Re:The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months
by jacquesm on Sunday December 11, 2022 @09:49PM
(#33950295)
That's the right approach though: any Joule you don't need to produce is one saved and even the most efficient furnace can not fix a leaky house. So the priorities are: economize (because it is free, and assuming you still can), insulate, high efficiency heat (depending on the age of the furnace, anything older than a decade is likely not HE+), self generated power in that order.
Re:The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months
by landemva on Sunday December 11, 2022 @08:49PM
(#33949910)
I had the full energy efficiency report with infrared camera and expert's eyes and blower door test. It was enlightening. I strongly recommend first thing get the expert report and follow the recommendations.
A few years later I got another report and fixed a few more things. House cold spots mostly went away, bills went down, less outside noise, and have the same windows and furnace.
My post was a little too quick… one of my good friends was an energy efficiency expert and when I asked him for advice on replacing a boiler in our “new to me” home and he goes “don’t!”.
We did an audit and spent about $4000 on efficiency retrofit - it cut our heating bill about 25%. That was 10 years ago, and we’ll probably start looking at replacement boilers when incentives ramp up for new tech.