apperson energy management

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. 

High Heating Bills Prompt Energy Efficiency Checks for Homeowners
By GLENDA ANDERSON

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

The high heating bills that come with winter’s chill have sent some homeowners hunting for energy efficiency.

 “It’s been cold. People have been cranking up the heat,” said Jim Apperson, owner of Apperson Energy Management, with offices in Mendocino and Sonoma counties.

When they find it costs too much to keep the house toasty, some seek a home energy evaluation.

Kimberly Melvin and her husband this year had their drafty Ukiah home evaluated and opted for a house retrofit, including insulation, double-paned windows, new furnace and air conditioning.

Apperson also made safety checks and found her oven was emitting unsafe amounts of carbon dioxide, a problem that was fixed with a new vent fan. The energy makeover cost the family about $23,000, but they recouped $5,500 in rebates and are saving money on their monthly energy bills.

“It was so well worth it. The money we’re saving is incredible,” Melvin said.

Last winter, her monthly heating bill was close to $220 a month. Her November bill this year was $120, she said. 

“I keep it warm” because of the children, Melvin said. But now it stays warm enough for minimally clad children when the thermostat is set in the mid-60s.

 The makeover was conducted utilizing a new program, Energy Upgrade California, a collaboration of counties, cities, non-profits and utility companies. Property owners can find out what energy-saving incentives are available in their area by going to www.energyupgradeca.org, and then entering their zip codes.

Homeowners have nothing to lose by having their homes evaluated because rebates cover their costs.

“So it’s free,” Apperson said.

The tests are comprehensive, with two energy technicians spending three hours at each home, he said.

Last week, Vince Caffery and Sergio Galarza were busy evaluating a vintage west Ukiah home. Their work included sealing off the front door with a vinyl-covered frame fitted with a fan. Facing outward, the fan pulled air out of the house, creating a vacuum inside. That allowed the technicians to measure how much air was leaking using a hand-held computer.

A smoke-emitting device helps locate the leaks.

“We have tangible evidence where drafts are,” Caffery said.

 An evaluation looks at a home as a whole system rather than at individual parts — like the insulation, windows and ducts, Apperson said.

Making changes piecemeal can result in something like a heating system that is too large for the house, causing it to cycle on and off frequently and inefficiently, he said.

 Looking at individual symptoms also can lead to erroneous assumptions, Apperson said. People often think they need insulation under their homes because the floors feel cold when in fact the problem is air leaks elsewhere in the house sucking the cold air up through the floor. The solution is getting rid of the air leaks, not insulating the floors, which has a minimal effect on a home’s energy efficiency in our climate, Apperson said.

 To be eligible for Energy Upgrade rebates, a home must be tested before and after installation of new devices to prove they work.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or Glenda.anderson

                                         WHOLE HOUSE ENERGY ASSESSMENTS

 First of all, a note pertaining to our last column, questioning why no more money was channeled to such a good and successful a program as the MIST/CHF low interest loan program and why it was allowed to simply die. I was able to email that column to a Mr. Robert Oglesby, the Executive Director of the California Energy Commission as an open letter and asked for his response. So far haven’t heard back.

There is something that needs to be mentioned here regarding politicians we elect. When it was getting down to the wire for the CEC to make it’s decision as to how much money (if any) was to go to the CHF program, people in the industry tried to get any available politician to take a stand and nudge the CEC in the correct direction. We reached out to the offices of Congressmen Mike Thompson, who actually returned our call and was genuinely interested in our plight. Unfortunately it was on the “wrong side of the isle” and there was nothing he could do, but referred us to State Senator Noreen Evans’s Ukiah office who also called us back and asked what they could do to help. Since the vote was the next day and in Sacramento, the timing was all wrong and they just couldn’t do anything, but I think it’s worth mentioning that these elected officials did take the time to actually try to understand the issue and were willing to help if they could have. A nice surprise.
                                                         HOME ENERGY AUDITS

 A lot of the energy incentive programs available right now sponsored by utility companies require some type of energy audit or assessment prior or after the work is complete to justify the incentive amount. We used to call these “Audits” but we have been asked not to use that term. They (whoever that may be) feel the connotation is too close to an IRS function, so we have been asked to use the much bigger word, “assessment”. But it’s all the same and it is the best place to start if you are serious about doing an energy upgrade on your home. As we’ve said so many times here, it can be counterproductive to approach the replacement and upgrading of the many energy systems in a building without some kind of plan or roadmap, which give you some assurance that everything will end up working together as a unit.

