Category — historic homes

Dear Mr. Energy,

I want to know how to make my home Energy Star so I can get credit for my utility company. Do I get an energy audit? My house is only about ten years old. Because it’s fairly new shouldn’t my house easily qualify?

–Bargain Shopping in Benson

Dear Bargain,

Isn’t it great that some local utilities are giving rebates, credits, and lower rates for homes that have achieved a high level of energy efficiency? Mr. Energy sure thinks so, and he thinks that when the new, more stringent Energy Star guidelines for homes go into full effect in 2012 it will be even more meaningful goal. The new Energy Star guidelines will require that homes be more than 20% effiecient than code-built homes; the current guidelines look for a 15% improvement.

That said, dear reader, your home will not qualify. That’s because Energy Star for homes is only for new construction.

I will repeat: Energy Star is only for new construction.

Mr. Energy said it twice because he gets many calls from people just like you: people who are excited at the possibility of making their homes more energy efficient and saving money and who don’t understand that in order for a home to get an Energy Star rating a HERS rater – the professional who can rate a home Energy Star – must be involved from the get-go. The rater has to see the plans and make site visits every step of the way. An already existing home, no matter how efficiently constructed, simply will not qualify.

Very sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

The only way existing construction could ever qualify for Energy Star is if a homeowner were renovating his or her home so thoroughly it was being taken down to the studs. Which I doubt you want to do simply to get a percentage off of your monthly electric bills.

To answer the second part of your question, about new construction automatically being energy-efficient construction, Mr. Energy has this to say: maybe? It really depends on your builder, your house’s plans, and the various contractors your builder used. Mr. Energy hopes that your builder and HVAC company and insulation contractor had the highest level of energy efficiency in mind when they worked on your home, but new doesn’t always equal energy efficient. Mr. Energy has been in a number of homes built in the past 10 years that have been extremely energy inefficient – either because the builder didn’t know any better or because he or she didn’t care. The only way to know for sure if your home’s level of energy efficiency is to get a professional energy audit.

Here’s the good news in all of this: if you get an audit and weatherize your home according to your auditor’s suggestions, you will be saving energy and money anyway – just without the Energy Star label and without the automatic discount from your utility.

A couple of months ago we audited a historic home inside the beltline in Raleigh in conjunction with Preservation NC to create a video showing the benefit of an energy audit and weatherization for historic properties. When asked to do the audit, we jumped at the chance because this is truly our passion: making older homes, particularly historic homes, energy efficient without compromising what makes them special. Converting a home from an “energy hog” to a level of energy efficiency equivalent to Energy Star can absolutely be done – but the key for the homeowner to get a professional audit so he or she will have a plan for how to accomplish that goal.

Preservation NC also has a wonderful guide on their website about weatherizing historic homes.

(A note about the video: the actual leakage in this house should be in square inches…not square feet like the voice-over states!)

Here’s the video:

A couple of months ago I wrote that Home Performance NC was selected to do an energy audit of a historic home as part of a contest sponsored by the Raleigh Historic Districts Commission, Preservation North Carolina, Sustainable Raleigh, and us! The end result is a video targeted towards people who own historic properties.

We were very excited to be part of this project because we are passionate about historic homes and believe that they can be made very energy efficient without destroying their historic elements. Our owners’ home is 95 years old and has been weatherized to current Energy Star standards! It can be done!

Here is a slideshow of pictures provided by Raleigh Historic Districts Commission. Enjoy!

I’ve written a few posts about how we’ve made our own 100-year-old house more energy efficient, and I plan to write more, but I wanted to send our readers over to the blog for The Rosemary House Bed and Breakfast, located in Pittsboro, which is a wonderful little B&B created from another 100-year-old house.

The owner just wrote a post about the energy audit we did for her a couple of months ago. After the audit, she contracted us to do the suggested repairs. 

In the post she reports a 27% savings on her energy bills since we came. She says that the audit and work we’ve done will have paid for itself in 18 months. After that, it’s all money in the bank.

We love hearing stories like these!

Dear Mr. Energy,

My wife and I are renovating an older home and I am wondering if there is any way to get an existing structure rated “green” or “energy efficient,” etc. LEED and Energy Star only apply to new construction, right? That doesn’t make sense to me – isn’t reusing an existing structure the most “green” thing a homeowner can do?

–Renovating in Raleigh

Dear Renovating,

Mr. Energy couldn’t agree with you more. Before he became an expert in energy efficiency, Mr. Energy renovated historic homes . He also lives with his family in a hundred-old house that was built from wood cut from trees on the property and has managed to weatherize it enough so that it could, were it new, qualify for an Energy Star rating. Plus, in his work as an energy auditor most of his customers are owners of already existing construction.

