Energy Efficiency Update

Yesterday we had a home energy audit by Next Step Living, which provides the audits free of charge (the electric & gas companies pay for them). We found out about the opportunity at a booth at the Lowell Folk Festival back in July, which, by the way, was awesome. The food, the music, the food, the people, the activities, the food....well, you can see what we loved the most. We tried Jamaican meat pies, some kind of Burmese fish concoction, various things grilled on sticks, peirogi, Polish rosette cookies, and all of it was delicious. The Folk Fest is also very much focused on being "green," so all of their plates, cups, and silverware are compostable. At the end of the event, they sort all the trash (we saw them doing this), and start the compost pile. Each year, they give away bags of compost made from the previous year's trash! Check it out:





So that's out in our garden now! But I digress...



We had our energy audit (for free!) yesterday, and it returned mostly good news. Our heating system is about 82% efficient. This isn't awesome, but it's pretty good for the kind we have (boiler w/ steam). So there's not much to be gained from replacing it, which means we probably have another 10 years or so (barring any terrible mechanical failure, which seems somewhat unlikely) until we need to deal with that investment.



We already had mostly all of our light fixtures filled with energy efficient bulbs, but he gave us one free one. He also gave us (and installed) a new, low-flow shower head. It's actually pretty awesome, particularly given that our old shower head was kind of broken and needed to be replaced anyway.



He went up in the attic (yikes!) and checked out the insulation. It turns out there's pretty decent insulation up there, and probably not much can be done to improve it. He did recommend re-doing the attic hatch with foam insulation board (polyiso) and new weather-stripping, which we'll do soon. He also thought that the bathroom fan pipe could be insulated, but said it wasn't a big deal, since it's a short run.



He did a blower test and checked out the heating system and the oven. The oven was producing a bit more CO than he' like to see, but he said as long as we're using our hood, it should be fine.



He also looked into solar options (we'd love to get a few solar panels!) but it turns out our house isn't fit for it. The main part is slate (which doesn't work for solar panels) and the back flat roof is too obstructed to make the panels worthwhile. Sigh. So there isn't much new we can do, but it was nice to get a clean energy bill of health.