Here are some topics of interest from our team:

Be Green. Save Green.

April 22: Let’s get ready for summer together!

With the summer months just around the corner, now is the time to inspect your home for ways to save on energy…before the big bills hit! Check out some of these top tips from our weatherization experts to see how:

1. Seal the deal. Inspect the areas around your doors, between the crown molding and ceiling, inside closets and at the seams around your floors. If you see light coming from the outside or feel any air seeping through these areas, it is time for sealing those drafts! Weatherstripping and caulking or using spray foam (be careful: it expands) can significantly cut down on wasted, cooled air in your home!
2. Bring out the blankets. It’s summer, so do we need blankets? We are talking about blankets of insulation! By rolling out the ‘batts” or blankets of insulation in your attic or between your basement ceiling and your first floor hardwoods, you can keep the cooled air where you want it: inside your home.
3. Loose the obstacle course. The air ducts that carry the conditioned air from your HVAC system to finished space is like an obstacle course for your cooled air. The department of Energy says you loose 25-40% of your home’s energy through loss due to the air ducts alone. Zone/Decentralize your home with Ductless Mini-Splits for a much more efficient way to keep cool.
4. Turn it up. If you have the traditional heating and air system, leaving your thermostat on 78 degrees can allow the air conditioner to operate more efficiently. You can even turn it up to 80 degrees when you’re not home; there is no reason to cool the air if no one is using it.
5. Check out the stars. High-quality, energy star rated windows that are double paned will minimize air leakage and increase comfort.
6. Cut it off. Lights, computers, TV’s and other monitors all generate heat. So when you’re done using them, turn them off. And when you leave a room, turn off the lights as well. Minor behavioral modifications can save you money.
7. Feel the breeze. Using a ceiling fan that rotates counterclockwise allows the cool air to be pushed downwards, where it belongs in warmer months.
8. Block it out. Keeping the curtains drawn on the windows and having shade trees planted around the house, blocks the sun out during the day, allowing your climate control system to work most efficiently when you are home.
9. Plant shade trees. Plant fast growing shade trees so next summer you can block the hot sun from your home!

For more top tips or to speak with an expert, visit www.nrgsvrs.com, where you will find the resources you need to get prepared for summer. If we work together, we can save you some green from your pocketbook and you can feel good about being kind to the environment and making wise choices.

Ducts are bad

Jan 15: A lot of energy is wasted in the typical residential heating/cooling system.

A Department of Energy pamphlet (DOE-102004-1606) presents the ugly picture of the home hvac heating/cooling system. The weak link in such systems is the ducts, not the furnace, A/C unit, or heat-exchanger.

The DOE describes the factor "duct efficiency," which is the ratio of energy provided to the living space out of the ducts divided by the amount pumped into the ducts by the furnace, A/C unit, and exchanger. Perfect ducts would give an efficiency of 100%. But ducts leak, they are poorly insulated, they are in attics or crawl spaces and therefore in unconditioned space, and other factors that decrease the amount of heated or cooled air pumped into them. The efficiency will vary based on location (cold climates have more days blowing hot air; hot climates have more days blowing cold air) and homeowner habits (temperature settings and hours of use.)

The DOE says duct efficiencies under typical conditions are 67%, so one-third of the heated/cooled air pumped in is wasted. They do recommend insulating and de-leaking (is that a word?) the ducts, but they say you will still only get to about 83% efficiency.

Now, if your furnace is only 75% efficient (typical of most furnaces more than about eight years old,) and your ducts are typical at 67% efficiency, you're wasting about HALF of the energy provided to the system. In the best case, if your furnace is 95% efficient, and you’ve spiffed up your ducts as much as DOE says you can, your whole system still wastes 22% of the input energy!

The worst part is that even if you improve the condition of your ducts, the fixes you make will degrade with time. Duct tape dries out and leaks. Insulation thins out as it settles. Duct piping shifts or deforms with age. To keep the highest efficiency requires continuing maintenance.

In addition, the movement of air through your house caused by the ducts stirs up dust containing dirt, pollen, and other potential allergens. Some of this dust sticks to the inside of the ducts, slowing down the movement of air and lowering duct efficiency. The best solution to the duct problem seems to be zone heating: split up your house into zones where you spend time for different activities and/or at different times. Then heat/cool zones independently, only when you're in that zone. For example, your kitchen and family room might be one zone if they are contiguous; your bedroom might be another. You would heat your family room zone, but not your bedroom zone, in the early evening, and then the reverse at night. When you are at work, you would not heat either of them. (Obviously, you probably don’t want the temperature in any room to fall below 50F or so in winter or above 90F in summer to prevent damage to water pipes or for the comfort of pets and plants.) <

By controlling the temperature of the areas you use, only when you use them, you will save money.

And the savings could be significant, maybe as much as half of what you’re paying now.

You can cut your home energy bills in half!

Dec 20: There are some things you can do to save money on your gas or electric bill at very little cost that will result in savings immediately. Others will cost you up front but will save you even more money over the years. And you can do all of this with only small changes in lifestyle.

In these posts, we will talk about the ways to improve your energy usage and lower your costs in the most budget-conscious way. NRG SVRS is not like other companies because we will not recommend that you spend any money with us unless it will save you even more money.

With the weather turning colder, one of the first things you should consider is improving the insulation in your attic.

A study by Harvard University estimates that 45 million homes in the U.S. are under-insulated, and that may translate to fully half of the homes in Georgia. Some studies put the number even higher - maybe as high as 80%. The DOE recommendation is to increase your attic insulation to at least R-30 and preferably R-38 if you have a well-ventilated attic, and to R-49 if ventilation is inadequate.

Blown-in fiberglass insulation is a fast and economical way to beef up the insulation in your attic and minimize the heat that goes up through your ceiling in the winter (and, incidentally, the heat that beats down through your ceiling in the summer, putting an extra load on your cooling system.)

For more information about how insulation works and why blown-in insulation is the best choice, call NRG SVRS at 770-674-7877 and ask for the NRG SVRS Technical Note number TN-01.