While it rarely reaches below freezing in the Phoenix area, that doesn’t stop us from feeling those cool temps that come in the winter. We will inevitably have to turn that heat on to combat our more temperate weather. Below, you can find a few things that will help your home stay comfortable enough to walk around barefoot in the dead of winter while also saving energy and improving your air quality.
Also, check around potential leakage “hot spots” such as old windows, doors, plumbing penetrations under sinks, and electrical outlets. By replacing old weatherstripping around the doors or caulking around the windows or plumbing penetrations, you can effectively keep your conditioned air where it belongs, inside. Check the local hardware store to find outlet sealers to add a little insulation behind light switches too. 2. Check your insulation For Phoenix and central Arizona, the DOE recommends at least 12-inches of blown-in cellulose or an R-38 value to slow the transfer of cold air into the home. If your attic has fiberglass batt insulation, it should be in contact with the attic floor at all times to work properly. 3. Have your furnace or heat pump inspected A seasonal tune-up may be in order for your furnace or heat pump. If the temperatures consistently don’t reach the temperature set-point, the HVAC system may be low on refrigerant or something else may be awry. It's best to have it checked by a professional. 4. Remove shade screens During the Phoenix winters, solar gain through windows can help significantly warm the home, lowering energy bills from decreased heat use. Shade screens can be unclipped and stored until it comes time for summer. Don’t underestimate the power of natural sunlight! 5. Stay safe! Install CO detectors if you have a fireplace or gas appliances 3-6 feet from the ground. Use a bubble solution to check for gas leaks around fireplaces, water heaters, furnaces and feeder lines. Be sure that the furnace or water heater has a good clearance to allow for fresh air intake and that they are not located in the same room as a dryer. Follow these tips for a comfortable winter in the Valley of the Sun!
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Load controllers have been gaining popularity because they are an effective way to forcefully ensure your energy usage doesn’t exceed a certain amount at any one time. SRP and APS energy customers who have considered solar or have solar power have especially been made aware of the load controller by the companies selling and installing solar. More than ever, it has become an integral part of an installer’s solar system. Before we get into the solar aspect let’s take a step back and cover the basics of what a load controller is and their pros and cons. There Are Three Ways to Reduce Energy At HomeGoing SolarProduce it yourself with solar power. Remember to first reduce before you produce. Energy EfficiencyUsing less energy with energy efficiency is about eliminating waste with many of the suggestions we make in our Energy Audits: sealing the ductwork, adding more insulation the right way and purchasing a more efficient air conditioner. These are upgrades that don’t change your lifestyle but instead work behind the scenes to lower your energy bills. Energy ConservationEnergy conservation is about putting a sweater on during the winter rather than turning the thermostat higher, changing to shorts and a tee shirt in the summer rather than lowering the thermostat in the summer, or turning the ceiling fans off to rooms that are not used. These are lifestyle changes. Today we are talking about method #3: energy conservation through load controllers. What Is a Load Controller?A load controller is a device that puts a cap on how much electrical usage a home can use at one time. They tie directly into your electrical panel and limit on how much power your home can draw at one time. Let’s say it’s the middle of the summer in Phoenix at 5 pm and your air conditioner is on full blast, your TV is on, you start cooking dinner with an electric oven and you are running hot water, turning on the electric hot water heater. All these loads running at one time would send a signal to the load controller that your power demand is exceeding the rating of the load controller and the load controller would start shedding loads and turning off your appliances and air conditioner to level off your usage. I understand this can immediately be a turn-off for homeowners, and yes, I was taken aback by the thought of it too. I thought, “why would I want a load controller shutting off my air conditioner during the hottest part of the day? That’s the whole reason I have an air conditioner in the first place! It’s like I’m being forced to keep the thermostat set to 84 degrees, take a cold shower (not that we get cold water in Arizona in the summer), walk around with shorts and a tee shirt and sweat my butt off! YES! I want to be able to cook at 6 pm when I come home from work without having the oven shut off in the middle of cooking. Load controller? No thank you. You can take that load controller back!” Load Controllers on APS and SRP HomesLooking at load controllers from a different perspective, from the point of view of APS or SRP, they are a godsend. One of the main problems APS and SRP have is meeting energy requirements during peak demand. In the middle of summer, peak demand is when everyone comes home and blasts the air conditioner, starts cooking, washing dishes, and doing their normal thing. The load on the electrical grid spikes in usage to the point of capacity. This gets APS worried that they will have to build another power plant, which costs a lot of money and sits idle more than half the time because it only gets used during peak demand like many of its other power plants. From the utility’s perspective, why spend money building another power plant when we can get our end users to reduce their consumption through energy efficiency, solar and load controllers and then charge customers a lot more to use energy during peak hours. Load controllers level out the peak demand from homes so they don’t see huge spikes anymore. That is why APS is drastically changing their rates to charge customers a lot more for on-peak energy usage. How much more? APS has already raised their electricity rates by 44% for on-peak usage and 72% for off-peak! With this new rate change, all 4 million APS customers are going to see an increase on their energy bill even if their energy usage stays exactly the same. SRP has peak hours from 1-8 pm during the summer and has implemented a demand charge for solar customers where they look at 30 min increments and nail you with another charge if your load exceeds 7 kW. See the table below to get a feel for how little 7 kW of load actually is. How Much Energy Do My Appliances and AC Use?Click on to read further.
