Author Archives: T.D. Inoue

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About T.D. Inoue

Ex-digital imaging entrepreneur, Green building advisor, professional problem solver. Amateur chef. Avid ice cream maker and general troublemaker

Question: What are your thoughts on solar heated water?

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Question: What are your thoughts on solar heated water?
Answer:

Solar water heaters are one of the most underutilized alternative energy systems in the U.S. What could be better than reducing your energy consumption using the sun? Many other countries have “got it” and you’ll see solar water heating systems on most roofs.

There are three problems with them – we charge too much ($7000-$10,000), there aren’t enough qualified installers and they require maintenance. But if sized and installed properly, most families could satisfy 75%-90% of their hot water needs using solar on any sunny day.

Here are some resources for further reading:

Build it Solar – Site for solar DIY’ers.

U.S. Dept. of Energy

Wikipedia – Extensive article on solar water heating

 

Water heating – trimming your bills

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If you haven’t yet read my first posting about water heaters, I highly recommend that you do so now. Without that foundation, you’re not going to get the most out of this article.

Invariably, this question comes up – “how do I reduce my water heating bill?”

Let’s break this down into a few parts. What affects your bill?

  1. The amount of hot water you use
  2. The efficiency of your water heater
  3. The cost of your fuel
  4. Other inefficiencies

I’m going to address these points one at a time, because each one is important to understand and all impact your energy bills.

Reducing your hot water use

This one is obvious. Reduce the amount of water you use and you directly cut your energy bills. But how can you cut back on hot water use? I’m assuming that you aren’t willing to change your lifestyle because most people aren’t. I mean seriously, if you’ve taken 20 minute showers your entire life, are you suddenly going to start taking 10 minute showers, even if you know it might save you $100/year? Probably not.

Top ways to reduce your hot water usage:

Shower heads

Showers are one of the biggest consumers of hot water. Consider an older 4 gallon per minute shower head. That’s 60 gallons of water or maybe 40 gallons of hot water for each 15 minute shower. Ouch! That’s going to cost a fortune. If you can reduce that to 2 gallons per minute (GPM), you cut that to 20 gallons of hot water without changing your lifestyle. So the first act I would take is replacing the shower head.

But before you rush out and buy new shower heads, you might want to measure the flow of your existing heads. Just turn on the shower and time how long it takes to fill a 5 gallon bucket then calculate the number of gallons per minute. Easy!

  • If you’re not already using a reduced flow shower head (1.5-2.5 gallons/minute) then invest in one. I’m not talking about the pathetic little ones they sell that couldn’t wash the soap off a bald man’s head. I’m talking about nice, designer shower heads, that are designed for efficiency. Things like this one. I’ve used one of these for years and love it. No, it’s not the most efficient one around, but it’s reasonably efficient and it actually works.
  • If you’ve got teenagers who take really long showers, then get one of the 1.5gpm shower heads. They don’t work quite as well, but if they’re taking hour long showers, they can deal with a little inconvenience! If you’re feeling generous, you might get this one or this one.

Laundry Machines

Usually, I don’t endorse getting rid of perfectly good appliances – in most cases, it’s just wasteful. But I make an exception for laundry machines. The new front loaders with high-speed spin-dry cycles are worth the investment on so many levels.

A typical, old style, top-loading washer requires filling the entire tub with water multiple times during the cycle, using up to something like 35 gallons of water. They’re incredibly wasteful! Add to that the fact that the clothes are still pretty wet after the spin dry and you’re paying a lot more to dry the clothes as well. Finally, those agitators are simply brutal on delicate clothes. In all respects, top loaders are simply destined for extinction.

The front loader cuts your hot water usage very substantially. If you want a detailed discussion of them, go to the Energy Star website. They do require a little different usage, and special soap, but that’s a small price to pay for $100-$200 savings per year in reduced water use. They’re truly awesome!

Wash Clothes in Cold Water

You’ve heard it before and I’m going to say it again – the most efficient usage of hot water is not using hot water at all.

With modern laundry detergents, you do not need to wash clothes in hot water, and the savings can be hundreds of gallons per week if you do a lot of loads of laundry. That adds up to huge reductions in your hot water use over the course of a year.

Ok, so maybe you’ll still use hot water for some things, like your kids white socks that they wear outside without shoes or their football uniforms. But for a typical person, hot water wash is a complete waste.

Whole House Humidifiers

Many homes are outfitted with whole-house humidifiers. These bolt on the side of your furnace and introduce water into the air stream to humidify your home during the winter.