It’s been proven that the “Whole-House Concept” of energy upgrades is by far the most cost-effective path, and an energy assessment is the first step. A good one will take one or two guys 2-4 hours onsite to do the testing and gather all the information needed. The basic one required for PG&E’s EUC rebate program requires pressure testing your duct system as well as pressure testing the whole house. The technicians will also gather information on all your gas fired appliances, as well as doing safety testing on them. They will also do basic safety testing on the house as a whole to make sure you don’t start out with some kind of back drafting problem of some kind. They will look at everything in your home that produces, consumes or is affected by energy.

They then take all this information back to their lair and feed it into a computer program that builds a model of your house inside it, and subjects it to all the weather conditions it has in its library, for every hour of the day of the year, for whatever climate zone you are in. It then lists upgrades and improvements and calculates how much each of those will save, both as a percentage and as a monetary amount. These percentages are used to determine rebate amounts in the PG&E EUC rebate program.

The technician should also ask you for 12 months of utility usage and input that into the program also, and in the end a 12 page custom report is issued with some very good information, tailored just for your home. Upgrades are listed in the order of their “cost-effectiveness” meaning the most “bang for the buck” listed first. Unless the home was built within the last 10 years, we almost always see 15-20% by installing a few simple items and a 30-50% savings by getting more aggressive (new dual pane windows, new furnace), and you can get an 80-85% if you add solar P.V.

The drawback is these assessments take a lot of time, as you can see, 10-15 man hours, so most companies must charge for the service. But people hesitate to pay because they don’t know what they are going to get in advance, and since most utility programs have minimums, if their savings doesn’t measure up on the audit the money spent is then wasted.

However, we now have an answer. We now have a $500 rebate from a CEC grant administered by a group called Ecology Action. You can Google “Energyupgradecalifornia” put in your zip code and look for the $500 “Whole House Energy Rating Rebate”. You fill out a form and you have an option of selecting a rating company to come out and do the rating on your home. The first part is called the “test-in” and that’s where you’ll find what upgrades are recommended and for that part the reimbursement is $300. Then after the work is done (if you have work done, it’s not mandatory) you have the rater come back and do a “test-out” and for that you get a $200 reimbursement. When you call or email to schedule your audit make sure you ask how much it’s going to cost, you’ll get $300 back for the assessment but every auditing company can charge what they want. 

A good home energy audit or assessment is a valuable tool in fighting high utility costs and if you can take advantage of this CEC grant to get it done at little or no cost you should consider it before the grants are gone.

NOT UNDERSTANDING THE REASONING

As I got older I assumed I would also get wiser. I think there is some corny saying about wisdom coming with age or some such thing but I’ve run into something I just don’t understand. I am referring to the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) refusal to provide even moderate continuing funding for the MIST/CHF loan program.

 There are a lot of acronyms thrown around: MIST means Moderate Income Sustainable Technology program, CHF is California Homebuyers Fund. I’ve talked about the CHF loan program in this space before. It was a one year program and was started with a grant of almost $20mil in March of 2011, but didn’t really get rolling until May of last year.

 It’s a very simple program in design and operation. CHF is the administrator of the program and is a joint powers group of involving 50 Counties in California. 

The program consists of a long term low (or in some Counties no) interest loan to install anything at your home that proves to be cost effective in saving energy, and to help create jobs. The interest rate for the areas that have interest is 3% and the loan term is 15 years. Qualifying is simple; the liberal upper end income guideline for Mendocino County is $87,400 or less for a household. There are no appraisals no credits checks, no loan to value, you don’t even need a wet ink signature on anything. You must have a source of income (other than unemployment), be current on your mortgage and property taxes, and meet the income guidelines, and the project must prove cost effective on “Energy Pro”, the computer software used for new home construction Title24 calculations.  That’s it.

                                                   FULL SPEED AHEAD

Our company got a late start and really only had 4 months to work with this program before the $20mil in funding was depleted. All during this time we questioned why we were told to keep pushing full speed ahead with applications, and we questioned the rational of continuing to add additional Counties to the list of participants when it was obvious the money would be gone soon. The answer was that there was “nothing official, of course” but that there was going to be an infusion of capital to keep the program going.