Remember the Gremlins movie where cute little furbie creatures with huge ears made every child want to snuggle up with until they came into contact with water and transformed into ravenous looting monsters. The story goes that the old man that gave the Gremlins away warned its new owner to avoid contact with water but despite a half-hearted prevention effort, the original creature comes into contact with water and the trouble begins as the Gremlins multiply and take over the town. There’s plenty of Gremlins that are hidden in your house that keep your energy bills higher than they should be and cause hot rooms and temperature differences despite efforts to save be energy efficient at home. These home energy Gremlins remain hidden from view but are counteracting the positives of energy upgrades you may have tried like using a time of use plan or replacing your windows or air conditioner. If you have seen lack luster results from your energy saving efforts, start looking for these Home Energy Gremlins. Performing one upgrade instead of a whole home performance approach A specialty contractor takes the point of view of that everything is a nail and they are the hammer. The problem with this is that homeowners looking to reduce their energy bills or fix comfort problems will likely be disappointed from this approach because these problems aren’t often fixed with just one approach, be it solar, windows, insulation, Aerosealing or radiant barrier and solar attic fans. Our energy auditors have seen all too often homes that have plenty of insulation in the attic by an insulation contractor, Aerosealing done by an air conditioning contractor or new windows installed by a window contractor and the results fall far short of the promised results. Sometimes the contractors just don’t know the best way to truly upgrade a home is a whole home approach and education. Other times contractors are over ambitious in their savings and product estimates. When push comes to shove, there is no way to know what a home needs until a whole home energy audit is done by a qualified company. The wrong sized HVAC unit A home could have all the right upgrades- new windows, spray foam in the attic, a tight house and duct system and even a new AC unit on, but putting the wrong sized HVAC system on the home is an energy Gremlin that could turn in real ugly real fast. Too big a system and the air conditioner will turn on and shut off like a kid who’s had too much candy and can’t sit still, we call it short cycling. An air conditioner that short cycles wastes a ton of energy because these boys spike in energy use just to turn on, almost ten times the energy is used to turn the AC unit on as it takes to run it at a steady state. At start up, a compressor has to immediately move a lot of refrigerant through the unit and compressors need extra torque to overcome higher pressure sitting on the compressor cylinder head at startup. The load calculations we have done to determine the proper air conditioner size in Phoenix reveal about half of the systems we look at are oversized. I love putting a smaller and properly sized air conditioner on a home but that is the topic for a different post. Click on to read further.
We often get questions, normally in Arizona’s peak summer/winter seasons, about garage insulation. “Will insulating my garage make it more comfortable?” “Will adding insulation to my garage save me money?” “Is garage insulation worth it?”
For Arizona homeowners adding insulation to your garage is an unnecessary home upgrade because adding insulation to your garage will not save you money on bills. Yes, insulating over your garage will lower the temperature of your garage and of course, if you have rooms bordering your garage or above it then that garage wall should be insulated. Insulating the wall that separates the room and the garage will protect that room from being effected by the garage’s temperature and 100% of the homes we have performed energy audits and thermal camera scans on do have insulation in the adjoining walls. If insulating your garage is more about comfort and less about savings then we completely encourage it! If you’re one of those people who enjoys working in the garage then insulating the space might be a good idea. Insulating the garage will help you keep the warm or cool air inside without it escaping and being influenced by the outdoor temperature. In fact, we have even put swamp coolers in garages to really circulate the air in the garage. Evaporator coolers are the most cost effective way to cool the garage but if you want to fully condition your garage with a ductless mini split, we recommend fully insulating the walls, ceiling and garage door panels in conjunction with installing min splits. We have installed mini splits without insulating the garage and it becomes much harder to keep the conditioned air in the garage if it is not insulated and the mini splits needs to be grossly oversized. Some homeowners will insulate their garages during construction because they know that they’d eventually like to turn it into a bedroom years down the road. This is a fine idea as long as you’re using insulation that will not deplete over time like microfiber or spray foam. Imagine this: you come home after a long, busy day. On your way into the house, you pick up the mail from the mailbox, and rummage through the letters until you pick out your utility bill. As you begin to open it, you start thinking about all the energy you've spent in the last month, how often you ran your AC, how often you left the refrigerator door open, how many lights you forgot to turn off...
