Energy Conservation and Building Efficiency

I think that there needs to be a statewide or regional program to assist people who heat with oil to make energy improvements. If you heat with either natural gas or electricity then the utilities have generous rebate programs to help with insulation etc. if you heat with oil, you are on your own. Perhaps a cooperative between the state and oil providing companies to provide a similar rebate can be started to serve this need.

Please clarify the shutting down computer guidelines, which was confusing at the beginning of the hour.

Is the energy (equivalent to that produced by solar panels) saved if the computer goes into sleep mode, or does it need to be completely shut down?

I put a kill-o-watt meter on mine (a new iMac) for a week with sleep mode and a week with shutting down, and the energy usage was about equal.

I wasn't able to call until too late in the program. Laura kept saying how expensive energy audits are, but I wanted to give an example where one more than paid for itself.

We had our home audited by Efficiency Vermont a couple months ago at a cost of about $300. He did a very thorough job, including a blower test and using an infrared scanner to find cold spots. We'd done a lot already but he found some cold spots I could seal up with caulking and a couple cans of spray foam at a very low cost. That's fine, but nothing exceptional right?

Here's where the bigger savings came in; our 1980's home was built with track lights throughout. As part of the Efficiency Vermont program, the auditor replaced for free about 20 of those track light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs, which will save us money for a long time. Some of those were the more-expensive cf bulbs that work with a dimmable light switch. If we'd bought those bulbs at the store, it would have cost about $250. So our audit cost us almost nothing overall.

Efficiency Vermont also loaned us an electric power meter that lets us take readings from all our appliances to see how efficient they are, even giving estimates on how much each cost us to run per month. Because of that we're unplugging some appliances that use electricity even then they're turned off, like the stereo when it's in sleep mode. I also just got a "smart" power strip, that turns off the "slave" appliances when the "master" appliance goes off, which will pay for itself in a year, then keep saving us money.

But the real surprise came when the auditor tested our propane furnace, water heater and cook stove. The first 2 were fine, but the carbon monoxide (CO) reading from the stove's oven was almost off the charts, so very unhealthy. We knew we needed to open the kitchen window some when we used the oven, but never realized how unhealthy it was. The auditor said it was so high that OSHA rules would prohibit him from doing additional work to seal up our house until we got that fixed. So the energy audit might have saved our lives from CO poisoning.

We're getting the oven serviced to try to get the CO level down to something safe. If that doesn't work, we'll replace the stove.

I'd say the audit paid for itself, both in money and improved health from not breathing so much CO when we bake and broil.

Thanks for a great, timely show,

Stew