Isn’t the green mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle?”

Certainly renovating an existing structure reduces, reuses and recycles.

Up until a few months ago, most programs to certify a remodel required that the home be gutted to the studs and completely rebuilt.  But now the NAHB (National Association of Home Builders) Green program, which is a nationally recognized program,  can certify a remodel “green” without requiring a complete gut of the structure. Locally, Green Home Builders of the Triangle have a “green” rating that doesn’t require stripping your home to the studs.

Getting a “green” rating for you home will help you save money and resources, which will benefit your wallet, but should also add value to your home, especially as consciousness about energy efficiency increases.

Caulk Caulk Caulk Caulk.

That’s the answer to one very effective way we’ve made our 100 year old rustic Carolina farmhouse more energy efficient.

To weatherize our home after our disastrous 1st winter in which we heated all of lower Pittsboro, North Carolina, we caulked and caulked and caulked some more. Oh – did I forget to mention that in that first, expensive, wasteful winter WE WEREN’T EVEN LIVING IN THE HOUSE AT THE TIME? All of that energy was being spent heating a house to just-barely-warm so Mark, our lead auditor, home renovator,  and the husband of this writer, could work on the house before we moved in our family.

Over the course of that winter we used 150 tubes of caulk in our house. Yes, 150. I am not exaggerating. I can produce the receipts if you want.

This house was very, very leaky – largely because every single wall of the house except for the small bathroom/laundry add-on that was here when we moved in, is constructed out of bead board. Not the bead board you buy at the big-box lumber store that comes in flat, solid sheets of paneling; no, bead board that is made from individual boards. Every place the boards fit together was a place for a potential air leak. Every air leak was a place to caulk. The boards range from 3 1/2″ wide to 1 1/2″ wide.

The math: 2700 square feet = 9 rooms (plus 2 big hallways) built of 2 1/2″ (on average) boards = a heck of a lot of cracks to seal = 150 tubes of caulk.

The crazy thing about the caulking is that when we started it was largely for cosmetic reasons. We repainted the entire downstairs and once we’d put on the primer we saw the cracks and the cracks and the cracks. They looked bad! So we caulked them up. We weren’t going to do the kids’ rooms (upstairs), but at the last minute I decided that all the dirt falling down from the attic through the cracks in the ceiling was a health hazard – so we sealed their rooms up, too. Thank goodness we did. I can only imagine the dirt and the air leaks and high energy bills we’d have if we hadn’t done that.

We had a great deal to caulk in this house. It made a huge difference. We’ve lived here 4 years and we’ve never had energy bills like that first year, (in fact, our bills now are a little less than half) and a lot of it is owed to the caulk. We don’t have a lot of insulation in the walls (although we do have a well insulated attic and crawl – more on that later), so if you think about it all that stands between us and the outside are the boards that make up the walls and wood siding…and caulk.

Even if you don’t live in a house with 50 cracks in every wall, however,  you, too, can benefit in the power of caulk. Caulk is cheap and pretty easy to use and although we recommend gloves to preserve your manicure, water-soluble caulk is pretty much non-toxic and can be smoothed out with a fingertip.

Places for any homeowner to caulk:

• around the escutcheon plates of your plumbing fixtures (the plastic plates that cover the plumbing where it comes out of the floor/wall)
• around any obvious cracks (like where baseboard or crown moulding touches the wall)
• around electrical outlets/light switches (here’s an article on how to do this effectively)

Caulk caulk caulk. The d.i.y. weatherization person’s very best friend.

Hey – here is part 1 of this series on how we weatherized our old house.

And here is part 2.

This is a great little list by Peggy at Energy Circle:

Ten reasons to have a home energy audit

I especially like #6:

6. You will understand the interconnectedness of your house.  Learn what no contractor working on your house ever told you – that every action you have ever taken has caused a reaction… somewhere in your house.

This is the home analyst’s approach to an energy audit: the home is a system of systems, and each system is interdependent. This is why it pays to have a professional looking at your home’s energy usage. He or she might find something in one of your home’s systems that you didn’t realize had an impact on the energy use of your house. Kind of like the “butterfly effect” as it applies to energy efficiency!

Here’s an example: our house is 95 years old, and when we bought it, 4 years ago, we put in central heat and air. Big problem: our house was essentially a giant colander. It was more leaky than all of you readers’ houses combined, I guarantee. We used 150 tubes of caulk simply sealing up leaks in the ceilings and walls (all made of individually beaded bead board) before we even moved in…and at the time we were just doing it for cosmetic reasons. We had not yet become the home energy experts that we are today!

