A Cooler House?

I just completed two days of energy saving work with my contractor, A Cooler House. We stopped some air flow and increased the money flow....out.

As I stated in an earlier blog, I had some concerns about my duct work. The tests showed I was losing at least 37% of my rated airflow capacity through leaks. Now I have the old style hard metal ducts wrapped in foil insulation. I have a vent and return in almost every room so I have a lot of duct work.

Before I go too far, can you imagine losing 37% of anything in regular operation? That's higher than taxes! In theory every dollar I spend on heat and cool I take 37% and throw that away!

Needless to say, I want the guys to focus on duct work. Initially they find a big hole. High fives all around but...that seems to relax them and they don't really find much of anything else. When we test at the end of the day, I am very disappointed. We are now at a 32% loss.

I begin to get some double talk from the contractor about how they couldn't seal everything, or they cant get to everything or there is too much duct work etc etc. Basically it's broke and they don't know how to fix it.

I throw out a few ideas that are discussed, but its too late in the day to try them so we call it a day.

Day two starts better because they get under the floor in another area of the house and they find another hole. It's become obvious to me these guys don't relish crawling under the house...progress on that part of the system is going to be minimal in my view. They also don't implement my idea of testing the supply and return airflow separately to isolate the problem.

We are however placing insulated boxes over the can lights! These are sealed down to the joists and ceiling in the attic. Except, they don't get the ones in the furr downs or close to the edge of the roof. So we seal 15 of the 30 or so I have. It will help, but we fall short of our intentions....again.

We add some more insulation and then test again. The house is now 35% tighter than it was which is decent, but we still fall short of the energy star specifications. The duct work is about 6% tighter than at the start.

Bottom Line #1 - Every time I hear a government official say that saving energy is easy and low hanging fruit, I cringe. Implementing and maintaining savings beyond 30% is hard. The contractors are inexperienced (in Dallas), the customer has little choice of contractor, the duct system is in either hot or dirty areas, and everyone has limited education on all the issues that you uncover.

Overall I am pretty disappointed. I think I was oversold and under delivered, but, the price was reasonable. I had three roof fans installed, two attic walls insulated and sheathed, 15 can lights covered, duct sealing, and 1,850 more cubic feet of insulation added to the attic for a total of $1,317.

The duct sealing was $400 of that number and they did spend a lot of time getting the 5%. It will save me around $75 a year. It's impossible to calculate a payback on everything else I spent. If it's 20% of my overall heating and cooling bills, I would be pretty happy with around a five year payback.

Bottom Line #2 - Unfortunately, this just illustrates the importance of measuring and sealing ducts. Its easy to quantify the savings and a 20% reduction in leakage would have paid back in a little over a year.