Energy Vanguard Blog

Buildings use a lot of energy. We spend the majority of our time inside them, controlling the temperature, using computers, charging cell phones, keeping our food cold, getting our food hot, taking hot showers...all those things we do in our daily lives that we rarely give a second thought to. Most of what we do in buildings uses energy. Lots of energy.

President Obama delivered the 2012 State of the Union address last night. In a 7000 word speech, he devoted about 800 words to energy. The majority of those words were about oil, natural gas, and clean energy - the supply side. There was one little paragraph about energy efficiency, and it seems more of an afterthought than a substantive, well thought out part of an energy strategy:

I like James Watt as much as the next person. He was one of the people whose inventions helped advance the Industrial Revolution with his refining of the steam engine. He invented an early copying machine. And he was Scottish. (Now you'll have to read this whole article in the mellifluous accent of Fiona Ritchie.) I feel closer to my Irish roots than the Scots-Irish, but a man named Allison can never escape his Scottish heritage.

The transition to ENERGY STAR Version 3 accelerated on 1 January. That's when Version 2 of the program expired. Now all new homes in the program will qualify under Version 2.5 or Version 3, depending on the dates of permitting and final inspection. Anything permitted last year can still qualify under V2.5 as long as it's finished before July. Everything else will be V3. The chart below shows the relevant dates.

Today's article in the Energy Vanguard Blog is a guest post by Ted Kidd, whom I know through LinkedIn and Home Energy Pros. If you've interacted with Ted, you know that he's nothing if not passionate, especially on the topic of setbacks and heating and cooling equipment that can change its capacity to match the loads. I don't agree with all that he says below and will post my response on Friday in our first Point/Counterpoint series here. He makes some good points, though, and his article is definitely worth the read.

In addition to getting out and enjoying some sunny January weather, I did a little reading this weekend. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) just released a new report,  The Long-Term Energy Efficiency Potential: What the Evidence Suggests, so of course I had to find out what they wrote about homes. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but one statement jumped off the page as I read:

I've made my living solely as a home energy pro since 2004, and I was building a high performance home for two years before that. For six of the past eight years, I've been running my own business, and Energy Vanguard is halfway through its fourth year now. It doesn't take a PhD in physics to be successful in this business (though it's certainly helpful to have one), but I can point out a few factors that I believe have contributed to my success and longevity in this business.

Last Saturday, I was doing some stuff around the house, and my wife had the radio tuned into one of those home repair talk shows. I don't listen to those shows much because they usually say something that drives me crazy. They do seem to be getting better, though, and what I heard last Saturday indicates that a little bit of building science and house-as-a-system thinking may be making its way out into the trenches.

This time of year, I see a lot of ads for various types of electric space heaters. They all promise that you'll save money by using them rather than whatever other type of heat you have in your home. Some of them have famous—or formerly famous—people promoting them. Sometimes it's people who look like members of a small religious sect hawking these devices.

Independent home energy auditors have always been a rare breed. In the past decade, though, an army of them has gone through RESNET or BPI training programs and hit the streets in search of homes to analyze. At first, these energy auditors were mainly of the RESNET variety—certified home energy (or HERS) raters—because the ENERGY STAR new homes program really took off. Then, with all the ARRA weatherization money that started flowing in 2009, the BPI building analyst certification became the hot one.