The Latest from the Energy Vanguard Blog
You can turn electricity into heat at an efficiency of 100%! Every kilowatt-hour of electricity in turns into one kilowatt-hour of heat out. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? The truth, however, is that electric resistance heat (toasters, baseboard heaters, and the supplemental heat in many heat...
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1. If you want to save energy, the first thing you should do is weatherstrip your doors and caulk your windows. Not true. Your house has much bigger holes than those.
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As a HERS (Home Energy Rating System) Provider, I check the home energy ratings that my raters do. Recently one of the EVER raters, Jason Payne of Structured Energies, completed a rating project for a homeowner who was financing home energy efficiency improvements with an Energy Efficient Mortgage...
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I'm one of those rare people who actually likes to go into crawl spaces. I strap on my knee pads, put on my head lamp, grab my camera, and go have fun. Well, perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit, but I really do like seeing what kind of horror stories I can find to add to my collection. The problem is I'...
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Last month I gave a presentation at the RESNET Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina on the topic of the Energy Eficient Mortage (EEM) - where it stands now, what the barriers to its use are, where it might be going, and what the other options are. My co-presenter was Geoff Ferland of Ecolend in...
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I've analyzed and improved the energy efficiency of numerous homes. The starting point is, of course, the analysis because you want to put your efforts—and your dollars—where they're going to generate the best results.
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Remember when President Obama said that “insulation is sexy” a while back? Well, I’m happy to report that he and Congress are pushing to make things happen in the world of energy conservation.
In case you haven’t heard, chances are good that Congress will pass a jobs bill with a new program...
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Well, at least don't insulate your attic until you’ve sealed the air leaks. Most attics have a lot of holes where attic air can get into the house, or conditioned air can be lost to the attic. Don’t you just love the idea of breathing air that got sucked through that dead squirrel in the attic?
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Energy Vanguard Energy Ratings (EVER), a division of Energy Vanguard, is a home energy rating provider. Last Tuesday, EVER rater Howard Feldman of Hilton Head was in a small group of builders, contractors, and energy auditors that got to meet President Obama when he spoke about the Home Star...
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In 2005, my friend Scott from Pennsylvania (well, really from Toronto but living in PA) visited me in Georgia. I was enveloped in the world of peak oil at that time and showed him an article that postulated that when gasoline hit $4 per gallon, the US economy would begin to falter and all hell...
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