Question: Ted – I don't know what to do! My electric bill doubled last month and I don't think anything changed about my house. Help!
Answer:

If you have an electric water heater, the first thing to check is if you have a water leak somewhere. This is usually caused by a dripping hot water faucet. It’s amazing how much energy is wasted by a slow water leak.

A second thing to check is the thermostat on the water heater. If the thermostat is malfunctioning, then it might be heating the water way too hot, which would lead to excessive energy usage. If this is the case, it can actually be very dangerous because it can cause a tremendous pressure buildup inside the water tank if the pressure relief valve isn’t working. If it is working, the heater will periodically “beltch” boiling water out the relief valve, which can also be dangerous. Check for puddles around your water heater.

You may also find that the water coming out your faucet is extremely hot. However, most systems are required to have a tempering valve the prevents the water from getting too hot, so you might never know.

So start with your water heater. If that doesn’t work, I’ve got a few more tips…

If you’ve got something like this in your attic, then a good portion of your utility bill is being wasted. Unfortunately, sights such as this are more common than you might think. Studies have shown that a typical house may lose around 30% of its energy because of leaky ductwork and my analysis have shown that this may be an underestimate.

A typical heating/air conditioning system contains a blower capable of moving around 1500 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air. Normally, the air resistance and dampers in all the different sections of duct even out the flow so that each room might receive about 100 to 150 CFM of air. But when a duct has fallen off, like shown here, the resistance to air flow is much less because the air doesn’t have to travel through all the ductwork. Because of this, one detached duct may allow 300 CFM of air, or about 20% of the total system capacity(!) to escape. In fact, that may be an underestimate of the losses.

Unfortunately, the situation is often much worse. During the winter, the warm air in your house will rise up through your ductwork and out the leaky ducts in the attic. So you are losing energy round the clock.

If you ever feel a cold draft coming out of your heating registers during the winter, especially when it’s windy outside, chances are you have leaky ducts somewhere. Or, if you find that you get very poor airflow AND cold drafts, that’s almost a guarantee of a detached duct. Find that in the attic and attach it properly. Or, if you’re not “handy”, hire a professional HVAC company to come in and check out your ducts.

So before you spend thousands of dollars installing a new heating/cooling system, you might spend a few minutes in your attic looking for bad ductwork. Fixing a single problem like the one pictured above can increase your system’s efficiency as much as installing a typical high efficiency system!

Do you ever wonder why your skin cracks and dries out in the winter? Why you get nosebleeds and sore throats? Why you can see your breath when it’s cold out? It all comes down to physics!

The air can only hold a certain amount of water and the colder the air, the less water it can hold before the water condenses. When you exhale, your breath is warm and contains lots of moisture. As your breath cools down, it eventually reaches a temperature where the air can’t hold all the moisture and you see a fog.

You’ve probably heard the weather forecaster talking about the “relative humidity” (also called RH) of the air. It’s relative because it depends on the temperature outside. For example, if it is 20F outside and the relatively humidity is 80%, when you take that air, bring it inside and warm it to 70F, that same air will only have a relatively humidity of about 15% – very dry indeed!

So during the wintertime, even if it’s very humid outside, when that air comes into your home and warms up, it is very dry air. And dry air wants to suck the moisture out of your skin, leading to chapped lips, nosebleeds, and generally uncomfortable living conditions.

Interestingly, in a normally sized home, overly dry inside air is also a giveaway of a leaky house because most homes have a fair amount of moisture from internal sources – people and pets breathing, watering plants, showers and cooking. All of these dump moisture into the air. In a tight house, this would be more than enough moisture to keep things comfortable in your home. But in a leaky home, the moisture is leaving through all the cracks and the really dry outside air is coming in creating a double whammy that dries out your home.

So if you have dry conditions inside your home during the winter, the best thing you can do is to tighten your home so that less warm, moist air leaves. This could involve getting better windows or putting that shrink wrap plastic over your windows. You can also tighten your home by fixing doors so they seal better. But one of the biggest culprits of air leaks result from poorly sealed ducts. I’ve even seen homes where there were ducts detached in the attic, so the furnace was blowing lots of warm, moist air right out of the house! Problems like this cause the snowmelt seen in my earlier posting.

Keep in mind that air leaking out of your house means an equal amount of cold, outside air is leaking in, and that air has to be heated. So if you seal your ducts and other air leaks, you’ll be reducing your utility bills and making your home more comfortable.

How much of a difference can this make? Easily 30% of your heating bill comes from having to heat cold air that comes in through all these cracks! In fact, studies have shown that air sealing your home can provide the best bang for your buck – making your home more comfortable and energy efficient.

So next time you’re wondering why it’s so dry in your house, go looking for the air leaks. Fix those and you’ll have a more comfortable and energy efficient home!