Moving Beyond the Low Hanging Fruit

When I first moved into my new home three years ago, I wanted to do everything "little" thing I could to improve my footprint and reduce my wasteful costs like energy and heating. Changing a lightbulb is pretty cheap and pretty easy, but sooner or later you end up needing to face bigger ticket items. Windows, insulation, things like this are not cheap or easy to do, but let's face it. They are well worth it! And even though the payback or return on investment might be years, it's still better to do them, or at least consider them.

So, following the guidelines in my energy audit, I started one of the biggest projects of my life - and one of the most expensive. I set out improving the energy efficiency of my home in a very serious way. New windows, new siding, and additional insulation. All at the beginning of the heating season.

As you can see from the photo, my house used to be green with wooden vertical siding. The building was structurally sound and it had decent insulation for a home built in 1974: probably about 4-6 inches of fibreglass batting. The windows were leaky enough in some rooms to feel a draft; the house was expensive to heat; and you could clearly hear the traffic outside in some rooms as if the window was open. Plastic sheeting and caulking only did so much.

My energy audit also recommended additional insulation without removing the existing. Over the next few posts, I'll show you how we added more efficiency and how we improved the value of the house.



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Project: Insulating the Hot Water Tank Pipes

An efficient and well-insulated hot water tank will help conserve energy whether your tank is heated by electricity (like mine) or by oil or natural gas. Unfortunately, a lot of the pipes leaving the hot water tank are not well insulated, at least in older homes (also like mine).

Luckily, putting insulation on exposed copper is a quick and easy way to help! All you need is some pipe insulation and a knife. Measure the various lengths of exposed pipe and cut appropriate lengths of insulation. Simply wrap over the pipe (careful! it might be hot!) and seal if necessary.

This is what is looks like when complete. Relatively painless. Total time was about fifteen minutes start to finish. Total cost was $0.00 as the insulation was just laying around my garage. You should expect to pay about $2 a metre or less.

Insulating the hot water pipes in the walls is a job best done when building a new home or when renovating walls. My next step for this system is to wrap the water heater with an appropriate thermal blanket.

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Enviromental Weekend

So it's Friday and that means it's time to get back home and get a few more things done around the house before the cold winter heating season is fully upon us.

In addition to the 350 event in Halifax tomorrow, there was also the launch of Dalhousie's ReThink initiative today at the SUB. I'll post some additional details about that very soon.

So what's on at the house? Here's a quick update:

I've got 3 programmable thermostats left to install; 6 done last weekend!

I have a number of outlet and light switch insulation pads to install. This will be a quick one!

I have a new shower head for the downstairs bathroom

I have some foam insulation to put on the garage ceiling. Looks to be about R10, but I'm not yet sure if I have enough to cover the whole ceiling.

I have the parts and intention to build another 1-4 pop can solar furnaces.

More on all of these updates soon!