How to save home energy

Yes it is true, October is Energy Efficiency Month. And there are some great ways, some inexpensive ways to make sure your house is running at top efficiency when it comes to energy savings. Let us start with some very inexpensive ideas. How about $5.00, that is pretty inexpensive. It will get you a tube of caulking like this. What do you do with it? Well this is Polyseamseal with two magic words on it, water cleanup and paintable. Especially if you are planning on doing any painting in the near future. Do not use a siliconized caulking. You won’t be able to paint over it. You want to make sure you go around all those doors and windows and seal up all of those cracks. That is where unwanted outside colder air gets in, in the winter and really makes it hard to heat that house up efficiently. So, for $5.00 and a little sweat labor there, you can get your windows nice and sealed up. If you got those old leaky double hung windows that rattle around or hard to open, try this. This is a temporary fix. This is the window shrink film. Now in the past, this was a little hard to put on. It seemed like you needed three friends and a monkey to get this stuff do it here. But now, this is Duck brand. What they have done, is they have made a very simple change and that is putting a piece of tape across the top. It makes it very simple for one person with a pair of scissors and a blow dryer to install this window shrink film. Ones it is stuck to your window frame like that. Use a hair dryer. It shrinks it down and creates a nice air-tight seal. So again you are not getting all that air passing to the outside and back from the outside end, making it again to your heater to heat up the inside air. These are some great inexpensive ways to really save some real energy by keeping that unwanted air. Now inside your home, $20.00 fix right here. This is a Lutron Dimmer. The nice thing about this, is you don’t have to install them in a wall. You can simply plug these in and then plug a lamp into them, like I have done right here. I have actually plugged the dimmer into a watt meter so we can see exactly how much energy we are using. This is a 60 watt volt. If dial it all the way up using 60 watts. Literally dial it halfway down and I am only using 30 watts of energy. So I am using half the energy and that translates into really half of the money that you are spending on energy. Not bad, put a few of those in they are going to pay for them self within probably a year. Another thing you can do, actually for the long term, this is a great idea if you have an older home or those old energy inefficient windows, replacement windows and doors. Now I just put some of these in my home, these are from Geldwin. There are two things that you really want to look for when you are buying new energy efficient windows. You will find them usually right on the stick or on the window itself, the energy star label and also the fact that they are using low-E glass. What does low-E glass do? It essentially reflects from the greatest heat source. So in the winter time, it is going to reflect that heat back in your home if you take a look at this thermal image. On the left is ordinary glass and what you are seeing there, all that red is the heat escaping from the house. So literally you are spending money to heat the outside air. On the right, the low-E glass, you will see how little heat is being transmitted through that glass and again that is real savings and if you replace your windows and doors with the energy star models, there is up to a $500.00 tax credit through the end of next year so you want to check that out as well. Check with your tax professional. Now, with all of the remodeling and the new construction going on, on this country, if you are one of those people that is getting ready to either build a new house or remodel part of yours. Make sure you talk to your builder about a quality home rap. This is a DuPont Tyvek that you are looking at right here. It is the white paper that you see going up on homes all across the country. What does this do? A lot of people don’t know. This is essentially like putting a wind breaker on your home. This keeps out those unwanted drafts, unwanted air infiltration and it really makes your home more energy efficient in that sense. There is also a product that they have come out with called an Attic Wrap, and what this attic wrap does, it goes between the decking and the trusses or the rafters of your new construction and again, it acts as a barrier against the heat in the summer time but in the winter it also keeps that heat inside your home. So again it is making it more energy efficient. Those are some of the tips you can use to make your home more energy efficient especially this month and in the future. A few more tips for about $100.00, buy yourself a programmable thermostat. It is the 100th anniversary of the 100th birthday of the programmable thermostat. They have been around for a hundred years, believe it or not. For around $100.00 maybe a little less, this will actually save you that kind of money in your home energy bills by powering down your system when you are not at home or when you are asleep. So one of the things that you can do is insulate your water heater if you have one. That will save you some energy. As well as installing a brand new tankless water heater. The great thing about those is the fact that you are not heating up a 50 gallon tank full of water all of the time even when you are not using it. You are only heating the water when you need it. So, logically, that is going to save you quite a bit of money on your home heating bill and your energy bill throughout the winter and the rest of the year as well. Those are great ideas for keeping the energy efficiency in your house at a very high rating, especially this month, October, energy efficiency month. Check out more about that done info for more info and I am Brad Staggs.



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