. Cut them to size and attach them to the back of your existing curtains. If you want to get fancy, buy some polyester batting at your local fabric store and sandwich that in. An important element in this is to seal around the edges of the curtain with magnetic strips or velcro to keep air from circulating behind the curtain.

Perhaps most important, take care of your heating device. If you have an oil furnace, when was the last time you had it tuned and cleaned? Whatever you use to burn fossil fuels, maintain it at peak performance. Even a small increase in efficiency at the burner can save you the cost of the technician’s visit in a few months.

This is simple, relatively inexpensive work that has a fast payback, both for you and the environment. For the next step, have an energy audit of your house. An expert can assess your situation and run the numbers on the best steps to take for further savings. In Vermont, call or email Efficiency Vermont, our energy efficiency utility. The Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site has good information on weatherization techniques and how to find an energy auditor.

Energy efficiency isn’t rocket science, doesn’t require a lot of capital, and is a better investment than stocks, bonds, or money market funds. It is a way for you to benefit yourself and the world at the same time. Don’t wait for winter.

Comments

[Marc]

Another great pithy essay, Hilton. One minor correction on air change rate. I think you meant to say a new house might have an air change every two or three hours, rather than two or three per hour. Really well-built houses are down under 1/10th of an air change per hour.

[Heretic]

Thanks Marc, I had a momentary loss of linguistic function. It is corrected.