common energy mistakes of builders, home
owners and Code Officals
Or, Confessions of a frustrated Home
Performance professional
Missing or
insufficient insulation.
Most every day I see under-insulated and sometimes
completely uninsulated attics. It is so easy and effective to insulate them and
the benefits of comfort and energy savings are so great. Today I did a pre-solar inspection on a house
from 1965. The attic had zero insulation. One would think that before the most
advanced energy measure, solar electric generation, that one would do the type
of energy measure that was done as a code requirement in 1970. However there is
no trigger to make this happen.
I recently tested a house on the peninsula. It had just undergone a $700,000 remodel to make it a mansion for a tech executive with a taste for Mediterranean
style. It was going for sale for 2 or 3 million dollars. It was perfect. Except for the attic insulation.
It had gaping holes in it and was more of a 1980s job than one fitting the 2013
California Energy Code. There was nothing I could do about it. No trigger.
Leaky hatch
to attic.
This is extremely common. What is highly uncommon
is to see a properly weatherstripped attic access hatch door that is insulated. This
is essentially a 5 square foot energy hole in most every ceiling in California.
No radiant
barrier on reroof or addition of ply to roof.
I experience hot attics all the time. They don’t have to be that way. When reroofing it is easy to add Kool-Ply
rather than old fashioned plywood or OSB. It costs about 10 cents per square
foot to upgrade to the radiant barrier covered plywood.
Back in the early 90’s it was common knowledge in energy
circles that radiant barriers really worked. Carpenters on the job could tell
the difference there under a roof with a radiant barrier from one without. It
was pleasant under the radiant barrier and hot under old fashioned plywood.
In some areas a radiant barrier in the attic could be the
difference between needing air conditioning or not. Please specify Kool-Ply on
your next reroofing job, new house or addition.
No
insulation on raised floors in houses with crawlspaces or basements.
You don’t have to have cold feet all winter long
and waste energy. You can really feel it. I insulated the floor of an old house. The tenant called me up to thank me. I did not tell him about the insulation, he felt it. I remember being told by PG&E people back in the 80’s that
floor insulation was not cost effective. Don’t believe it.
Insulation is not
very expensive, it has no moving parts and will last til it gets infested with rats or
gets wet. Rodent proof your crawlspace to keep rodents and their feces out of
house. (Some 60% of air inside a house originates from crawlspaces.) Protect the
air you and your family breathe. Get your floor properly insulated after you
rat proof it. You'll have happier feet and no mice.
A brand-new 1970s era furnace!
Your HVAC installer just sold you a 1970s era furnace
in late 2015. This is in the state with the strictest energy code in the
nation, the one leading the way in cutting carbon and fighting climate change.
I see this every week. Even though we’ve been replacing these old
units for decades, sometimes with detailed energy savings calculations, contractors
still sell people these inefficient units because they have a low first cost.
We know that the costs we should be concerned with are the lifetime costs of
heating system because that is the larger and more significant cost. Spend a
few hundred dollars more for a level of efficiency and safety more 2015 than
1979.
Combustion
Safety
I just had to pay $500 more for insurance because
I do “BPI” work. BPI is the Building Performance Institute, a non-profit
organization that teaches and certifies contractors how to test houses for
carbon monoxide, gas leaks and energy efficiency. (They do more really. Check
out BPI.org). That means that I do the
tests of houses with old-style open-combustion gas appliances. If the houses
that these appliances are in ever get a strong enough negative pressure in
them, combustion gasses can escape inside and sicken or kill the people who
live there. This is why we should not
sell these units anymore. Buy the cheapest 90% efficiency furnace, one that is
sealed-combustion rather than an old-style open combustion unit.
Not getting
a furnace or air conditioner tested by a HERS Raters.
The HERS energy testing industry in California
speculates that some 85 or 90 percent of comfort systems are not tested by a
third party inspector after installation. Nobody really knows the real answer. If the California Energy Commission does know,
they are not letting on about it. However, in California, code requires third
party HERS duct leakage and air conditioner testing.
Do these undocumented
systems perform to the manufacturer’s, Federal and state government’s energy
code specifications? Does it blow the right amount of air? How much does the
duct system leak? Does the air actually go where it is supposed to? Is there a
gas leak? Will it help California’s buildings become 50% more energy efficient
by 2030 to comply with Senate Bill 350? We’ll never know the answers, because it
didn’t get tested.
Oversized
air conditioning and heating systems.
Every day I see HVAC contractors install furnaces just
as they have been doing their entire careers. They put in a 66,000, 80,000 or
100,000 btu per hour furnace in a house that might need a 40,000 btu per hour
unit. The same thing happens with air conditioners which use far more
electricity. There are some perverse yet strangely logical reasons why
contractors do this. I won’t get into that.
Why are these systems oversized and wrong-sized?
Because installers use simple and incorrect “rules of thumb” rather than doing
the math like professionals. Of course, the energy code in
California requires that HVAC system be sized according to the ACCA . This
means that the HVAC contractor is required to use software such as WrightSoft
and input the building plans into the program including volume, windows, wall
assemblies, insulation and orientation.
This is what I see in my work. Of course, as noted
above, as a HERS Rater I only see the 5 or 10 percent of work by contractors
who actually have contractors’ licenses and get their work inspected. What
about the other 90 percent? I can only guess that with no one in back of them
testing their work, demanding that they do it right, that it is probably less-than-code
compliant work. Even those contractors doing everything right mostly just scrape
by passing code by a thin margin.
I suspect that if the California Contractors State
License Board and City and County Building Departments actually clamped down and forced code
compliance, and the requirements that HVAC installers obtain a contractor’s license,
get building permits and get their work tested, that energy use would go down
and California citizens; energy consumers and carbon emitters, would have
systems that work properly and provided more comfort, energy savings and climate mitigation.
Every HVAC system uses natural gas, electricity and
creates combustion gasses. Each of these can kill you. It makes sense to follow
the building code and energy code and inspect and these systems that are found in every California house.
George Matthews
Building Energy Compliance Testing
San Francisco to Silicon Valley
