Ryan Jaramillo stood in an unusually warm San Francisco garage and gestured at the ceiling, the only barrier between him and the house above.
“Right now you’re heating your car and all the mice down in the crawl space,” he said to the homeowner, who stood nearby and looked up at the bare wood while carefully absorbing Jaramillo’s report. A more efficient design would insulate this 1940s house from its garage, keeping the heat in the living space.
Jaramillo works for the preeminent home energy efficiency experts in the Bay Area. Recurve, formerly called Sustainable Spaces, uses high tech equipment to deconstruct home energy use. That includes infrared cameras, computer modeling and blower door tests.
Efficiency is the less flashy side of greenhouse gas reduction, but it’s getting more attention these days, especially since it’s the one sure bet when it comes to reducing emissions. Evidence for this upswing can be found in the Obama administration’s interest in a “cash for caulkers” component in upcoming federal legislation.
Locally, we have the example of Recurve, which Matt Golden and Adam Winter founded in 2004 using $17,500 in seed money from the sale of Golden’s Westfalia van. Today the company employs 66 people at its San Francisco office on Eighth and Mission Streets.
Back in the house with the heated garage, the homeowner – who asked to be unnamed in this article – followed Jaramillo through the various inefficiencies of his house. Jaramillo and his crew had just visited every neglected nook and cranny, including the crawlspace and the furnace it houses.
Even though the furnace was relatively new, the older ducts attached to it weren’t sufficiently insulated. And some ducts, unbeknownst to the homeowner, were wrapped in asbestos, which in this case looked like white medical tape.
When the heater was installed, the workmen simply plugged it into shabby existing ductwork. Even worse, they left a large hole on the intake side of the furnace, allowing the heating system to suck up crawlspace air straight into the house, instead of isolating the in-house air.
“It’s like you get a Prius, but you have flat tires,” Jaramillo explained.
San Francisco homes consume the most energy in heating. That means insulation, air sealing, and duct sealing are the most cost-effective greening measures. These can cost $3,000-$5,000 and also benefit air quality.
One of the most dramatic tests involves attaching a blower door device to the house and sucking out all the air, measuring leakage, and then reversing the flow and over-pressuring the house.
The consultants then can better measure how much air is leaking in through cracks, windows, ducts, and even glaring holes.
“I can stick my hand up into your home from here,” said home performance specialist Matty Meskill to the owner of a large old Victorian. Though the home was beautifully redone in the living space upstairs, a gap yawned above them where the two stood in the crawlspace.
In addition to ruining any efficiency a new heater may provide, outside air coming through leaky ducts will clog the filter faster. Furthermore, leaky ducts allow the recirculation of all the nasty, potentially airborne items that homeowners squirrel away under their houses.
These could include asbestos fragments or even stored pesticides and cleaning agents. “They don’t know how much crawlspace air they’re really breathing,” Jaramillo said.
The company’s teams measure inefficiency over a several-hour visit, later producing a tiered report on home energy savings that can be made for a variety of prices. The reports are upwards of about $300, depending on the house size.
This homeowner called Recurve for all the usual reasons: wanting to improve efficiency and comfort and maybe pay a little less on his heating bills. His home ranked a bit better than average efficiency and had new double-paned windows, but some rooms weren’t getting warm enough.
Using computer modeling, Recurve estimated that almost a quarter of energy loss in the house was due to duct leakage, and another 17 percent was lost through lack of duct insulation.
After receiving his report a week later, the homeowner decided to hire Recurve to implement roughly $7,000 in retrofits. That involves replacing the ducts, getting rid of the asbestos, and sealing the house for leaks. Using the report’s calculations, he decided that adding wall and floor insulation for more than $5400 wasn’t worth the price.
The company estimates about half of its clients decide to retrofit.
Before founding Recurve, Golden had been working in the solar products industry after moving from the high tech industry. He found himself leaning to a more systemic approach to home energy, wanting to “solve problems, not just sell products,” even as other entrepreneurs were bee-lining for flashier technologies like solar panels and smart grid tech.
“Solar is literally the last thing you should do,” Golden said. “Home owners are trained to think about retrofit in reverse.” Instead, he encourages reducing electricity and natural gas use first.
He pointed out that while solar panels are primarily constructed in China, energy retrofits have multiple advantages. “It’s job creation,” he said about retrofit installation. “More than 90 percent of the materials we use are domestically produced.”
“Energy efficiency first – it’s the cheapest, fastest, cleanest thing you can do,” said Jim McMahon, the energy analysis department head for the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. McMahon supports solar but said that from a cost per kilowatt hour standpoint, efficiency is the first stop. He said a well-executed retrofit – providing sufficient air flow – can also increase comfort and health.
“Customers do not buy zero energy alone,” Golden said. They also want comfort, which isn’t necessarily the enemy of efficiency. “If someone had asthma before, they think that you walk on water.”
I found this web site very, very helpful. A question: is it true that the infrared photography in home energy audits can/should be utilized only in cold months to be of any use?