During the 4 months we had to work with this fantastic program (if we count the project still waiting to be finished) we will had 14 projects completed. All had insulation upgrades, almost every single one had a high efficiency furnace installed, more than half had new dual pane windows put in, 5 had solar P.V. systems, 4 had new “cool roofs”.  We had several generated utility savings of over 70%, with one at 82%. That would mean someone with a $450 mo. heating cost would drop that to $81. The average savings was in the 35-40% range. The average project resulted in a potential of over 6 TONS of CO2 removed from the air.

We had clients who said they could no longer afford to live normally in their homes because of the cost of heating and cooling them. 14 very wasteful, inefficient, costly homes were turned into extremely efficient ones.

I can say that without the CHF loan program that I don’t think even one of these projects would have happened. Why? Because these are “Whole House Retrofits” If you are going to cut a buildings heating costs by 82% you have to change out a lot of inefficient old equipment and upgrade a lot non-existent insulation and infiltration items, you must address the whole house. And that costs money. These jobs ranged from $22,000 to $81,000. But in every case the amount saved more than made the loan payment. At 3% $10k costs only $69.05 mo. And we have a number of rebate program out there so a person could get the loan and do the work and then get up to $6000 in rebates and another $9,000 in tax credits (for solar). 

There would simply be no other way for these folks to have this kind of upgrade done without the CHF loan program.

                                                         THE QUESTION

 So, this is the thing I simply do no understand. I do just not understand why the CEC is choosing not to fund this program any longer. After less than one year of being highly successful.  We just had an expose a few weeks ago that said millions of dollars of unspent stimulus money would have to go back to the general fund because it was not going to fund energy conservation, it’s stated target. We also hear regular discussions of large amounts of money earmarked for energy conservation sitting unspent in programs that can not spend the money before they will loose it, and the CEC is the body with the power to move that money to where it will be the most useful. Why do they not consider adding additional funding to a program with a staff in place, trained contractors signing clients up for work, a backlog of work of several million dollars, an inspection process that involves an independent third party inspection of each job to deter fraud, verifiable results, low administration costs, and word of mouth advertising that will carry it into 2013?

Their one comment was that they had this new program they were going to fund with $25mil that was going to be “just like the CHF MIST” program except that instead of giving the administration to the same joint powers group, they would give it to a group of bankers to distribute. Now I don’t know if any of you has been to a bank recently but I don’t think you’ll find a group of people on this earth less willing to loan money out right now as a group of bankers, especially for 15 years at 3%, with no collateral or appraisal, or loan to value.

So, I’d like to know from anyone out there, or from anyone connected to the CEC especially.  If anyone has any idea why the people who we put in the position of trust, who we trust to do the right things with our tax payer and rate payer money, why they would act in a way that seems so counter productive to the best interests of the general public. Somewhere, someone made decisions that to me just do not make sense. Was it just a matter of money?

                                    SHOWER HEADS AND FLUORESCENTS

One of PG&E’s latest incentive programs for energy conservation is the EUC rebate program. This is actually a Statewide program and is administered in our area by PG&E. It has two levels of participation. The advanced level has been the most popular by far. This is where a home assessment is done and a computer determines potential energy savings things you can do to your home and you can get up to $4,000 in rebates if you actually install the recommended items. The less well known part of the program is called the “Basic” path and it consists of a package of things that a homeowner must do to their home in order to receive a rebate. These are: add attic insulation, seal your HVAC ducts, air infiltration sealing, insulate the hot water pipes from the water heater to where they disappear into the wall, and make sure you have low flow shower heads, and one more thing, install a thermostatically controlled shower flow sensor valve. If you do all of these things, and have some safety testing done on the way out, PG&E will pay the first $1,000 of the cost to have these things done as a rebate. One drawback is you must need all of the items in order to qualify. So your home must have central heating and must have an attic that needs insulation. But it’s not a bad deal because if your house is medium size all that work can be done for well under $2,000 so you get more than half of it paid for. If it’s a small home it may be close to free. If you happen to live in the City of Ukiah and have central A/C you can double up on City rebates also. But the reason I bring all this up is the shower valve. Until I ran across this stipulation I had never heard of a “thermostatically controlled shower shut-off valve” and they are a really cool thing that I wish I had heard about before.

