By Shawn Dell Joyce
Almost half of our energy use goes into heating and cooling our homes. We are already paying an average of 20 percent higher home energy costs, so reducing your energy usage by ten percent will pay for itself. A professional home energy audit costs $100-$300, but is free to homeowners who sign up through NYSERDA at www.getenergysmart.org.

Some states, like New York, will reimburse businesses and municipalities for the cost of the audit, and make you eligible for a low interest rate loan to pay for major renovations. If you take out the loan and make the improvements, the money you save on your electric bill easily covers the loan payment, often with plenty left over. If you plan to go solar, or incorporate some form of renewable energy into your home, the same program will pay for half the installed cost.

Having a trained eye look at your home is invaluable. My auditor spotted right away that my furnace was operating at 80 percent efficiency in spite of just being serviced. He also found some leaky and uninsulated ductwork that was never noticed previously.

Here are a few ways my home energy audit suggested would save ten percent of home energy costs in the coming year:

• Just by caulking all the gaps and leaks, we could save almost $1,000 on our annual heating and cooling bills. Even if we hired a contractor to do this and had to pay $4,500 for caulking, we would make that investment back in under five years. You can’t get a rate of return that good on the stock market right now.

• One of the most obvious leaks in any home is an uninsulated attic and basement. We were losing much of our heat right though the roof. A modest investment of about $1,500 added six more inches of insulation in our attic and made a considerable difference in how warm the house feels, and how much energy we use to heat it. We reinsulated many of our outside walls at the same time, and were able to cut our home heating costs dramatically last year.

• If you have an unisulated basement, insulating exposed crawl space ceilings and walls could save you as much as $800 annually, depending on the size of your house. Again, if you paid someone to do it, you would make a return on your investment in under five years.

• Switching out your incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent or LED lights can save you an immediate 20 percent on your electric bill. The more bulbs you replace the greater your savings.

• About 14 percent of our home energy use is spent on keeping water hot at all times. Buying an on-demand water heater will save you the cost of that new water heater in about two to three years.

• Appliances and cooking can account for 33 percent of our home energy use. If you replace older appliances with Energy Star Rated appliances, you can save about $100 per year per appliance on average. This saving helps to offset the cost of the new appliance over the years.

• Replacing windows can be expensive, making the payback period much longer. In my case, we would save $30 to $50 annually with a payback period of 10 years. We opted instead to invest in window inserts to use during the winter. An immediate action you can take is to cover every window with clear plastic window sheeting from your local hardware store. It curbs heat transfer, and will save you energy.

The Wallkill Valley Times will be covering the progress of the Town of Montgomery and its villages in reducing their energy usage by ten percent. If you have a tip or story you would like to share about your personal experience reducing your family’s energy usage, email ShawnDellJoyce@gmail.com

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School of Art in Montgomery, and a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2011 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Shawn Dell Joyce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.