When you finally open up your utility bill, are you paying a number you feel happy with? Do you feel that you are sacrificing home comfort for a lower utility bill? At Green ID, we offer home energy audits to help homeowners save money and improve comfort to the fullest extent. But there's more you can do on your own! Here are 5 tips to help save energy in one of the most important rooms in any home: the bedroom! 1. Turn off lights and electronics before bed You might think it’s convenient to charge your phone and laptop while you sleep, but often it only takes a few hours to fully charge most of your electronics- meaning the rest of the night, your electronics are just wasting energy. Make sure you turn all of your lights off before bed, too. If you like to keep lights on while you sleep, you can invest in a multitude of helpful products like night lights, energy efficient bulbs, or timers, so that you never use more energy than you need to. 2. Keep closet doors closed Your AC unit works harder to keep bigger areas cool, and keeping your closet door open adds extra square footage to your room that your AC will try to cool. A bedroom closet almost never requires cooling, so close those doors and feel your bedroom start to cool down faster! 3. Keep curtains closed A huge portion of a home’s heat gain comes from the windows. Use window treatments such as sun shades, window film, or heavy curtains to block out sunlight and help keep your room cooler. 4. Clear the area around air vents Air vents and registers aren’t able to efficiently push air around the room if they are blocked. Locate all of your vents and make sure they are clear of furniture, curtains, and other objects for 12 inches on all sides. 5. Use the ceiling fan A ceiling fan can make your bedroom feel up to 4-6 degrees cooler without ever turning on the AC. Just make sure to turn it off when you leave! Fans create a wind chill effect, meaning they are able to cool down people, not rooms. Magic spells, daring swordfights, a prince in disguise, and... An energy audit?!
Saving money and energy by only changing your lighting? Sounds like a bright idea to me! Energy efficient lighting is one of the easiest ways to save money on your energy bills. Here are some ideas to save money more than just changing out incandescent bulbs to CFL or LED bulbs.
You might think that something so small in your home, which uses so much less energy than, say, your AC unit, might not make a difference. If that’s your thought, let me illuminate you: lighting is one of the easiest ways to save energy, with the most immediate results. Even if you’re not paying much just to light your home, waste is waste, so let me bring a few ideas out of the shadows and into the light: Firstly, keep your lamps (and even your other appliances!) away from the thermostat. Every thermostat has a sensor so that it can tell how warm the room is, and whether it needs to be running the air conditioning. If the sensor is too close to a warm lamp, the sensor will pick up on its warmth and run the AC longer than necessary. Lamp placement can help save energy in other ways, too. For instance, try putting a lamp in the corner of the room. A lamp placed against a single wall only has one surface to reflect light off of, but placed against two walls, your lamp reflects twice the amount of light. This makes your lamp appear even brighter than normal, and offers an opportunity to use a lower wattage bulb for the same amount of light. Speaking of lower wattage bulbs, another idea is to replace your lesser-used light bulbs with a lower wattage. While you do this, you can also upgrade your most used lights with an energy efficient bulb. Keeping your lights on a timer helps you keep your energy use on a regular schedule, while a motion sensor attached to your lights allows you to make sure you are only keeping lights on when you need them, instead of when you forget about them. Who would've thought you could do so many different things to save energy from just your lights? At Green ID, we can help your energy efficiency shine bright with a home energy audit. Don't be in the dark about your home's energy waste, call us at (602) 926-1650 today! Whether you spend every night in the kitchen making dinner or its main use is warming up left overs, these tips can help you cut down your spending and energy use in the kitchen. Pots, Pans, and dishes Using a warped pan to cook can be an energy sucker. Using a warped pot to boil water can take longer and use 50% more energy! Not only does the state of the cookware matter but the material matters as well. Using a copper bottomed pan will cut the time of cooking down; they heat up much faster than some of the other options. Also, when using the oven it’s better to use glass or ceramic dishes rather than metal. If you use a metal dish you’ll need to turn your oven at least 25 degrees up to be finished cooking in the same about of time as you would with a glass dish. Make leftovers If you can, make double portions! You can freeze the extras and save them for later. It takes a lot less energy to reheat than it does to cook a meal twice. Appliances Trust me, when it comes to energy use, not all appliances are equal. Upgrading your appliances would be a great first step to lower your long term spending in the kitchen. Although the initial cost may be high, this change will make the biggest impact on your energy bills and has the potential to slash your spending. Aim for investing in energy star appliances because you’re guaranteed that they are the most energy efficient. cleanA convention is always preferred over a standard oven. Because the heated air is constantly circulating the temperature and cook time can both decrease. Making the switch to a convention oven, on average, will lower your ovens energy use by 20%.