                        THERMOSTATICALLY CONTROLLED SHOWER VALVE

You see they are a little thing about an inch long and you take off the shower head and you put this valve on the shower pipe coming out of the wall, and then put the shower head back on. Now, when you turn the shower on, as soon as the water warms up to 95 degrees this valve shuts the water off. So you can be off doing the normal things you do while waiting for the water to get warm and you won’t be wasting all that water that got warm in 2 ½ minutes but ran for 15. When you are ready you just pull on a little cord and the hot water starts flowing and in you go. So far I’ve only seen one company making the thing, so It may be a proprietary item. They say it saves 2,700 gallons of water per year which costs about $75, and they cost between $20-$40 plus installation. They are called “Ladybug Shower Head Adaptor” and you can get them online. My wife went to a conference in Southern California and the hotel had these Ladybug controls. Most of the showers had waterproof placards explaining what they were and how they worked. A few of the rooms had their placards missing. And some of these folk went ahead and got in and soaped up while waiting for the water to warm up. But everyone else liked them.
 
                                                 MANDATES ARE COMING

Another thing I wanted to remind everyone about is the upcoming T-12 fluorescent lighting phase-out mandate. As of July 2012 (8 mos.) the T-12 fluorescent lamps can no longer be made or imported, or I would assume sold, in the U.S. There are still a heck of a lot of buildings out there with the old T-12 fluorescents lights in them. This doesn’t really apply to households as much as businesses. Both the City of Ukiah and PG&E have programs to help defray the cost to change to the newer, more efficient T-8 style. If you are not sure which you have, the number after the “T” corresponds to the bulb diameter in eights of an inch. So a T-12 lamp is 12/8 or 1 ½” in diameter while the newer T-8 is one inch. I just found that the EPA act of 2005 has been extended thru 2014 and the amount spent by businesses to upgrade their lighting, HVAC units, and/or building envelope (insulation) can receive accelerated depreciation. The entire cost can be depreciated at up to $1.80 per sq ft.

If you are a business owner and you have upgraded your heating or lighting or building envelope and you haven’t claimed this, or you are thinking of doing this kind of work, you can email me and I’ll send you a copy of the tax code. With the help from the utility companies and the tax benefits a lighting conversion can be done for very little net cost in the end. With the mandated loss of the T-12 lamps and ballasts your gonna have to convert at some point in time anyway.

COOL ROOFS

We have a topic we can now discuss that until recently had been outside our sphere of interest in energy conservation, and that topic is the “cool roof”. Most people tend to think of either the white “Snow-coat” you put on a metal mobile home roof, or that brilliant silver comp shingle or 90 lb. rolled roofing you see on low slope roofs when the term “cool roof” is used. And while those are examples of early cool roofs the products have come a long way. They are of interest to us now because a cool roof is a fundable item under the CHF loan program and PG&E will also pay a rebate on it which makes it worth looking into if you have a roof that is going to need replacing soon.

So, what is a cool roof? There are substances that can be added to a number of different roofing types that cause it to react differently to sunlight. There are two measurements that pertain to a cool roof, “high solar reflectance”, which is the ability to reflect light, at all wavelengths including infrared and ultraviolet, and “high thermal emittance” which is the ability to radiate absorbed solar energy. Both of these measurements are on a scale of between 0 & 1 where 0 indicates a surface that absorbs all solar radiation and 1 represents total reflectivity. The number is expressed as a percent or decimal. Almost every kind of roofing has a cool roof option. Built-up roofing, foam roofing, metal, comp shingle, slate, tile, single ply torch-down, pretty much any kind of roofing has a cool roof branch of the family. They do tend to cost a bit more because the processes required and the special materials needed to cause the sun to “reflect” and “emit” from their surfaces in the proscribed manner are more expensive than the standard materials. But it’s worth in over time. Both the DOE and EPA have calculators at the CRRC website where you can figure your payback and get much more information. And they come in far more interesting colors than white and silver. You won’t find black but you will find shades of dark brown and greens and the “textured” look of the 40 & 50 year comp shingle products, while some carry a lifetime guarantee.

