I’ve written quite a few articles over the years about the importance of properly air sealing a home to save energy and money. Even the best quality insulation won’t work very well if your home has air leaks that allow outside air into your home. I found a very useful site that offers some great information on air sealing and I wanted to share it with all of you.

Seal Your Home

The folks from DAP Products have sponsored a great site called Seal Your Home. The site has lots of great information on common household sources of air leaks and how to best seal them up. The “Test Your House” feature allows you to enter information about the size of your home and last years energy usage to compare your home to national averages. Comparing your home to the average can give you a good baseline for determining if air sealing might be beneficial to your home.

The site also provides some great information on some of the current tax credits associated with energy savings. Now is a great time to take advantage of some great tax credits for energy conservation upgrades to your home. The Stimulus Bill Tax Credits include credits for windows, insulation and certain heating and air conditioning equipment.

Check out Seal Your Home and you may find that there are some easy DIY projects that can help you save energy and money! You may also want to check out a recent article about Lowes Coupon that can save you money on your next project as well.

You may want to check out an online coupon offer that may help you save money as well. Check out the Lowes Coupon offer.

What About Newer Refrigerators?

For newer refrigerators, the savings aren’t as dramatic. Replacing the same refrigerator built in 2003 will return only $265 over 5 years. An upgrade probably isn’t worth it, unless you really want to earn some green points by helping out fellow citizens and saving the electricity. Check out the EnergyStar site for more details. You can even put in your specific refrigerator’s model # to get a listing.

Before You Buy a New Refrigerator, Get a Coupon!

Before buying any major appliance, you should pickup a coupon. Home Depot, Lowes, Sears, and more all offer 10% off coupons if you search for them. One Project Closer maintains a Sears Coupons list that always has the latest appliance discounts. We expect there will be big savings for Black Friday, so keep your eyes out at all the retailers.

Recycle Old Refrigerators

Need to recycle a refrigerator? Check out Energy Star’s Refrigerator Recycling page for information. A 10 year old refrigerator can contain as much as 100 lbs. of steel that can be recycled over and over again. Don’t let the refrigerator go to the dump!

I recently helped install some replacement windows in my dad’s house. Now I know some will think that adding vinyl replacement windows to a house isn’t exactly green. However, I beg to differ. The reality is any construction that reduces our dependency on petroleum fuels is green in my opinion.

Windows are one of the biggest losses of energy both heating and cooling in our homes. Advances in window technology have drastically improved the energy efficiency of windows today. The biggest advance today is the reasonable pricing of triple pane windows.

If you’re home has windows that are more than ten to fifteen years old then you might want to consider replacing them. Now is a great time to replace windows with the Stimulus Rebates for Windows.

Installing Replacement Windows

Installing replacement windows is actually not that hard. I recently wrote an article about How To Install Replacement Windows. In that article I go over all the steps involved with installing replacement windows. You’d be surprised at how easy it really can be.

For our project we ended up using Harvey Tribute replacement windows with triple pane glass, Low-E/Krypton filled with a U factor of 0.20. I’ve used these same windows in an Energy Star home we built and they are really great. We were able to install 5 replacment windows in about 4 hours.

The recent Stimulus Package has created some significant Federal Tax Credits for home owners looking to make energy efficient home improvements. I thought I’d take the time to summarize some of those Federal Tax Credits that apply to “Green” home improvements. You can find a detailed list of the new Tax Credits on the Energy Star website.

The new Tax Credits involve both new construction and renovations to existing construction. The Tax Credits for renovating existing homes are in effect until December 31, 2010 and they include:

Existing Home Tax Credits

The existing home tax credits are good for 30% of the cost up to a maximum credit fo $1,500.

• Biomass Stoves
• Non Solar Hot Water Heaters
• HVAC Equipment
• Roofing Products
• Insulation
• Doors
• Windows

Existing and New Home Tax Credits

These Tax Credits are really good! You get 30% of the cost with no maximum and they are in effect until the end of the year 2016! They include:

• Fuel Cells
• Small Wind Energy Systems
• Solar Water Heaters
• Solar Panels
• Geothermal Heat Pumps

These new stimulus package tax credits make it a great time to consider some really great energy efficient home improvements like solar power and geothermal heat pumps! My hope is that subsidies like this will drive up demand which should bring pricing down and improve the availability of these green home improvement options.

This week we are finally finishing construction on an Energy Star home for a customer so it was time to perform a blower door test. The blower door test is used as an analytical measure of a houses air tightness. The Energy Star Certification program uses the results from a blower door test as one benchmark in determining whether a house meets the criteria.

The blower door test was performed by a third party inspector using the equipment shown in the photo. This simple piece of equipment contains an adjustable door panel, a calibrated fan and an air pressure measuring device. The fan is turned on to create a negative air pressure in the home which allows the tester to calculate a standard CFM50 score. The CFM50 score is definted as the air flow in cubic feet per minute required to create a 50 pascal pressure difference in the house compared to outside.

The CFM50 score is then used in a computer model along with information about the insulation R values, door and window U values and the square footage of the home. The computer model then generates a score that’s used for the final Energy Star rating. We should get the results back in the next week or so and it will be interesting to see how this new home rates.

Stay tuned for the results!

The Tribute window can be ordered with triple pane glass filled with krypton gas to achieve a U factor of 0.20! That means these windows are about 60% more efficient than the standard double pane argon gas filled windows that we typically use.

Some of you may argue that vinyl windows are not exactly green. However, I argue that these windows have almost zero maintenance (no painting) and the energy savings over time make them a serious improvement for the environment.

Be sure to follow the Total House Construction Series over at my Home Improvement Blog if you’d like to read more about this great new Energy Star home that we’re building this fall.

The blower door test is used to test a house to determine how airtight it is. The airtightness of a house is a very good indicator of how efficient a houses thermal envelope is. You can have great insulation in the walls but if there are leaks around power outlets, doors, windows and utility penetrations then the air leakage can offset the great insulation.

The blower door test is very simple to perform for a qualified technician. The photo shows a standard blower door test apparatus installed in an exterior doorway. A blower door test apparatus includes three components. The components consist of a canvas door panel, a calibrated fan, and a device to measure fan flow and building pressure.

The calibrated fan is temporarily sealed into the exterior doorway using the canvas door panel. When the fan is turned on it creates a small pressure difference between inside and outside of the house. The pressure difference between the inside and outside of the house will cause air to leak through any holes in the building envelope. The tighter the building is, the less air that’s needed from the fan to create a change in building pressure.

The results from a blower door test can be used to calculate an HERS rating which is used to certify home for the Energy Star program. The blower door test results are used in conjunction with inspections of the homes insulation installation and design values from the plans to calculate the HERS rating. The lower the HERS rating the more energy efficient a home is. A rating of 100 is considered the average home while a rating of 0 indicates a net zero home.

The really nice thing about this test is you can walk around to suspect areas (windows, doors, openings) and look for drafts by using a simple smoke device. You can easily see drafts at these locations and determine corrective actions. I’ve witnessed several of these tests and it’s amazing to see areas that you wouldn’t even think of during construction. The one area that really amazed me was a interior pocket door between a bedroom and bathroom. If you know how pocket door frames are built then you know that inside the cavity for the door it’s open to the space above within the wall framing. If you have an un-insulated area above that pocket door and you subject the house to an uneven pressure you’ll quickly see where the smoke goes!

Even if you have an old house this test can be quite beneficial. You can perform the same tests using the smoke tracer to identify leaks in the building envelope. These leaks can then be sealed to improve the airtightness of the house. Many states and public utilities even offer these types of services for free in order to improve energy efficiencies in their areas.