The excitement around home electrification is great to see. But if we want home energy bills to really fall, and home health and comfort improve, we can’t say that energy efficiency measures are “just an add-on”.
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How good are home solar panels and batteries, and heat pumps for space and water heating!? They’re really good. Fossil fuels are too expensive to want to burn and are driving climate disasters. So it’s very fortunate we live in a time when electrification equipment is available to help people ditch fossil fuels and at the same time smash energy bills and improve home safety.
However, among some experts and commentators, the excitement around electrification can reach such a pitch that the other critical home improvements – for example draught-proofing, insulating, shielding windows – can be forgotten or even dismissed as “just an add-on” to the electrification effort.
As a home comfort energy advisor, I’ve been in over 1000 homes. Also, as founder of the 170,000+ member Facebook group My Efficient Electric Home (MEEH), I have insight into many more homes. So I can agree – there is a lot of excitement about home electrification!
At the moment, every other post at MEEH seems to be asking “what do you think of this battery quote”? Members are weighing up which to do first: add the solar panels and battery or replace a gas heater. Now, another international war and rising fossil gas and LPG prices have added to the rush to electrify our homes
This is all good! For households that are able, eliminating fossil fuels as soon as possible is a big win – for them, for their household budgets, and for our Earth.
But what about those other home improvements that are sometimes classed under the banner of energy efficiency measures:
- airconditioning maintenance
- draught proofing
- insulation
- window coverings?
Are they just an “add-on” to our home electrification / degasification efforts? I say “no”, based on my experiences working with householders. Here are some energy efficiency stories from those homes.
Clean your filters
Most home heating or cooling systems that blow air around (e.g. ducted heating and cooling or non-ducted split systems) will include a filter. This is good. Filters help to clean the air you breathe. They also keep your home equipment in good working order. But it’s not progress if we bring new equipment into people’s homes without explaining to them how it is to be maintained.
One household had converted their ducted gas heating to electrically powered reverse-cycle heating and cooling.
Substantial energy cost savings are expected after such a conversion, but this client felt they weren’t saving anything at all. I asked, “Are your filters clean”? They thought they were. The filter was in a ceiling-mounted hinged air return. The client had been opening the air return and as it swung down from the ceiling, they observed a clean filter. I had to explain that they were looking at the back-side or clean-side of the filter. The dirt is on the other side of the filter, easily seen when the filter is fully pulled from its frame.
Oops! Oh well, we weren’t born knowing this stuff and no one had ever explained the maintenance process. The filter was caked with years-worth of dust and dirt, and the system certainly performed much better after the filter was cleaned. Even relatively new electrical equipment might not save you money if maintenance is neglected.
Check your ducts
Thinking of heating/cooling system maintenance, we don’t do ducting very well in Australia. A client complained that their ducted air conditioning system wasn’t cooling one end of their home. I found that there wasn’t much air coming from the duct outlets, but there was some delightful cool air blowing around beneath their house. Either the ducts had never been taped up properly in the first place, or the taping had deteriorated. In any case, the ducts had come apart.
Ducting should be inspectable…and inspected! Is this an energy efficiency measure, to ensure your ducts are intact? Well it is certainly inefficient to be heating or cooling the outdoors.
Insulation works
I’ve had a number of calls this summer from folks thinking their air conditioning system was underpowered. So I looked in their roof space. What I invariably find is that their insulation is out of place.
In other words, the insulating batts up in a roof space may be thick enough, but nearly always I find the batts have gone walkabout and aren’t where they’re meant to be. Tradespeople or possibly homeowners will go up into a roof space looking to replace a light fitting, to install the NBN, or checking for a roof leak. During their time up there, they will move insulation out of place and not put it back.
I see this so often that on a hot summer’s day I have developed the ability to feel missing insulation using only the top of my bald head! More professionally, I also use a thermal imaging camera to spot missing insulation, which provides a convincing image for the householder, but bald-head sensing can also work.
Having insulation missing, and only bare plaster protecting you from a blistering hot roof space is like having a radiant heater on your ceiling on the hottest days. How is any air conditioning system meant to cope with that?
Likewise in winter, your precious heating goes up through the thin plaster and into the roof space leaving you poorer, colder, and uncomfortable.
Draught-proofing saves money and improves comfort and air quality
In my experience, our Australian homes are so leaky that not only does the breeze blow through, but also sometimes vines, ants, spiders, mice and even snakes.
Draught-proofing is snake proofing!
The sum total square centimetres of gaps and leaks I find around a home can be equivalent to having a door or large window open to the outside world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
How is a home meant to be comfortable, or to have low energy bills, with that amount of air blowing through? But since air is invisible, we often don’t sense what is going on, unless perhaps it’s really, really windy outside.
Some openings in our home’s thermal envelope can be very large and draughty including unblocked chimneys, evaporative cooling outlets left uncovered for winter, or the old-fashioned wall vents.
Some other gaps are less obvious. Feel or look around the architraves framing your windows. Have they been properly caulked up or did the original installer leave a gap, thinking you would never look. Caulk them up!
Let’s talk about those wall vents a bit more. What were they for? In very old houses, those vents allowed for ventilation and air to flow to wood or coal-burning fireplaces. Fires need air to burn.
Rather than always having a window open as the fires burned, it became standard practice to install vents up on the wall. These are so draughty that I often can see right through to the sunlight outside. When I got up to seal the vents in our own home, I was nearly blown off the ladder by the sea breeze coming through.
One can find videos online explaining how to identify and seal most of the leaks we find around our homes. Some draught-proofing can be done DIY (do it yourself), perhaps even by renters in ways that the landlord will never notice. One can also seek out professional draught-proofing businesses that treat it as a specialty.
Be aware
One caution though. It is safest to go about draught-proofing your home after all gas burning equipment has been removed. Gas burning can produce poisonous carbon monoxide gas. So eliminate that risk before you start draught-proofing.
After draught-proofing, one must also be aware of how to manage or prevent the build-up of other air contaminants in one’s home such as moisture or the carbon dioxide that we and our pets breathe out. I have written about this elsewhere in The Fifth Estate.
An air quality advantage of draught-proofing is that it will help to keep out smoke that might come from bushfires, controlled burns, or your neighbour’s wood or coal burning. There is no safe level of smoke that we should be breathing, so draught-proofing and possibly the use of a smoke removing air-purifier is a way to protect your health.
A window cover-up
For summer and winter, your windows need help, in the form of drapes or blinds for indoors, and shading for outdoors.
One client complained that they found heating with their air conditioner to be unsatisfactory. It seemed to be creating even more draughts. Since I was visiting their home on a chilly winter evening, I suggested that we pull down the interior roller blinds over their extensive windows. And hour later in the discussion, the client remarked “this actually feels much better now”. Clearly using window treatments that are already in place can be an instant win.
Likewise in summer, it is best to keep direct sun from hitting your windows. It can also be valuable to shield your windows from less obvious reflected heat coming from hot surfaces such as roofing, decks, or nearby walls. Eaves, blinds, awnings, umbrellas, plantings, or some other sort of shading is needed for your windows to combat the hot Australian summer sun.
On many days of the year you will find me keeping fit by running around our house twice a day manipulating 25 sets of blinds. This practice means I don’t have to spend on a gym membership – more savings!
To summarise, to get the greatest comfort benefits and energy bill relief out of our home electrification efforts, investing in energy efficiency measures such as insulation, draught-proofing and window coverings is a priority that should not be neglected.