                                                             A STUDY DONE

In 2001 the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs did a study on a big building in Texas. They took a lot of summer time measurements while this building had its standard black built-up roof, and then put on a new vinyl membrane cool roof and took the same summer measurements. They found the surface temperature dropped an average of 43 degrees, the average daily temperature went from 168 to 125 degrees, this cut the air conditioner average use by 11% and peak use by 14% and cut the buildings one year cooling costs by $.07 per sq ft or $7,200.  Must have been an airplane hanger. But the point is the cool roof works. If it didn’t PG&E wouldn’t be offering a rebate on it. You have to live in climate zones 2,4,11,12,or13, all the zones with lots of cooling degree days. They offer $.20 per sq ft and you can include the overhangs. But what’s really cool, so to speak, is if you need a roof and you qualify for a CHF loan (make less than $87,200 yr, current on mortgage & prop. Taxes). Then you can get the cool roof as part of your 3% loan (Mendocino, Sonoma, 0% in Lake County) and then you get to stick the PG&E rebate in your pocket. And the loan will even cover tear-off and new plywood over skip sheathing if you had a wood shingle roof.

                                     FREE HOME ENERGY ASSESSMENTS

Here is something else that just started that ties into all we’ve been discussing. If you want to know how energy efficient your home is (or isn’t) and to get an idea of what you might be able to do about it, or if you want to see if you can participate in one of the PG&E or CHF loan programs, the first step is a home energy assessment. The CEC has sponsored a rebate for the cost of this home assessment. Administered by Ecology Action and funded by ARRA monies it makes this service free. You can Google Energy Upgrade California, put in your zip code and follow the prompts for the $500 assessment rebate. That’s the first step in a cool roof and some cool information on energy savings. Sign up for the free HERS II rating and get a low interest CHF loan. There’s funding through the end of the year, so don’t wait too long.

                                                           MORE SUN POWER    

Last time we were discussing solar hot water systems and a little bit on how they worked and the rebates available for them. The other kind of solar system available is the solar P.V. or Photovoltaic system. If anyone should care about such things, “Photo” is from the Greek word meaning light, and “voltaic” refers to “volt” a unit ofelectromotive force.Turning solar energy into an electrical charge was discovered by a guy named A.E. Becquerel back in 1839, although there wasn’t an actual “solar cell”until someone named Charles Fritts coated some seleniumwith a thin layer of gold in 1883. The efficiency of this cell was 1%. The concept really didn’t go much of anywhere for quite some time as there just wasn’t any reason to develop a product that took in sunlight and produced electrical power. They weren’t very efficient and the batteries of the day weren’t much better. And besides about the only thing people were using portable energy for was for lamps to light their homes, and we had whale oil for that and what the heck, we had an unlimited supply of whales, right?

                                                               TELSTAR  

It was the space race and our communications satellites that really gave the solar industry the jump start it needed. Bell labs developed the first modern solar cell in 1954 and added them to their Vanguard and Telstar satellites. We take it for granted now, but up until that time they would launch a satellite and it would run until… the batteries went dead. And then that multi million dollar piece of equipment was just abandoned, because  it had no more power.

But that was the start the industry needed and, like computers, the price and function started getting better exponentially every year. 

The way a solar panel works is a sheet of material is exposed to the sun. There are various materials, most have long, hard expensive names, and somehow silicone is involved. These sheets of materials are made into panels and protected by glass. The silicone based materials have impurities, and when the sunlight strikes these impurities they react by giving off a small electrical charge. Not much by itself but if you are able to multiply that many, many times as you do when you have a whole sheet in a panel, you have something that generates a usable amount of electricity. And it generates direct current or D.C.  Direct current is not what you use in your home. D.C. is what you use in your car. Direct current always flows in one direction. A/C or alternating current alternates, and changes direction. It alternates and changes direction and flows back to the power plant, and it does this 60 times a second, and no, I have no idea how it does this or why.

So, in order for the D.C. power to be usable in your home it must be converted to A.C current, and trained to change directions very quickly, as noted above. The thing that does this is called an “inverter”. These are a very important part of the system and if they fail the system can not function. My understanding is the latest inverters are mounted with, or can even be part of, the panel itself and have become very dependable.

