THE I.R. CAMERA AND OTHER TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Back in the early 1980’s when our company was first getting into the energy conservation business, the whole concept of what energy efficiency in a home means and how to achieve it was in its infancy. The birth of the field was basically a reaction to the oil embargo of the late 1970’s. Up until that happened no one thought much about conservation or the fact that we wouldn’t always just have as much oil, and therefore cheap electrical power, as we would ever want or need. The embargo opened everyone’s eyes to the fact that oil is a finite resource and we, in the United States, do not own or produce as much as we use. The first attempts at residential conservation were put forth by the utility companies (PG&E in our area) who were realizing the shortfall of fossil fuels to generate power at the same time construction of nuclear power plants were meeting with strong opposition from the public.
THE ZERO INTEREST LOAN PROGRAM
Since the utility sponsored programs were the only game in town we took their methods as gospel. We had no real testing tools at the time so the concept was a “one-size-fits-all” kind of approach. You went to someone’s home and you looked at a group of six things that the utility company told you were what made a house waste energy. The attic insulation had to be a certain level, the doors had to be weather stripped, the showers had to have low flow heads, the gaps in the outside trim had to be caulked and the water heater had to have a blanket. If any of these were missing you went “Ah-ha” (and in most cases all were missing), and you convinced the homeowner if took advantage of an interest free loan from PG&E he could then install these items and his heating and cooling bills would drop sharply. In our local program if you did install these items you could then go on and get another loan for more extensive things like wall and floor insulation and even dual pane windows.
This was all fine while it lasted, which was 3-4 years and then the ZIP program ended. It did a lot of good for a lot of homes but without any means of testing or verification of results the real benefits were always in question.
TESTING & TOOLS
As it became more evident that energy conservation and reducing the use of fossil fuels is a serious matter, even to the point of national security, a better way was needed to make the process custom to each building since each building is so different. First we saw energy audits being done on structures in such a way as to be custom to a particular building. But the real changes started 10-15 years ago when we saw actual testing equipment designed strictly for conservation. We were introduced to the” blower door” about that time and the “duct blaster” shortly thereafter. These are both pieces of testing equipment designed strictly for building energy conservation, and both work on the same principal. The blower door pressurizes a whole house (or commercial building) after sealing up all the openings, so we can tell how leaky that building is. The duct blaster does the same for the HVAC duct system. Air leakage and infiltration are major factors in the loss of conditioned air and there was finally a tool to quantify and locate this instead of just throwing caulking at the same places on every building and hoping those were the correct spots.
AND NOW THE I.R. CAMERA
About the same time another tool was becoming available for building shell diagnostics. The Thermal Imager or Infrared Camera. These are fantastically useful instruments.
Visible light consists of electromagnetic waves of a certain wavelength. When those same waves are shorter and their crests closer together than visible light, they fall into the “ultra-violet” part of the spectrum, and as they get shorter yet they become X-rays and finally Gamma rays. If we head back up the other way on the spectrum just past visible light, as the waves become longer we have the infra-red part of the spectrum, then longer still they becomes Micro-waves and then radio waves. But it’s the infra-red part that these thermal imagers sense and record. The infra-red is heat. And if we are studying heat loss what better tool than one that can actually see and record heat leaving a building? Together with the blower door and duct pressure tester we have a way to test an individual structure and measure its performance and record the results of the testing. We then can compare our efforts after our energy efficiency measures are installed. We now have a way to see if what we did actually worked. The draw back to this particular tool was and is its cost. The first I.R. cameras had to be artificially cooled with liquefied gas and were large and cumbersome making them not feasible for building shell diagnostics. It would have been easier to bring the building to the camera at the time. We’ll pick it up here next time.
Back in the early 1980’s when our company was first getting into the energy conservation business, the whole concept of what energy efficiency in a home means and how to achieve it was in its infancy. The birth of the field was basically a reaction to the oil embargo of the late 1970’s. Up until that happened no one thought much about conservation or the fact that we wouldn’t always just have as much oil, and therefore cheap electrical power, as we would ever want or need. The embargo opened everyone’s eyes to the fact that oil is a finite resource and we, in the United States, do not own or produce as much as we use. The first attempts at residential conservation were put forth by the utility companies (PG&E in our area) who were realizing the shortfall of fossil fuels to generate power at the same time construction of nuclear power plants were meeting with strong opposition from the public.
THE ZERO INTEREST LOAN PROGRAM
Since the utility sponsored programs were the only game in town we took their methods as gospel. We had no real testing tools at the time so the concept was a “one-size-fits-all” kind of approach. You went to someone’s home and you looked at a group of six things that the utility company told you were what made a house waste energy. The attic insulation had to be a certain level, the doors had to be weather stripped, the showers had to have low flow heads, the gaps in the outside trim had to be caulked and the water heater had to have a blanket. If any of these were missing you went “Ah-ha” (and in most cases all were missing), and you convinced the homeowner if took advantage of an interest free loan from PG&E he could then install these items and his heating and cooling bills would drop sharply. In our local program if you did install these items you could then go on and get another loan for more extensive things like wall and floor insulation and even dual pane windows.
This was all fine while it lasted, which was 3-4 years and then the ZIP program ended. It did a lot of good for a lot of homes but without any means of testing or verification of results the real benefits were always in question.
TESTING & TOOLS
As it became more evident that energy conservation and reducing the use of fossil fuels is a serious matter, even to the point of national security, a better way was needed to make the process custom to each building since each building is so different. First we saw energy audits being done on structures in such a way as to be custom to a particular building. But the real changes started 10-15 years ago when we saw actual testing equipment designed strictly for conservation. We were introduced to the” blower door” about that time and the “duct blaster” shortly thereafter. These are both pieces of testing equipment designed strictly for building energy conservation, and both work on the same principal. The blower door pressurizes a whole house (or commercial building) after sealing up all the openings, so we can tell how leaky that building is. The duct blaster does the same for the HVAC duct system. Air leakage and infiltration are major factors in the loss of conditioned air and there was finally a tool to quantify and locate this instead of just throwing caulking at the same places on every building and hoping those were the correct spots.
AND NOW THE I.R. CAMERA
About the same time another tool was becoming available for building shell diagnostics. The Thermal Imager or Infrared Camera. These are fantastically useful instruments.
Visible light consists of electromagnetic waves of a certain wavelength. When those same waves are shorter and their crests closer together than visible light, they fall into the “ultra-violet” part of the spectrum, and as they get shorter yet they become X-rays and finally Gamma rays. If we head back up the other way on the spectrum just past visible light, as the waves become longer we have the infra-red part of the spectrum, then longer still they becomes Micro-waves and then radio waves. But it’s the infra-red part that these thermal imagers sense and record. The infra-red is heat. And if we are studying heat loss what better tool than one that can actually see and record heat leaving a building? Together with the blower door and duct pressure tester we have a way to test an individual structure and measure its performance and record the results of the testing. We then can compare our efforts after our energy efficiency measures are installed. We now have a way to see if what we did actually worked. The draw back to this particular tool was and is its cost. The first I.R. cameras had to be artificially cooled with liquefied gas and were large and cumbersome making them not feasible for building shell diagnostics. It would have been easier to bring the building to the camera at the time. We’ll pick it up here next time.
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