Self-cleaning ovens are ideal because they’re built with better insulation. Your burner pans You know the metal bowl underneath the coil stove burners that catch water and crumbs while you’re cooking? Those are burner pans. Keeping your burner pans clean is crucial and so easy. Those pans are not meant just to catch whatever is overflowing your pots; they’re supposed to be a reflective surface! That surface reflects heat up to the cookware and helps your stove work more efficiently. Fix that leaky faucet A leaky faucet, though it seems only small and annoying, can really add up! A faucet that drips once a second can waste up to 1,661 gallons of water each year! Not only is that a complete waste of water, it can cost you up to $35 in electricity and gas. You might think that choosing a new AC unit is as easy as pie (er, porridge?) when an HVAC contractor tells you their size suggestion, but getting a correctly sized AC unit is not as easy as it may seem- HVAC contractors will frequently take shortcuts by trying to use “rules of thumb”, or calculations based on limited information like the square footage of your home, which very often force you, the homeowner, to end up with an incorrectly sized unit.
Most units sized wrong end up being too large for the home, but units that are too small happen too. People (sometimes even HVAC contractors!) can often make the assumption that “bigger is better”, meaning a larger unit will be more efficient and save more energy, but this is far from the truth. Whether it’s too big or too small, an AC unit that’s the wrong size wastes energy and raises your bills. Too big, too small, or just right… Looking at AC units can have you feeling a bit like Goldilocks. And if you have the wrong size AC unit, the sight of your frightening electricity bills might just get you to run screaming. What can happen when your AC is not sized correctly: TOO BIG: • Shortened lifespan • Cycles on/off more frequently than right size unit • Can cause humidity indoors – which can lead to mold!! • More expensive to buy, maintain, and use • Large temperature swings TOO SMALL: • Continuously runs • Possibly not enough to fully cool house • Warmer indoor temps overall • Often overworked system PROBLEMS OF BOTH: • Longer run times • Higher electricity costs • Higher maintenance costs • Excess noise • Higher chance of system breaking Before installing any new AC Units, you should be absolutely sure that your HVAC contractor did their calculations with a Manual J Load calculation. At Green ID, our job is to make sure your AC unit is up to par. With our help, your air conditioning could feel juuust right. Call us today at (602) 926-1650. Installing a new air conditioner or heating unit in your home is an intricate process because every house is unique and requires a specific amount of heating and cooling in order to keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. In order to provide consistent comfort for you and your family, it is necessary to have appropriately sized air conditioning equipment. When purchasing a new system, completing a Manual J Load Calculation before installation is the only precise method a homeowner can trust to accurately measure their heating and cooling load. If you are replacing an existing system, technicians will often refer to the data plate of the original unit for measurements. Many contractors who follow this method rely on a general rule of thumb (400 square feet per ton) for their calculations. However, this shortcut is not ideal because buildings change over time in various ways that may significantly affect the size of the load. A Manual J is the short industry name for Heat Load Calculation or Residential Load Calculation and is performed in order to determine how much cooling and heating a home needs to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. If you are considering the purchase of a new HVAC system, your contractor should absolutely perform a Manual J Load Calculation for your home. A Manual J will indicate the proper size of unit that is required for your home. HVAC systems impact a home’s air quality, energy efficiency, and overall comfort. An oversized unit will lead to short-cycling and other risks that will drastically affect these three qualities of your home. Air conditioner short-cycling is when your HVAC system constantly turns on and shuts off every few minutes. Bigger is not always better – your oversized AC system is causing this to happen because it is so powerful that it cools your house down quickly enough to satisfy the thermostat buy you are left with an uncomfortable level of humidity. Most AC units need to run for at least ten minutes before they begin dehumidifying the air. If your system is frequently turning on and off, it doesn’t allow enough time for humidity to condense. This results in extra unnecessary wear and tear to your equipment from frequent starting and leaves your home feeling humid and stuffy. On the other hand, if your system is too small, it will run continuously, struggling to fulfill your home’s heat load. This may never allow your home to reach your desired temperature setting. An undersized unit will increase your energy usage and will raise costs from constantly working so hard.Incorrect sizing is one of the most critical aspects with any comfort system and the only way to avoid this issue is to put in the extra effort from the start and complete a Manual J Load Calculation before installation. Ensure that this does not happen after the installation is finished for the sole purpose of utility rebate incentives. It is ideal to a Manual J Load Calculation to be completed before the installation is started for the sole purpose of ensuring that the equipment is sized correctly. Performing a load calculation can be rather complex, as there are several factors to obtain that will determine the load calculation for a particular house. Load calculations are not based on square footage; they’re based on construction materials and occupant usage. To give you a better understanding of what exactly goes into a load calculation, see the list below: |
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