                                                   OFF THE GRID

 The last component of the system are the storage batteries. If you are completely “off the grid” you will need storage batteries to store the excess power so you can use it when it is needed. Such as at night or when the sun isn’t shining or when you are using more power than you are producing at that moment. If you are a utility customer you can use the power company as your storage battery. Your electric meter will actually run backward as you feed power into the public grid and then reverse as you use more power than you produce. Once a year they “settle-up” and you either pay what you owe or they will pay you if you have produced and put in more power into the public grid than you have consumed. I don’t know about the City of Ukiah, but the rate that PG&E pays ($.04 kwh) is about one third of the lowest tier they charge their customers. But they still offer a rebate, and the Feds still have the 30% tax credit and the City of Ukiah still has their rebate which, last I heard was at $1.96 kwh, so you can still get a large portion of a solar P.V. system paid for. Then there are the year after year energy savings and I believe tax credits out a number of years. Something else you need to consider, smart meters. We are all getting one and that can mean “time-of-use” billing. That means on those 11 hottest days of the year, during the hot mid-day hours, you’ll either be paying a super premium to run your A/C or you are not going to be running it. The cool people will have solar.

                                                        SUN POWER

If you own or live in a home that is more than a couple of years old you may be paying more than you are comfortable with to heat and cool the place. As we’ve said many times here, up until just a few years ago not much attention was paid to the energy efficiency of a building, or how much it was going to cost to heat it or cool it. Our various forms of energy, whether is was electric or gas, were so inexpensive that it was cheaper to build homes with lots of infiltration and just throw in a larger furnace to compensate. And up until the 1970’s oil crisis that worked just fine. After that we started to realize that it does in fact cost money to change the temperature of the air around us, and some people started to look for solutions. The building codes started to change but that takes time and  now, forty something years later we are finally seeing building codes that force builders to construct homes that don’t waste as much energy. My point being we have a heck of a lot of houses that need help as far as energy conservation. We have a couple of good programs out there at present, and one in particular is very generous in that it is a low interest loan to help people make their homes more energy efficient, and one of the items you can borrow money to install to help your home is a solar system. We have been receiving a lot of questions about solar systems recently so I thought I’d pass along the little bit that I know about solar.
 
                                                           THE KINDS

When someone calls and says they want a solar system on their home the first thing we need to know is what kind they want. There are two basic types of systems that do two different things, both getting their power from the sun. The first kind and most basic and oldest is solar hot water. If you set a cup of water out in the sun to get warm you have a solar water heater. Some of the earlier systems used coils of plastic pipe run across a person’s roof which would get the water inside them hot as the sun beat down on them, and this was stored in a big storage tank. This was a pretty simple basic system with almost no moving parts. The obvious problem being if the system is not drained down in the winter the pipes freeze and bad things happen. And of course in our climate zone we don’t get enough sun to depend on solar to provide year round hot water, although I’m sure several solar guys would argue the point with me.. So the solar system is only used as a back-up to a primary system of gas or electric hot water. However, if you can get the sun to heat or even pre-heat your water for free (after purchase and installation cost) then it’s a bargain. The newer systems of course are much improved. The water no longer runs through the pipes on the roof. A fluid such as oil or an anti-freeze is used and solar powered pumps make sure the lines are drained when it gets cold and solar motors turn the panel array to follow the sun to capture every available photon. The panel designs have come a long way. The technology and improvements have made the new systems almost maintenance free, and panel size is such that a solar hot water and a solar photovoltaic system can both fit on the same roof of a standard sized home. And we still have rebates for the solar hot water systems, if you have an existing electric hot water heater the rebate can be substantial. But the Federal tax credits are the real inspiration, with a first year credit of 30% of the installed cost in a check back from the Feds. I’ve seen the first year tax credit and the rebate cover half the cost of a new system.

 These new systems have very few moving parts, I would think they would be good for many years, and with the 3% loan for 15 years that is funded through a CEC grant many people are taking advantage. If a person has the correct kind of roof, facing in the correct direction, and his neighbors trees don’t block the sun (or some arrangements can be made), a decent solar hot water system may make financial sense for a lot of people. But you gotta do the math.  Give it some thought and next time we’ll look at photovoltaic. 

                                     FOR “DO-IT-YOURSELFERS”

I belong to a group called “Solar Sonoma County”, which may sound confusing until you realize we have an office in Santa Rosa and we work with solar contractors in Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma Counties. They are an informed bunch who keep everyone up-to-date regarding the current status of the energy conservation programs happening in Northern California. And they don’t seem to get overly upset if someone should happen to fall asleep during one of their evening meetings.

