Our team at EnergySavvy has come together for a variety of reasons, but we’re all passionate about home energy efficiency. We thought we’d share the story of one of our writers, Seattle resident Matt Dressler. His experience remodeling his house and then dealing with the resulting home performance problems is a compelling story, a mystery with a great ending.
It’s a long read. Matt is serious about his home. But for anyone who’s got a cold or drafty room in their house and has wondering what to do, his story is for you.
Matt and His Remodel
My wife and I live in a remodeled 1942 “war box” house in West Seattle. In 2006, we invested in a major remodel which included an addition to the first floor, a partial second story and upgrades to the furnace and hot water heaters. While we were very happy with the remodel itself, we noticed that the house was noticeably colder during the first winter after we finished: especially in the addition that we had put on and intended to be the major hang-out room in the house. This really surprised us because we had assumed that newer construction and a new furnace would inherently result in a warmer, more comfortable and energy efficient house.
Looking for Answers
Our first attempt to find a solution was to contact the heating company who had installed the new furnace system. A technician came out, inspected the furnace, felt the air coming out of the registers and told us everything seemed to be working as it should. He proposed that the fan speed on the furnace blower be increased to get more warm air to the space, so we tried that. But the higher fan speed did not have any real impact warming the colder areas of the house, particularly in the new room that was the coldest. Bummer.
Our next attempt was also in the “more is better” school of thought. Perhaps the coldest room just needed a little more heat and that would do the job. So we decided to add a wall-mounted, electric space heater, sized to heat the square footage of the room itself. Unfortunately, while it did warm the room some, the heater ended up running almost continuously. The heat just seemed to be leaving the room as quickly as it entered, and our electric bill went up considerably. Strike 2. We were pumping in more heat, consuming more energy and paying higher electrical bills. But we weren’t making the house any warmer. Clearly, it was time for some other ideas.
As we pondered who else might help us, we contacted an architect, several general contractors and a window and door specialist to get their perspectives. After meeting with these folks, we were only more uncertain about what to do. We were told that the addition should be the warmest room in the house, not the coldest. A wide variety of ideas were proposed that “might” solve the problem, but a clear explanation of what was causing the issue did not emerge.
Energy Audit: Mystery Solved?
Time went by, and later that year I learned about a course in Residential Energy Auditing at a local community college. I found out it would cover how to assess, diagnose and improve a home’s energy efficiency. How to understand comfort, air quality and energy issues by looking at how house functions as a system of interacting processes. How temperature, pressure and moisture move through and impact the overall performance of a house. Seeking answers for my own house, I signed up for the course.
About halfway through the class – when I knew just enough to realize that I didn’t know enough to do a safe and meaningful audit of our own house – I got in touch with an experienced home performance contractor. I wanted to see a professional energy auditor in action and find out how we might improve the energy efficiency of our house and hopefully solve our cold room problem. The basic energy audit consisted of a blower door test to quantify and locate where air was leaking into and out of the house, test the furnace ducts for leakage (a major source of heat and energy loss in newer homes), inspect the quality and adequacy of the insulation in our walls, floors and ceilings, and identify any health and safety issues with the house.
The audit provided us with great information. We easily found the location of the air leaks. In our house, the leaks were primarily around the recessed can lights, electrical outlets, through the furnace ducts (which had never been sealed) and in many places around our basement. We also discovered that the insulation had been poorly installed both above and below the addition room, reducing its effectiveness by a third or more! In one area, the insulation was missing altogether, allowing a steady stream of heat to escape out of the house through the can lights. The energy auditor explained how the warm air escaping from the upper areas of the house was drawing cold air into our basement through the gaps around the basement windows, holes in the wall paneling, gaps between the trim and the walls and through holes between the basement and the crawlspace under the new addition. So most of the air we were breathing was coming through our dirty basement and crawlspace! We learned this phenomenon is known as the Stack Effect.
We also learned that while the overall air leakage was quite low relative to the square footage of our house, it was still enough to be a major factor in the comfort issues we were experiencing. In fact, it turned out the amount of air leakage in our house was right at the lower limit of what is considered necessary to provide acceptable indoor air quality. Therefore, in our case, sealing up the air leaks would require us to add some type of mechanical ventilation—i.e. running a whole house fan periodically or installing a ventilator–to maintain healthy indoor air.
Last, but certainly not least, we learned that if all the various exhaust fans in the house (bathroom, kitchen, dryer) were to run at the same time and all the windows and doors happened to be shut (on a cold winter day, for example), it was possible to depressurize our house to a point where poisonous exhaust fumes from a furnace or hot water heater could be pulled back into our house. Scary! We had never heard of such an issue before the audit. Luckily, in our case, our furnace and hot water heater were both direct venting types (they drew outside air for their fuel combustion) and were not affected by the depressurization we could generate.
Finding a Real Fix
After the audit, we talked with the home performance contractor about where we could get the most energy savings and benefits for our money, and asked him to generate an estimate for the various energy efficiency improvements. We mulled it over and decided to go ahead with air sealing, adding insulation above the ceiling of the new addition, correcting the placement of the insulation below, sealing the heating ducts wherever possible and investing in an energy recovery ventilator to provide adequate ventilation into our tightly sealed house. The air sealing was a no brainer–straight forward and very inexpensive. The insulation improvements were more of an investment, and the energy recovery ventilator was our big ticket item.
So what changes have we noticed since doing the work? First, the air sealing in our basement has made a huge difference; we already notice dramatic improvements in both warmth and comfort. We also notice much fresher indoor air throughout the entire house. The steady infusion of fresh outdoor air and the exhaust of stale indoor provided by the ventilator is really nice. What about our cold room issue? Well, as the temperatures are just beginning to drop here in Seattle, we won’t have really good data for a couple of months. We certainly have decreased the amount of air leakage and improved the effectiveness of the insulation both above and below the room. So, we’ll have to wait and see. And finally, we’ll have to wait until the end of the winter to know exactly how much we’ve saved on utility bills.
What We Learned
So what advice do we have for others considering energy efficiency improvements to their houses? Well, if we were to give two recommendations, the first would be that it is really worth taking the time and investing the money in an energy audit to get the whole picture before you take any action. Houses are complicated. We wasted both time and money by adding a heater to our cold room without addressing the air leaks and insulation problems first. And second, work with someone who understands how your house really works (as a system of interacting processes) from the very beginning. That way, you’ll focus your efforts on addressing the root causes of your comfort and efficiency issues and get the results you are looking for.
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