Unfortunately, some lazy product designers decided it was a good idea to run hot water through these units to help humidify the air because the hot water will be more “steamy” and work better. So what do these idiots do? They design a machine that runs something like 6 gallons of hot water through the system every hour, even when they’re only using a tiny fraction of that to humidify the air. Why? Because hot water is much more prone to scaling problems, so they run the water to flush out the mineral buildup!

Over the course of a day, that humidifier can be doubling your hot water use, easily. So over the course of a winter of use, that’s adding hundreds of dollars to your utility bills. Horrible. Stupid. Wasteful. These things should be outlawed.

If you’ve got one of these units that runs on hot water, disable it, shoot it, rip it off, and throw it in the trash. If you must have a humidifier (I’ll cover this topic in another post) then get one that uses cold water and a misting system or a sponge-like element.

BTW – I wrote an entire post about central humidifiers and their evils.

Remember to Fix those Drips!

Remember – there’s no such thing as a small leak! Even a slow drip can be gallons per day which means hundreds of gallons per year. That’s dollars out of your pocket and wasted water for absolutely no reason.

If you have a leaky faucet, fix it. Any homeowner should be capable of turning off the water supply and replacing a washer or faucet components. They’ve made it pretty easy for most things. So don’t hesitate. Fix the drip!

Here’s a nice tutorial on the subject.

And if you don’t like to read, here’s a video.

< End of part 2 >

Ok, I’m stopping here for the day. These have been the biggies and I’ve given you enough information to save you hundreds on your water heating bills each year. Now get busy replacing shower heads, buying new washers and dismantling your whole-house humidifiers!

Energy Data – your path to enlightenment…

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As I said in the post on water heater, I’m a numbers guy. But you probably have no idea just how much of a numbers geek I am….

A few years ago, I found Phil Malone’s amazingly cool website documenting his journey to energy efficiency building his own super-efficient home. You see, Phil is a kindred spirit, as are all the people on this page. We’ve all come to the conclusion that energy monitoring can be fun and enlightening. After all, if you don’t measure it, how do you know how much energy you’re actually using? It’s all just a bunch of theoretical mumbo-jumbo.

So with this post, I’m putting my own home’s data on-line for you to see. Isn’t that cool? It’s all my home’s energy use at a glance. From anywhere in the world, I can go to that web page and see if my ground source heat pump is running and how much energy it is using.

Using this data monitoring, I’ve been able to discover when things in my home are amiss. For example, this winter, my boiler broke down, and I was able to determine exactly when it happened and how fast my house cooled down. Why is this a big deal? Because if I wasn’t at home, I would have seen this before my pipes froze and my home was flooded. It could have saved me tens of thousands of dollars.

But on a daily level, it tells me where and how much energy I’m using. At a glance, I can see how much energy my ground source heat pump is using and how much heat it’s pumping out, which tells me if it needs servicing or if it “needs a rest” (I’ll tell you that story another time, right now my blood pressure is high enough…)

It also shows me just how much it’s costing me to have a hot tub, sitting outside in the cold, all winter long, wasting energy, just so once a month (maybe), we can sit in it and enjoy the view. This is a “luxury”, so why don’t I feel luxurious…

Plus, it shows me interesting things. If you’re observant, you’ll notice that the cold water side of my radiant floor heater is hot while the hot side is cold. What’s up with that? That’s actually intentional, because I disabled the circulator pump and am allowing the system to work passively (called thermosiphoning). This saves the energy use of the circulator, which can be substantial.

So if you’re technically inclined and really want to know what’s going on around your home, I can’t recommend Phil’s Web Energy Logger highly enough. It’s truly awesome.

Water heaters – efficiency, insulation, costs…oh my!

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After my last try at this long post, I’m going to break this one down into a few parts. There’s lots of material here, so bear with me.

So recently a friend asked me about water heaters – how much energy do they use and is adding insulation a good idea. Let’s start with energy use…

Energy Consumption

Just how much energy does a water heater use? Is it as significant as people say?

In a word – “YES!” – water heaters are a major consumer of household energy.

No matter how you slice it, this is a numbers question, and I’m a numbers guy. So get out your spreadsheet and prepare to think about BTUs and Energy Factors!

Let’s pull out a famous pie chart showing a comparison of average energy use for different things around the house. I grabbed this from the Energy Star website because they should know, right?

Well, as it turns out, I don’t know what fantasy world they’re getting their numbers from, but by my numbers, water heaters are responsible for 20%-50% of your utility bills, and I’ll show you how.

Here’s the problem – the answer to this question depends upon whether you’re a single person, living alone, who only showers once a week in tepid water, or if your household is multi-generational, with grandparents, parents, and seven children making loads of laundry every day. The occupants are the biggest factor in hot water use, so let’s look at them and how they affect the equation.