A local building supply store with three outlets, two in Sonoma County and one in Ukiah, wanted to have a member of Solar Sonoma speak for half an hour about simple things that homeowners could do to their homes to save energy, using items found right there in that very store. I was asked, and as penance for the aforementioned sleep issue, gladly accepted. At first I was slated for the Sonoma store and someone from somewhere in Sonoma County was penciled in for the Ukiah branch. We did a little horse trading and I ended up with my 1/2 hour of fame being last Saturday at 11:00 in Ukiah.

To make a long story short, people in Ukiah had other things to do last Saturday at 11:00, or maybe someone forgot to tell someone or who knows, but anyway no one showed up, except one customer who I grabbed 10 minutes in and we talked for the rest of the 30 minutes.

So, since I did do some preparation, I hate to see that kind of thing go to waste so I thought I’d just go ahead and put the 20 minute “do-it-yourself” lecture in writing here.

So here goes:

                                                THE NEW CFL’S

I don’t know if you have noticed yet but you can no longer buy a 100 watt incandescent light bulb. Really!. This is the result of a Mandate passed in 2007 and signed by President Bush called the “Energy Independence and Security Act”, and is actually due to take effect on a Federal level next year. California decided to start a year early. It effectively  bans any bulb over 72 watts, and by 2014 will apply to the 75, 60 and even 40 watt incandescent bulbs. Incandescent bulbs are highly inefficient, turning 90% of the consumed energy into heat while only 10% goes to light. In place of the incandescent will be the CFL or Compact Fluorescent Lamp. When first commercially produced about 25 years ago, they were great. I can show you bulbs I installed 25 years ago that are still burning. The downfall was price. They were in the $15.00/$20.00 range. So the makers started working on cheaper bulbs and by about 15 years ago we had CFL’s that were in the $1-$2 range. But they had a 25% failure rate out of the box and the other 75% you couldn’t see to read by. So people hated them. Now, more research and development, and we again have great CFL’s, this time affordable.  IF you get the right one. Something the early makers did was to only make the bulbs in the 2000-3000 Kelvin range. Kelvin is a way to measure the color or brightness of the light and in the 2100K range the light tends to look brownish. If you look at this 13 watt CFL in 2100K (at this point I happen to have a little clamp-on light fixture with the appropriate CFL) and then compare the same 13 watt but in 6500K, you’ll see a world of difference. 6500 Kelvin is really close to natural sunlight. If you go right over there to the light isle and buy CFLs and make sure you are getting them in the higher Kelvin ranges (at least 4500) I can just about guarantee you’ll like them. I can’t tell the difference myself between them and incandescent. And they make them in 3 way, in floodlights, in candle shape, and even dimmable CFL’s now. And I have seen them as cheap as $.99. Get used to them, you have until 2014 to really like them.

.                                  MOVING ON TO DUCT SEALING

O.K., now we’re going to look at how you can seal your own heat ducts. I have here a heat register like you find on your floor or on your ceiling. This is where the heated or cooled air comes out after it leaves your furnace or A/C. Studies have been done by PG&E that show a large percentage, 28%-40%, of your conditioned air is simply not making it to your home. It’s running out under your home or into your attic. That’s huge! Somewhere between one quarter and almost one half (or average one third) of the air you paid to change the temperature is being wasted. But you can do something about it. Pull up the register, even though there are screw holes there are never any screws, unless your ducts are in the ceiling, in which case take the screws out first. If you have floor registers, take a few minutes at this point and get the vacuum out and get a flashlight and vacuum out the duct. You’ll be amazed at what you find. There are always a couple of petrified lizards, I don’t know how they can possibly  get in there, whether they crawl in from the house, or from a gap under the house, or maybe they’re installed at the factory, but they are always there. There always seems to be an apple core, and it’s always bigger than the openings in the register, and money. Yes, there’s always lots of money down in the vents. So remember that when you’re looking for parking meter change.

