A home energy audit of this 1900s home revealed leaks and drafts equal to having a 46-by-46-centimetre window open all year round.
Energy audit reveals the hole in my house
October 18, 2008
Special to the Star
Homeowners feeling powerless about global warming and concerned about potential rising energy costs can take control of their anxieties with a simple home energy audit.
They're cheap, informative and you get up to $150 of the cost back from the provincial government.
In Ontario, the home energy audit program is a provincial conservation program with links to the federal ecoEnergy programs.
Your home energy audit will show you how your home uses energy and where it is wasted and leaked. You'll learn ways to make your home's heating, cooling, hot water heating and other energy systems more effective and that may result in significant energy savings. This could also reduce your family's carbon footprint, cutting your impact on global warming.
I decided such an audit was a must for financial and ideological reasons after purchasing a-turn-of-the-previous-century three-bedroom farmhouse with a rear addition in a lovely village called Tamworth, just outside of Napanee.
It would be an understatement to say the eco-energy audit was an educational experience.
But beyond what I learned about my home's energy efficiency, to my delight the audit and report came with a marvellous plain-language kit that explained much of the basics of home maintenance issues I would need to confront.
My auditor went though my home – attic to basement. It involved a walk-through assessment of the insulation, heating and cooling systems and other energy uses. Plus, I got the fascinating "blower door" depressurization test to identify leaks and drafts. (More on that later.)
In the end, I got a personalized Energy Efficiency Evaluation Report with their recommendations. And $150 back from the Ontario government toward the $325 cost.
It turns out my home energy rating was very poor — 24 — with 0 to 20 being least efficient and 55 being average for homes of my type and age. This, despite the fact that it was a double brick home with a well-maintained metal roof, low-flow energy efficient toilets, seemingly excellent energy-efficient windows, and a fairly new electric hot water heater and high-efficiency oil furnace from 2005.
So what was the problem? When I recently moved from Toronto to Tamworth, many of my frenzied urban friends asked if I had a hole in my head. But what I should have been worried about was the hole in my house. Or to be more specific, the aggregate of all the little holes, cracks and leaks in my home – not uncommon for homes like mine and the many others in Toronto that are more than 50 years old, my inspector said.
The hole in my house was equal to having a 823-square-centimetre opening – think of a 46-by-46-centimetre window – which is open all year round. Bye-bye money.
The hole was determined by that "blower door" depressurization test I mentioned, where they close all your doors and windows, seal one door with plastic and attach a pressure blower fan in the middle that depressurizes the house showing where all the leaks and drafts are vented .
Two of the biggest culprits were the two basement doors – neither were sealed, letting warm air out and cold in.
They would be my first job to tackle as they were also letting moisture come in rivers into the basement.
And those lovely energy-efficient windows? They had not been correctly installed – not sealed with sealant before the finishing wood trim, so they were leaking air.
All along my staircase steps to the second floor were leaks to the basement that had to be filled.
Other areas cited for major leakage were: openings to exterior walls, the attic hatch access cover, electrical outlets, baseboards, the front door threshold, and the back doors. Both doors needed sealing, weather stripping, and, again, there was no sealant on their windows.
The inspector suggested an easy way to reduce air leaks in the walls overall – blow cellulose insulation into all our wall cavities.
But this was the simple stuff. My house has two basements.
One was under and attached to the original stone foundation and had a partly concrete, partly dirt floor – not unlike many crawl spaces. This dirt floor created a great expanse where moisture could drift up into the house. Moisture means a loss of heat – 20 to 35 per cent by the inspector's rating. Though the ceiling was insulated, he recommended blown insulation on the stone foundation walls and plastic on the floors to seal the dirt, making a secure vapour barrier.
The other basement is a full concrete basement underneath the back addition. It had a poorly insulated door, was built under grade, and let water flood in. In both cases, insulation consultants who came to give me estimates told me these water problems would have to be fixed first to get rid of the moisture before any insulating could begin.
Once the moisture and grading are fixed, the headers (top of the ceiling near the joists) would need extra insulation to keep the heat in the upstairs.
Then there was my attic. Though it did have insulation to a level of R19 (four to six inches of loose fibre insulation), the inspector said it could easily be increased to R50 to keep the heat in better.
I am still getting estimates regarding the cost of the insulation. I've decided to start with the obvious stuff before the cold weather settles in. I will fill up the cracks and leaks that I can see, fix the windows and doors and look into putting a plastic vapour barrier on the dirt floor.
Since I am new to this house and could get no reliable heating info from the previous owner, I have no idea what it will cost to heat.
The previous owner did use two electric baseboard heaters upstairs but I do not intend to. If I can get the leaks fixed and deal with the moisture issues, these may be not necessary. The previous owners also used a plug-in electric radiator heater to supplement the heat to the upper floor of the back addition.
The concrete addition basement below is heated by its own vent – but by closing off that vent, I can divert more heat to the upper floor addition and may not need extra elective heat above. Plus, if I retape all my heating vent connections with special fibreglass insulating tape, I will lose less heat in the connections and more will go upstairs.
Most of the plumbing in the concrete basement is close to the ceiling, heated from above. If it is well-wrapped, it should not freeze. I also turned the electric hot water heater down as it was set too high.
Once I get though a winter, I should be able to judge the energy costs and decide which projects I should start first.
Now, Mike Holmes I am not, and never will be. But I've got a Newfoundland small-town background hiding under my years of big city living, so I'm not averse to getting mucky, grabbing a shovel, saw and hammer. And the best thing about small-town living is you can tap into some honest, hard-working folk who do home repairs.
And thank God I have 18 months, until March 2010, to get the work done. After an audit, that's the amount of time you have to complete some, or all, of the improvements suggested to qualify for government rebates.