We kept sealing, and closing, and sealing, and closing (this was how Mark, our lead Auditor, became fascinated with the idea of making a home more energy efficient, by the way. Prior to this home’s experience he renovated old homes…but not to any degree of energy efficiency). Eventually our home got to be as airtight as the average home, which is to say not very airtight at all, but not the sieve it once was. At this point we began to notice some funny smells in the kitchen! Turns out our stove had a gas leak and we hadn’t known it because the house was too leaky! So we installed a fan, which you should always have if you have combustible appliances…

So, longish story to make a simple point. If you are working on making your home more energy efficient you should always have a professional evaluate it as a whole. Sealing and tightening a house is key in saving energy, but to avoid problems (like our stove leak and its possible ramifications for our health) you need to have someone look at all elements in the house, not just those obvious ones. It can be a safety hazard not to! We caught our gas leak early on, but other issues that can impact the nicely sealed up house, like mold, other combustibility issues, and air quality, may not be as obvious.

In my last post I explained what we did to initially improve our house (or rather, what we thought were improvements), and the resulting exorbitant energy bills. By adding central heat and air to a house that was essentially, a giant colander, we were wasting tons of heat and tons of money. After that first winter we knew we had to make some changes.

But first, some good things about our house:

• Because it is so leaky, the 95-year-old wood has been preserved. The bead board expands with humidity and shrinks with dryer air, and indoor air quality is high.
• One of the home improvements we made early on (before we moved in) was caulking almost every bead in the house. Did I happen to mention that every ceiling and every wall is made of beadboard – beadboard that is made of single pieces of wood? So when I say we caulked almost every bead, I mean we caulked almost every board on every wall of every room of our house. We estimate that we used over 150 tubes of caulk! I spent about a week straight caulking the kitchen ceiling alone. At the time, we were caulking for cosmetic reasons, but since then we’re so grateful we did it since plugging up the cracks plugs up air flow, which helps keep the heat in in the winter and the cold in in the summer. In the second floor rooms it also created a barrier between the attic and the rooms upstairs. This was crucial – not just because of heat loss – but because our 95 year old house has a 95 year old attic, filled with 95 years worth of dirt, which was sifting down into those rooms every time there was a vibration. With two boys, our house is filled with vibrations!
• Because our house was built before central heat and air it is naturally situated to keep as cool as possible in the summertime. We have deep porches on the south and east sides of the house, so the only direct sun in our 1st floor windows is very early in the morning, and the west and north sides of the house are backed by large trees. It’s also situated on the top of a hill, which naturally lends itself to a nice breeze on all but the most still of days.
• Every window in the house is very large, and double hung. When the weather is temperate and we open the windows and doors, we get a wonderful cross-breeze through the house. Plus, the windows are gorgeous – they have 95-year-old glass! And no, we are not replacing them, nor would we ever. I’ll explain how we manage their leakiness in the next post.

Here’s part 1 of this series.

This is, obviously, part 2.

And here’s part 3.

This will be the first post of several about what we’ve done to our 100-year-old Carolina farmhouse to make it more energy efficient.  We’ve made some really stupid mistakes along the way, but we’ve learned from our mistakes, and trying to create a comfortable, safe and energy efficient home that was built in a different era of home energy use is what set us on the path to starting a Home Performance contracting business.

First, here’s our house:

It was built in 1914, so it’s actually 95 years old, not 100, and almost all the original  materials for the house were milled on site. Inside, every wall and ceiling that are original to the house (which is almost all of it except the bathrooms and laundry area – a.k.a. indoor plumbing!) are made of beadboard. We’re talking individual boards, not the plywood panels people buy now. On the backs of these boards is bark. 95 year old bark!

When we bought the house it was in fairly good shape structurally but at the time we thought it just needed cosmetic changes to make it a happy space for our family. That, and a bathroom upstairs. Oh, and did I forget to add it had no central heat or AC? The original heat was through propane stoves in each room. There was no AC. It was fairly rustic.

So we added a bathroom on the 2nd floor and took care of our cosmetic issues and put in central heat and air…

…and the first winter we went through 900 gallons of propane. Which in the winter of 06/07 meant $1900. (In this past winter’s prices the amount would have been closer to $2400). In the piedmont of North Carolina, which has a gentle winter. And our house is 2700 square feet.

Ouch.

This was part 1 of the series on how we made our old home more energy efficient.

Next, part 2: some good things about our house, despite the crazy high energy bills

And part 3: the d.i.y. weatherizer’s best friend.