Word: trethewey
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...Think of your house as a boat," says Richard Trethewey, the mechanical systems expert for PBS' home-improvement series This Old House. "If all the holes in your house that are letting out air were letting water in, it would sink your boat." (Listen to Trethewey talk about how to improve the energy efficiency of your home on this week's Greencast...
...Trethewey's advice is simple: Plug up those holes. "If you see light coming through from outside, that means heat is leaving the building," he says. Windows can be particularly tricky: It's easy to forget to lock your windows (unless you live in my New York City neighborhood), but unlocked windows, even when shut, can bleed heat on a cold day. "You might walk by that window outside and think it's nothing, but if you took that thin crack and turned it into a circle, you'd have a hole as big as a nickel or dime," says...
...Trethewey also suggests investing in a home energy audit to help figure out exactly where the holes are. Such audits aren't cheap - they can range up to $800 - but as "fuel costs rise, the payback improves," notes Trethewey. A good auditor will use a blower test, which lowers the air pressure inside a home - air from the outside will then rush through openings, revealing any leaks. A truly high-tech test will use thermographic cameras, which detect infrared light, to detect exactly where heat might be leaking...
Another quick fix is to simply to use less heat - without freezing to death. Trethewey notes that many homes are overheated, equipped with boilers or heating systems that are far stronger than necessary. If a building uses about 100,000 BTU of heat, it doesn't need a system that supplies twice that - yet that's how many buildings operate. "It would be correct for about two percent of the year, and overpower you for the rest," says Trethewey. "It's like a V12 engine in a Volkswagen - it leads to wasted energy...
...more energy-efficient windows. But if America is going to get serious about weatherproofing the country and saving all the energy leaking out of its homes, the country needs stronger policies that will make going green the smart choice economically, not just environmentally. "We don't have it," says Trethewey. Low energy costs "have made us all pretty lazy and stupid." Winter's coming, though - even as the world gets warmer - and we need to get smarter, fast...