Home Energy Efficiency Retrofits--Is it Rocket Science?

I attended the Built Energy Forum in late January along with roughly 350 people from the home energy auditor community. The auditor breakout session was led by a couple of luminaries in the field--the leading trainer in the energy information management field nationally, Rick Karg, and one of Maine's most innovative auditor/contractors, Richard Burbank of Evergreen Home Performance.

Joining them was Dale McCormick, head of the Maine State Housing Authority, and also an old friend.  Dale pointed out that the low income weatherization programs she oversees had achieved a 22% energy use reduction, on average. That is impressive, to be sure. At one point she challenged the crowd of professional auditors with a provocative statement: "This isn't rocket science." This comment, needless to say, was the proverbial fart in church. Coming from a person who has produced such extraordinary efficiency results, you have to respect her point of view. Still, many of the professional auditors in attendance stood up during the comment period to rebut, saying, "Actually...it is rocket science."

So is home energy efficiency rocket science or not? Here's one story from the ongoing saga that is my house.

Not long ago, we put an addition on our house. During the first winter, we had ice dams that caused leaks in the kitchen ceiling. Our builder, a great guy who had delivered the project on time and on budget, told us that there was only one solution. We had to extend the roof over the pricey cedar gutter in the area of the ice dams. We bit. We weren't tuned in to home energy at the time, and didn't know any better.

As a result, that roof now dumps all of its water into a planting bed next to the foundation. It doesn't slope away particularly well, so we've had water problems in the basement. The location is right at the seam of the old foundation and new, and the joint leaks. To combat this problem, we laid a fancy subfloor system so that the moisture could move under the floor. This cost about $3,000.  Technically, this solution works, but because we don't have a really good integrated airflow system under the floor, we have to hack together a shop vac (1070 watts of nastiness) to suck air beneath the floor underlayment when it's wet. Back outside, I have spent way too much time wrestling with ugly tarps and jury rigged drainage diverters during big storms.

Now, after learning more about what's really going on, we're finding the ice dam problem isn't really because of gutter back up, after all. It's the result of compromised insulation, and the heat pouring into the ceiling cavity from 9 recessed halogen cans in the kitchen. Fixing that problem at the outset might have saved us all of the subsequent time consuming and expensive moisture management hassle.

Suddenly LED lighting solutions, like  the CREE LR6 LLF downlight LED Module, which retrofits into existing recessed cans, and seemed expensive at $125 each, look like a very good value even before taking into account energy savings (they are 12 watts and super bright). They would have been a vastly more cost effective way of tackling the problem. In fact, cool lighting might have eliminated the problem from occurring in the first place. And the fact that they give off beautiful light, are dimmable, energy saving and will last longer than me is just a bonus.

All of this was just another lesson on the complexities and interconnectedness of this ecosystem we call our house. And the real possibility of spending large sums of money solving the wrong problem. Is it rocket science? Maybe not. But it's still pretty darn complex.