Here is part II of the Series on affordable greenovations.  A few weeks back I posted Part I.

Here are a few things that you can do to help with Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)

I just finished giving a seminar for an affordable house conference here in Atlanta.  I wanted to share a few thoughts with the rest of you about how you can affordably make a sustainable impact on your home or property management as well.

PART I- energy efficiency

There are 2 parts to my presentation.  The first one is a summary of “low hanging fruit” concepts that a DIY can do to make their home perform better.  For property managers, I would recommend, at a minimum, exploring the following items since they are low cost and can make a difference.  The more advanced items would need a contractor, but most of them you can self perform.

• Install programmable thermostats- this can greatly reduce your heating and cooling bills
• Airseal holes- this will help conditioned air from going out side of your living space.  You paid to condition this air- why would you want to share it with you trees?
• Upgrade insulation to meet energy code- This is actually a law that no one enforces or abides by.  Whenever you are doing a significant renovation you are supposed to bring the insulation in those areas plus surrounding areas up the current energy code.
• Upgrade HVAC to high efficiency unit- As of yesterday there is even a greater tax credit for this
• Seal up the ductwork- why have a high efficiency unit and your air leaks out of your ductwork and goes outside?
• Use CFL’s and create an awareness program on how to recycle them-

For those of you in the Atlanta area here are some of the rebates you can get for some of these items:

GA Power Rebates

Here is a site where you can find some of the green items to DIY:

Conservation Mart

Have you had a salesperson tell you that all of your problems will be solved with one little gadget? OR- specifically on your home- ads tells us the replacing windows will cut you energy bills in half. Or that upgrading your HVAC can do the same. A few years ago I decided to investigate and the math did not add up. How can one product be the solution? Is every house or building the same?

What made these claims even sillier to me is when I started getting more green certifications and learning different techniques to help solve the requests that we get from our clients. I truly did wish that I could find a special pill to solve my client’s problems, but over time still had to look at each issue as being unique and the solution would be custom for that specific problem.

Here is one example:
You see these air cleaner that we can buy on TV or off the shelf at the store to help clean your air. Sounds good to me. Deep down I wanted to believe that this is all I had to do to help my clients breath better. Fortunately, since I am an engineer at heart and I resort to the scientific method for solving problems and offering solutions.

The problem is excessive dust which affects your health and your indoor air quality. The solution could be as simple as stopping the source of the dust and/or installing a whole house air filtration system.

A couple of solutions (for free- we usually charge for our consulting):
Problem: In new homes- if you have recessed can lights that not air tight and have fiberglass or cellulose insulation in the attic, then you probably cannot dust enough to keep up!

DIY Solution:
In this order..

1. Call a contractor to do all of this or
2. Count the number of recesses lights and either order new airtight trims online or go to your local suppliers to get what you need.
3. Take out the light bulbs (if they are incandescent or halogen you can take this opportunity to replace them with CFLs and save on lighting costs!
4. Remove the old leaking trim and install the new airtight trim. I make this sound easy, however the first couple will take much longer to figure out. The rest should take 15 minutes or less if you do them consecutively.
5. Reinstall the old light bulb or new Energy Star light bulb
6. Not only are you reducing the amount of dust your energy bills should decrease as well since your air leakage should diminish with the new air tight trims.

Note: if you see large gaps around the drywall- caulk them while the trim is off. If you have the time it makes sense to caulk any small gaps that you see as well. All of this will help cut down on the dust and air leakage

Each spring we plant a new garden at our home and last year we bought a bunch of herbs and a few vegetables from a local nursery for our herb garden. The rest of the herb garden was created from propagated herbs from the rest of the yard. The soil for last year’s garden was compost that I made from waste wood scraps from our job sites that I use as mulch. It took a couple of years for it to decompose, but it worked really well as compost!

You can see that each egg holder is the perfect size for a starter plant. I put the seeds in soil and in less than a week I noticed sign of new life. You can see the Basil poking through the compost.

The lid needs to be cut off so the sun can reach the new leaves. The lid then gets placed under the carton so it can catch the water from the holes. Make sure that you put the container in direct sunlight so they can grow. I have to water mine every other day to keep the soil moist as well.

As a Home Performance contractor you can imagine the grief that I get when my own house falls short of performing correctly.   I have reduced the leakage in my house by over 200%, but since it started out leaky there are still small areas that I still am working on over time in between servicing my paying clients.

I have replaced my furnace with a variable speed 96% efficient one.  I have replaced the majority of my windows will Energy Star replacement windows.  I have used spray foam insulation in the majority of my open areas to insulate and keep my family warmer.  Over all the house is great and is a least 2x’s as efficient as most houses that are the same age.  However, with all this I still did not address the smaller items such as caulking around the windows and around the doors.

The black around the window is an indication of a drop in temperature. Since we took this on a cold day, the cold air from the outside can be seen leaking into the house via the window.

I brought out our Home Performance team to take a look at one of the rooms that did not seem to be as comfortable as the rest of the them.  The IR photo showed that even though the roof line and the basement we air sealed, that the gap around the 40 year old window frame still need to be addressed.

The solution was to either just caulk around the trim to stop some of the air movement, or to insulate around the window frame.  I chose to insulate around the window frame since I had the tools to do so, but this can be a do it your self project also.

1. I broke the caulk seal with a utility knife around all of the trim and the wall.  This helps protect the Sheetrock from getting pulled off when the trim comes off.
2. Using a mini breaker bar, I carefully removed the trim off of the casing.
3. I used some minimal expanding foam designed for windows and doors to seal between the window frame and the framing on the house.
4. One the foam cured, I trimmed back any excess foam and reinstalled the trim with the original nails that I have pushed back through so they could be reset.
5. Now all I have to do it a little caulking a touch up of the trim.  Since I took extra precaution in order not to damage the walls, I will not have to paint the walls at all now.

Note: If you have high energy bills or very uncomfortable rooms, this is probably just a “drop on the bucket” compared to some more advanced performance measure such and whole house air sealing and insulation upgrades.

To see what I would do when renovating click here.

For Advanced Home Performance solutions click here.