Save Energy at Home

Winter is one time of the year when I can't help thinking about energy. I can even hear the furnace working and the pipes in the walls heating up. New Jersey has a great program to help you save energy at home, and you can even save money saving energy.

Visit this website:
http://www.njcleanenergy.com/residential/programs/home-performance-energy-star/home-performance-energy-star-r
to learn about New Jersey's Board of Public Utilities' Home Performance with Energy Star program.

I learned about this program at an energy workshop that Montgomery and Hillsborough Townships sponsored last winter at the Hillsborough Library. It starts with a home energy audit, worth $300, which only costs you $125. It took my husband and me quite a while to get an appointment for an audit, because this is such a great program that there is a lot of demand for audits! We finally had the audit last spring, and it was very interesting. It took about three hours, and at the end we were given a report, telling what we could do to make our home more energy efficient. All the items were chosen for cost efficiency, and the resulting energy savings were estimated. Also, state subsidies and federal tax credits were identified--that's one of the ways you can save money by saving energy.

Some of the suggested projects were ones we didn't want to do, such as knock many holes in our newly-painted plaster walls to blow in insulation. However, there were many other projects to choose from. Then we interviewed three certified contractors, who gave us estimates for the work. Some of them were more experienced than others, and had advice for us on what would work best in our old house. All of these companies are very busy, so it was months before we could get the work done.

Next came the hard part--moving everything out of the closets in our attic so they could be insulated. My husband did most of the work, but I still thought it was a pain. I reminded myself many times that I could complain about it on this blog. We even found some things we don't need any more, and we are still trying to give them away. Need any decorator fabric scraps, anyone? (Don't ask)

We got a new burner and boiler (equivalent of a furnace) and hot water heater in our basement, and new digital thermostats on three floors (now if only we could figure out how to program them!). Next other contractors came. Their first job was a blower test. They close up all the windows and doors except one door, into which they fit an adjustable door with a blower, and see how hard the fan has to blow to suck the air out of the house. That is sort of a measure of how many tiny cracks and gaps are in the house. Then they set to work sealing and filling those little cracks and gaps. They sealed cracks around the windows in the basement and insulated the basement ceiling. They insulated gaps at the top of the basement walls, so air couldn't circulate from the basement to the attic or the attic to the basement. (Later we got a radon test to make sure our radon levels were still OK). They also insulated all those closets in the attic. Then they repeated the blower test, and checked to make sure the improvements were in the neighborhood of the predictions from the initial audit.

Then we had to move everything back into the attic closets. That was a pain, but when the December heating bill arrived, we could already see the improvement! The savings in energy costs will take a few years to pay us back for the work that was done, but the subsidies and tax credits made it several years fewer than it could have been. And what better investment can you think of these days?