Hot water use based on occupancy

On average, people use 25-50 gallons of hot water per day, per person, so right there, you have a wide range. Think about it for a moment…If you shower every day for 10 minutes, that’s 22 gallons of warm water per day. Wash your hands a couple times and you’re using another gallon or two. A load of laundry? 10-30 gallons, and so on.

I emphasized “warm” water because most of the calculations I see count every use of water as all-out hot water, which is stupid. Nobody just runs the water on full hot unless they have their water heater set to a very low temperature. So when you take a shower, you might use 2/3 hot, 1/3 cold water. A 10 minute shower with a 2.5 gallon per minute shower head is 25 gallons of water but about 17 gallons of hot water.

However, there are other complications. For example, every time you run the hot water, you’re filling up the pipes between your water heater and your spigot with hot water. When you turn it off, all the heat in that water is lost. So you might run the faucet for 30 seconds to get warm water in the first place, then use it for 30 seconds and turn it off. The heat in the water in the pipes is “lost”. Yes – lost.

Some would argue that the heat goes into heating your home. Yes, true enough, you capture that waste heat during the winter. But during the summer? Oh…now that waste heat, usually 130 degree hot water, means your air conditioner has to work harder. It’s not so simple, is it? So for my calculations, I say that’s lost energy.

These are all reasons why the spread of usage is so wide. But let’s be conservative and use 25 gallons of hot water per person per day. How much energy is that?

Not so fast. How many people are in your household? Is it just you or do you have a family? For this example, I’m going to talk about a typical family of four. You can just multiply or divide the numbers based upon your own household size.

As it turns out, if you run the numbers, and I have, you’ll find that using 100 gallons of hot water per day costs you between $50 and $100 per month depending on your fuel costs and a few other factors like the efficiency and temperature of your water heater. Without turning this into a thesis, let’s just say it costs $70/month for hot water.

Depending upon the season and energy costs, the total monthly utility costs for a family of four will be $200-$400. Much more if it’s the dead of winter with an old oil boiler, less if you have a state-of-the-art geothermal heat pump. But this gives you an idea. So, if you’re on the low end of this, then the water heater accounts for 35% of the utility costs. On the other hand, it might be 10%-15% during the winter. But that gives you an idea of the typical ranges.

What does this all mean?

When you cut through all the verbiage, you discover that hot water is a big deal. Typically it’s 20%-30% of your total utility costs when taken over a full year – maybe around $750. This means that you should look at water heating as a “high leverage” area for improving your home’s energy efficiency.

I’ll touch on how to reduce your water heating bills in the next installment.

Energy Efficiency 101 – What’s an energy audit?

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If you’ve ever looked into energy efficiency, you’ve probably heard about energy audits. But what is an energy audit? What does it involves? Why should you get one? How much does it cost?

I’ll try to touch on all these topics, and more, in this posting, but if there’s anything I miss, please ask a question at “Ask Ted” and I’ll be sure to answer!

What is an energy audit?

This is a tough question to answer. The problem is, if you ask a bunch of us this question, you’ll get lots of different answers. It’s part of the problem – it’s become a marketing phrase that people put in their ads so they can sell you windows, insulation and other services.

So I’ll give you  my definition of an energy audit.

A proper energy audit is a bottom to top analysis of your home, inside and out. It’s kind of like a general physical for your home. The goal is to find how well constructed your home is from an energy, health and comfort perspective. Is it properly insulated? Is there any sign of water intrusion? How well are the heating and cooling systems installed? Are there drafts? Are the electric bills in line with expectations? How about other heating fuels (gas, propane or oil)?

A complete energy audit will usually include a blower-door test and a detailed thermal imaging (also called infrared) scan. I say usually, because sometimes the conditions aren’t appropriate for these tests. For example, during the spring and fall, the temperatures are usually too moderate for useful thermal imaging.

If it sounds like a pretty comprehensive analysis – it is! It typically takes me a minimum of three hours to go through the process on a small home and most of the time it’s a four-plus hour process. And to do it right, it can be pretty unpleasant.

In order to do an energy audit properly, every room and space in and around the house has to be visually inspected. That includes crawling around in the attic spaces, if they’re accessible and the basement and crawlspaces. In fact, on my jobs, I’ll spend more time in the attic and basement than anywhere else in the house because those areas have the most impact on the overall performance of your home.

What’s NOT an energy audit?

A warning – there are a lot of unscrupulous contractors advertising energy audits for free or for a very low cost, like $99-$199. They do this because they’re trying to sell you something, usually windows, insulation or a new heating system. This is like going to the brake shop and asking them to tell you if you need new brakes for your car. Of course you do! If you don’t get new brakes, you and your family’s life will be in danger! Blah, blah, blah.

