One thing I run into time and time again as an energy efficiency adviser is lack of consideration of a house, or any other building, as a system. Buildings are a complex arrangement of systems not totally dissimilar to biological ones. And what one does to one system in a building can positively or negatively impact others.
Let me give you a few examples:
One of the things I hear a lot in my new position is that people want to build their new homes energy efficiently but think that they cannot afford to. Whenever I hear this I always say without hesitation “You can’t afford NOT to build you home energy efficiently!”. There are huge misconceptions out there about the costs, methods and effectiveness of building new homes efficiently. Most new home builders do not help the situation and will tell prospective customers that adding more insulation to their house, installing a geothermal or solar heating system or building to take advantage of passive solar gains will add an unreasonable amount of cost and time delay to the building process.
Fortunately there are free resources out there for anyone to dispel these myths. A free software package from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) can be downloaded called HOT2000 and it allows anyone to do energy modeling on their home and actually forecast what various changes will do to the energy consumption of there homes! It has a fairly shallow learning curve, with a windows interface, drop down menus and check boxes, and comes with a good help file and example files to build on.
Reducing your shower times by a mere 4 minutes, say from 15 to 11 minutes, will save a family of four heating with 11.5 cent KW/H electricity and using 2.5GPM shower heads $230 per year! These savings will only grow as the cost of energy continues to rise!
