Seal it up!

One of our long term goals for our house is to use alternative energy whenever we can, and eventually, we'd like to be completely off the grid.  Before we even start to think about what sort of energy we'll be using (wind, solar, micro-hydro...), we want to make sure our house is as energy efficient as possible.  A couple weeks ago, we had an energy audit done by the great folks at the Midcoast Green Collaborative. It was a really awesome experience.  If you've never had an energy audit, here's the run-down:

They come to your house and ask you a bunch of questions about your energy consumption: how much your utility bills were for the past year, what sort of sources you use for heat, what sort of humidity generators you have in the house (watering house plants, an aquarium, humidifier, pot of water on the wood stove, etc.), and other questions associated with general energy use (including the length of our showers).  Then, we did a house tour during which they pointed out a lot of things that we could easily fix (putting insulation on the exposed pipes in the basement, for one).  Here comes the really cool part, though.

www.buildingdoctors.com

www.tlc.com

All the windows, doors, flues, etc. in the house are closed, and they attach a fan one of the external doors.  They then proceed to suck all the air out of your house, they measure the pressure differential between the work the fan is doing and what is flowing into your house (through all the leaky spots!).  With the fan still going, they walk around the house feeling for drafty areas, and it is pretty amazing how many leaks there are!

Then, they walked around with an infrared camera to see any leaky spots that were out of reach or so small we couldn't feel them.  If I had one of these cameras, I'd be walking around with it all the time.

Not our house -- www.energytribe.com

We learned that there are a lot of leaks in our house, but we also learned a lot of really easy fixes that pretty much everyone can do for cheap to save some energy.  For one, all outlets leak. There is a REALLY cheap, easy way to fix this.  Get some outlet insulation for the outlets in your house.  There are pre-cut foam pieces for this.

www.greeningneighborhoods.com

Punch out the holes for the outlets, take off the face plate, put in the foam, and put the face plate back on.  Save the pieces you punch out to make room for the outlets, and for outlets you rarely use, add the foam piece to a childproof outlet cover, and put that in the outlet.  Voila!  Insulated outlet.  :)  This is so easy, I can't believe I've never heard of it before.  They make them for light switches as well, so do those too.

Next on the list....caulking all the spaces between our support beams and the walls.  This one is daunting for me as my caulking skills are minimal.  I'm practicing in the basement first so that I can not make our house look like crap.

I just wanted to share about the outlets since it is so ridiculously cheap and easy.