So if some guy (they’re almost always guys) with a green business card tries to sell you on a cheap energy audit, send them packing. There’s virtually no chance that they’re going to do a proper job or even have the equipment to do a proper job. And they certainly won’t have the training or background.

Here are some things to look for when you’re interviewing people/companies to do an energy audit:

  • How long have they been doing this type of work?
  • How many homes have they analyzed?
  • Is this their primary line of work?
  • What organizations are they part of?
  • Do they profit by selling the work they recommend?
  • Can they send you a real sample report they’ve done for someone else?
  • Can they provide a half dozen references?

I would be particularly sensitive to whether this is their primary line of work and whether they’re getting kickbacks for selling you other services, for obvious reasons.

Note that, on occasion, contractors did give me money for sending clients their way as a way of thanking me. But it wasn’t a formal arrangement – it’s not like I only sent work their way because they were paying me. I provided my clients with a list of several contractors whom I knew to do high quality work. You’ll have to play this one by ear. You’ll know pretty quickly whether you can trust your auditor.

Also, insist on getting a sample report from a real client. If they make noises about not being able to do so because of privacy, scratch them off your list. We’re not lawyers or doctors – who cares if somebody sees your energy audit report? How hard is it to remove someone’s name and address from a report? If they’re not willing to go that far to win your business, how hard are they going to work once you hire them?

Question: Hi Ted, I was wondering about the energy used in heating hot water. I have heard it is bo

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Question: Hi Ted,
I was wondering about the energy used in heating hot water. I have heard it is bout 20% of my utilities. I have also heard that by insulating it with 6 inch fiberglass will help to improve efficiency. What do you think?
Answer:

Ugh, I wrote a really long article in response and tumblr seems to have eaten it. 

I’ll try again after I get over the annoyance of losing this great post!

For now, start with the article on water heaters I wrote for my website.

Here’s part one of my answer as a full post.

Retrofit your attic hatch for improved comfort and energy efficiency

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Link: Retrofit your attic hatch for improved comfort and energy efficiency

Thermal image of leaky attic hatch

The typical attic hatch is drafty and improperly insulated. Fixing it can reduce the energy loss of a room by half. This afternoon project is simple and cost effective providing results you can enjoy year-round.

If you’re looking for the best commercial product on the market, check out the Energy Guardian attic hatch covers from ESS Energy Products. They’re by far the nicest product I’ve seen for this application.

 

If you saw smoke coming from the wall, you’d call the fire department and evacuate the house.

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If you saw smoke coming from the wall, you’d call the fire department and evacuate the house. So why, when you see water dripping from the ceiling, do you put a bucket under it, and let it destroy your home just as surely as the fire would, just more slowly?

This is just a quick thought for the day. Water can be extremely damaging, but it seems so innocuous that people often ignore it until it destroys their home or their family’s health. Take every drip seriously – imagine that each drip is a puff of smoke coming from a hidden fire.

Got Mold? Part 3 – a flood doesn’t have to be the end of the world

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By now, you’re probably terrified of water, and well you should be – it is a silent destroyer of homes. On the other hand, I don’t want anybody freaking out because they spilled a bucket or even a glass of water on the floor!

Mold doesn’t grow instantly. It needs time, water, and sometimes warmth. I’ve seen plenty of cases where people have had a serious flood in their homes – perhaps a toilet or sink flooded a bathroom, but these resulted in no mold. Why? Because the water was cleaned up quickly and everything was allowed to dry out.

The danger is when you let water or condensation get trapped somewhere. For example, I see this a lot – house-plants causing rotten wood, like shown above. There was a huge house plant sitting in a plastic pot. The pot didn’t leak, but periodically, somebody might spill a little water which would go under the pot and get trapped. Over time, it totally ruined the oak floor.

Trapped water is bad. Water left to evaporate is usually harmless.

Most of the mold and water damage I’ve seen occurs over a long period. Weeks, months or even years of neglect. So it usually isn’t a surprise when you find problems. However, like the proverbial slowly boiling frog, we often ignore a “little” condensation or a puddle of water. But, these are exactly the things that cause you to wake up one day and find that your window sash has rotted out.

A little moisture over a long period can cause serious damage.

Let’s look at a few scenarios and classify them as bad or not-so-bad.

Scenario 1:

Your toilet or sink overflows, but you catch it quickly. Maybe a couple buckets worth of water floods your bathroom.

First off, any time you have a water spill, the first thing to do is to clean up all the water (duh)! If you have a wet-use shop-vac, you can put it great use. Shop vacs do a wonderful job of cleaning up spills because they’ll suck the water off the floor and out of nooks and crannies. If you don’t, then use a sponge mop and soak up all the water.