Vacuum them out good and try to do it a couple times a year. Now, what you want to do is take this special tape (available over on the tape isle) that says “181” on it, and tape the metal duct that the register fits into to the plywood sub-floor (or to the drywall if you have ceiling registers). The idea is for the air to come up the duct and straight out the register, without any other avenues of escape possible. You don’t want the air to be able to double back and go down the gap between the backside of the sheet metal “boot” and the plywood or drywall (at this point I hold up my sheet metal boot and register and my piece of cardboard I was using for the floor or drywall). BTW- you can not use duct tape. You can not use cloth backed duct tape on heat ducts in California. You will go to duct prison. Not really but it is strictly forbidden. It’s been found that after just two or three years of the hot & cold cycles the mastic looses sticking ability and whatever you have taped is no longer. One more thing, beware the carpet tack strip. If you have floor registers and carpet, and you pull the register up, the carpet guy has probably lined the register hole with pieces of wood with tacks in them, and they are sticking in your direction. They not only have barbs on them but a special chemical designed to hurt like the dickens. If you should place your palm or kneecap on a tack strip and bear down, it is a feeling you will never forget, and your family will see a new side of you.

So, that concludes my presentation to the multitudes at the building supply house and the small crowed has grown to several hundred and thunderous applause. And then I wake up in a Solar Sonoma County meeting.

                                     AIR CONDITIONING

With the time of year being what it is, it seems like an ideal time to talk a bit about air conditioning systems. Your A/C system is like your garbage disposal in that it will pick the worst possible time to malfunction, like Thanksgiving afternoon. And if you are used to having it around and in working order it becomes a major inconvenience when it suddenly becomes unable to perform. 

There are several different styles of air conditioners, from the simple single room type and the “thru-wall” style that are meant for small homes or to condition part of the home, to the central split system style which is part of a full central ducted heating and cooling system. They all work on the same principal. Let’s look at a split system.  A refrigerant is circulated inside a copper line, and is fed into a compressor. The compressor usually sits by itself in the back yard and has a big fan that blows when the A/C is on, it’s about the size of a large doghouse but taller.  The compressor compresses the refrigerant (which is a gas at this point) and squeezes it into a liquid. Heat is generated during this compression and that heat is drawn off and discarded (by that fan). The compressed refrigerant is then transported inside its copper line to the main HVAC unit, probably inside your house or garage. The super cold liquid refrigerant is run thru a coil of tubing with air blowing over it, allowed to expand and turn back into a gas. As the refrigerant expands it recaptures most of the heat from the air that was taken from it when it was compressed. And it is recapturing it from the very air that will be blowing into your home in a few more seconds. That’s how air conditioning works. You can, with some minor changes, reverse the process and you’ll have a heater. You’ve seen this type of heater/ air conditioner on motels everywhere, they’re called heat pumps.

                                                    SEERS & EERS

The effectiveness or efficiency of an air conditioner is measured in a couple of ways. For many years the standard has been the SEER. This is the Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio, but more recently the EER (just plain Energy Efficiency Ratio) has started to gain in popularity. The EER is supposedly the more accurate of the two and is the preferred designation moving into the future. For now we still use SEER, and a minimum of 13 SEER is what is required for a new A/C installed today. Some of our older housing stock in the 30 & 35 year old range have air conditioners that have reached the end of their useful life. These older A/C’s are average 8 SEER units. They also use an old style refrigerant called RA22 that has been found to damage the earth’s ozone layer and therefore has been banned. All newer equipment has the newer R410A refrigerant. 

While a 13 SEER is certainly much more efficient than an 8 SEER unit, 13 is just a minimum. There are air conditioners that go up over 19 SEER. These units are real trick. Like their partners in the furnace world, they have a two stage cooling capability by utilizing two compressors, and they have a variable speed fan. So when your home is cooled to temperature, only the single smaller compressor needs to come on and the fan only needs to blow at a slow speed to keep the home cool. You’ll hardly hear or feel anything. These units are usually set to come on with no heat or cool every so often just to stir the air to keep it fresh. The new HVAC systems have come a long way, and it’s going to be needed. As soon as everyone has a smart meter, if we should have to go to “time-of-use” billing, those people that still have those 8 SEER A/C units may find they can’t afford to run them.

Something else I’ve heard is that solar Photo Voltaic systems are finally coming down in price enough that with the tax credits and rebates it starts to make sense to look at being able to run your A/C all summer for only the cost of the solar investment. Summer months of no A/C electrical bills, might be worth looking into.

One thing that can hurt the performance of your air conditioner as well as your furnace, no matter how new or how efficient, is a dirty filter. Check them every couple of months and more often if you find them dirty. For the small price of a filter it’s well worth having a clean one in the system at all times.