INC NEWS - Where to save heating costs in your home this winter (today's Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Cozy up to efficiency, by John McCann
(Herald-Sun, 24 October 2005)

It's not just the $3 gas.

Motorists are also fuming about the prospect of
keeping their homes nice 'n' toasty this winter. If
(or when) fuel prices rise over the coming months, so
will heating bills, analysts say.

Even homeowners paying mortgages on abodes costing
$250,000 and up should shudder, because a solid house
isn't necessarily a tightly built one, according to
the energy conservation gurus from Raleigh's Southern
Energy Management.

That is, your place might not be creaky, but that
doesn't mean it's not leaky.

Companies such as Southern Energy Management can hook
a bunch of contraptions to your house and perform
what's called an energy audit to pinpoint those leaks.

Durham landlord Sandy Smith-Nonini agreed to let her
1920s Chapel Hill Road home serve as a guinea pig for
residents interested in what they can do to
efficiently heat their homes.

"I think landlords should take this sort of investment
seriously," Smith-Nonini said.

Her point being, the power bill is going to come in
the mail regardless. The bottom line could get really
big this winter, and somebody will have to pay it. So
a good landlord desiring to keep her or his place
affordable will do the preventive maintenance
necessary to keep costs down.

For Smith-Nonini, that's looking like replacing shoddy
furnaces and old ductwork, and installing new storm
windows.

But which repairs are absolutely necessary? And of
those, which should take priority?

Which is where the energy audit comes in.

Prior to everybody showing up at Smith-Nonini's place,
Bob Kingery and David Boynton of Southern Energy
Management rigged the house with rather
primitive-looking gadgets needed to locate air leaks.

Kingery flipped a switch and there was noise, and then
a reading popped up on the gauge.

Bad news.

"That's the highest I've ever seen," Kingery said.
"This house would test out extremely leaky."

It's an old house, a historic house, built back in the
day when homes were intelligently constructed to work
with nature, not against it.

Air conditioners weren't exactly commonplace in 1920.
So homebuilders outfitted houses with big windows and
sun-blocking eaves, and they paid attention to design,
making sure homes stayed breezy and cool.

Which still works great today. Smith-Nonini said it
takes very little air conditioning to keep the old
house comfortable in the summer. But heating this bad
boy in the winter is a beast.

The ceilings are high, so there's all that space to
warm from the floor up. Then factor in the leaky ducts
that Kingery diagnosed, compounded by the ballooning
cost of fuel, and it's even scarier.

Some leaks are easy to spot. Just look for gaping
holes in your duct system. Then go to a hardware store
and ask for some stuff called mastic that you can use
to seal the ducts.

Other leaks, however, are more clandestine. That's
when energy audits are helpful, because conservation
specialists can actually depressurize your house and
expose drafty areas.

After Boynton did it to Smith-Nonini's house,
everybody walked around holding out their hands,
feeling for little gusts commonly found along
windowsills, around electrical outlets and near
plumbing. Folks gawked at the breeze coming from
underneath the kitchen sink.

Besides routinely changing air filters or the
seemingly novel idea of wearing a sweater around the
house, Kingery said converting to a solar hot-water
heating system is an effective approach toward energy
efficiency. Mind you, that's different from, say,
large-scale versions of those solar panels that power
handheld calculators. Most homes aren't even
positioned to receive enough sunlight for that to
work, anyway, Kingery said.

But solar hot-water heating doesn't take as much sun,
making most homes candidates for conversion, Kingery
said. Plus, there are tax breaks for doing so. The
government is mindful of the world's diminishing
supply of fossil fuels, something not lost on
Americans contending with higher fuel prices after a
ravenous hurricane season.

"It's a combination of Katrina and Rita having knocked
out the gas in the Gulf," said Smith-Nonini, a
research assistant professor of anthropology at UNC
and Elon University. "Maybe it's a blessing in
disguise in forcing us to confront our vulnerability."

That vulnerability being our reliance upon natural gas
as opposed to depending on that great big service
station in the sky.

Or as Kingery put it, "The price of sun is not going
up."


More info... http://www.southernenergymanagement.com