When you’re done with the bulk of the cleanup, use an old towel to dry everything as well as you can.

Often, this simple cleanup will be enough if you catch the leak before it has a chance to really soak in. So beyond this, just run the bath fan for a few hours to flush out the moisture in the air or run a big floor fan in the doorway. 

All told, this type of “water event” can be pretty harmless. 

Scenario 1a:

You flood the bathroom with enough water that it drips out the ceiling or light fixtures in the floor below. 

This could mean trouble. In most homes, you have the finish flooring, with a wood sub-floor underneath. This sits on the floor joists. Underneath, the ceiling material, usually sheet-rock, is nailed or screwed to the underside of the joists. If the water flooded down to the floor below, that means that a substantial amount is likely in this space around the floor joists which you can’t get to in order to dry it out.

As in scenario 1, you want to immediately clean up the water above. Forget the floor below (yet) – stop the water above from coming down! If you clean up the water and get the bathroom drying out, that will help the water evaporate and allow all the building materials to dry out. Remember – water “wants” to move from wet to dry areas.

However, your work isn’t done yet. There’s a good chance that your sheet-rock will pull away from the nails/screws that hold it up. When it gets wet, sheet-rock will turn to mush. Don’t touch it or you may destroy it. You also run the risk of having the ceiling collapse on your head.

The best thing to do is clean up all the visible water from the bathroom and the floor below and then put dehumidifiers in both rooms. Let them run for a couple of days. You literally want to suck the moisture out of the building materials as fast as possible.

If you’re a professional and have good toys, you can use a moisture meter. I have a few of these. They let me scan behind walls and ceilings without having to take everything apart. There are two types – the pin type, which is generally more accurate but requires that you stick the probes into the material, and non-destructive, which works on the electrical properties of the material which change with water content.

The problem is, if you don’t have one of these meters, you really don’t know how much water remains in the ceiling cavity. If that water isn’t totally dried out quickly, you’ll probably have mold growing in there. You will be very unlikely to have wood rot however because the water will get soaked up and evaporate over time so the conditions for continued mold and related problems decreases over time.

The question is, if you do get a little mold in there, is that a problem?

Before I answer, if you have any doubts whatsoever about you or your own family’s sensitivities to mold, contact a professional. Without actually examining your home, there is no definitive information that anybody can give you. In other words, if you choose not to have a professional evaluate your problem and your house collapses or you die of mold allergies – don’t blame me!

There is a school of thought that as long as you get rid of the water let the mold grow in the first place, you don’t want to mess with it, especially if it’s safely trapped in the walls or ceiling.

What would I do? When I’ve had situations like this in my own home, usually after I’ve dried things out, I will cut a hole in the ceiling – maybe 16” square. Large enough to poke my head into and check things out. Sheet-rock is easy to patch, and you’re better safe than sorry. Though now that I’ve got those excellent moisture meters, if they indicate that it’s dry in there, I don’t worry about it.

Scenario 2: 

You’ve had a flood that you didn’t discover for a couple weeks.

This is bad news, really bad. I’ve seen homes totaled by this. Seriously.

This typically occurs when a pipe bursts in a vacation home. Or a rat chews through the water lines of your dishwasher or washing machine. The water pours out, gallons every minute, for the entire time. It’s horrible. Thousands of gallons flooding into every corner of the house, soaking into the carpets, up the walls, into every cavity.

In a situation like this, the only solution is to call in a water damage specialist. Hopefully your insurance will cover this, because it will cost thousands of dollars and take potentially weeks to dry out your home and determine if it’s habitable.

Here’s what they’ll do.

First, as in any of these situations, they’ll turn off the water to ensure that no more water enters. Next they’ll remove the “bulk water” so that it can’t cause further damage. This is the easy stuff.

Next, they’ll probably want to remove all the water soaked materials. This might include sofas, carpets, beds, anything that is wet and holding moisture. If they leave these giant wet sponges in the house, it will be extremely difficult to dry out the house.

After that, they’ll use industrial strength dehumidifiers and fans to dry out the air. The fans help to evaporate the water and the dehumidifiers suck the humidity out of the air. 

If you’re lucky, they’ll make measurements using meters like I mentioned above, and they’ll determine that the interstitial spaces (i.e. inside the walls and floors) are dry. However, with this type of flood, it is extremely likely that the insides of the walls and floors will be saturated with water. This can be extremely difficult/impossible to dry out without opening up the walls.

As you can see, this is really serious. If you encounter this type of scenario, don’t mess with it!