The Iconoclast Investor

I recently wrote about my home energy audit and I received a great question from a reader of the blog. I’ve included it and my response below:

“I’m happy to hear your house is more then ready for the winter. Luckily I don’t have to worry too much about the freezing cold living out here in San Francisco.

“Anyways, I’m wondering if you can share several more precautions/steps you took, in order to have such an efficient home? aside from caulking the windows

“I think we all could benefit from such information.”

Cheers,
Ethan

“Thanks Ethan,

“We did many of the basics the utility companies tell you to do–replace the incandescent bulbs with CFLs, use a programmable thermostat to save money by not heating the house when you’re not there, and insulate steam and hot water pipes and the attic.

“We also added some features that are more costly–the house has a new efficient natural gas boiler for our heat and we installed on demand hot water. The on-demand hot water is popular in Europe but less so here–it costs more (about 1.5 times replacing a hot water heater for us), but we had to replace our hot water heater and the cost differential ended up not being bad at all–if the on-demand system works as advertised for its 25 year life, we more than make up the cost in the long run. It is also a much more efficient use of natural gas, since there is no pilot light.

“We also installed efficient windows (nothing fancy, the Home Depot brand in most of the house and Andersens in spots), which has been great, since we had the old one-pane weight and pulley windows. We also generally look to buy efficiently in our appliances–Energy Star, LCD TVs over plasma (plasma uses a lot more energy). Being in California, there are generally more incentives to do a lot of these things, so it’s worth investigating.”

Thanks for your thoughts,
Brendan