Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

Alright. This module is residential energy consumption, and we're going to talk about where we live and
energy consumption in our homes. But first, I have to tell you, you know, this a time travel kind of thing
but you probably noticed I got my hair cut. magically, my hair got shorter and then next module,
magically, it'll get longer again. We don't do these shoots in chronological order so don't let that stump
you.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So, our houses, the built environment and that includes both residential and commercial in the United
States of America, uses 75% of all electricity produced in this country. So, it's a real rich area to look at
when we're talking about becoming more energy efficient. more than 1.5 billion megawatt-hours are
used in residential structures each year. You can see from that pie chart, 38% of all electricity consumed
in the United States of America is consumed in our residences. So, making our homes twice as efficient
would save nearly as much electricity as produced by all of our nuclear power plants. Now, that's a fairly
big number.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So, how do we do this? Well, you know, we're going to talk about that in detail on this module. But you
know, there's a lot of low cost, no cost things you can do. So, reset your thermostat 68 Fahrenheit in the
winter and 78 Fahrenheit in the summer. Now, if you're to far away from that, you like the Arctic cold in
the summer, move yourself your thermostat 1 degree at a time and, and ease up on that and you can
come across that fairly nicely doing it that way.

But, you know, the old thing about turn your lights off when you're leaving the room, you know, that
can save you more money than you think, because we leave a lot of stuff on. compact florescent light
bulbs and new LED light bulbs are much more efficient than incandescents and last longer, too. And
then, this thing called phantom loads, you'll have a reading on that but we'll explain that. how about
intermediate changes? Well, once I saved the low cost, no cost stuff, what do I do next? Well, you know,
think about appliances. We have a logo system in this country Energy Star, where the appliances with
that logo consume less energy than standard ones. So, Energy Star clothes washers, Energy Star
dishwashers, things of that nature and refrigerators.

Refrigerators are a large user of energy in our homes. so, we can change that one at a time throughout a
number of years. And how about attic insulation? So, there's a lot of intermediate things. And that leads
us to the last part, capital intensive, like changing out all the windows in your house or adding in a new
energy-efficient air conditioning system. And after we do that, then there's energy production, even at
our own homes. We don't have to rely on a central power plant anymore, we've got solar that we can
add on to our own houses.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So, what do we have in this country? over 120 million separate residences, whether that's apartments,
town homes, individual homes we have 120 million residences where people live. if we waited for new
construction, new energy codes on how we build our houses to take care of that problem, it would take
over a century to solve this problem. we don't have that much time or that much money.

So, we have to look at our existing homes, and that's what we're going to do in this module. And what
we also have to do is to use economically viable changes. I don't want to lose money trying to save
money. So, I also try to do things in that order, too, and also, I put this warning up here. This house may
be expensive to operate, unhealthy to live in, a burden on society, and potentially unsaleable. And that's
really what we're trying to cure, is all those things, and make our houses more livable, easier to
maintain, cheaper to maintain, and healthy to live in and, and sustainable.

So that's what we're going to do is look at these things in the module. And what we're going to do right
now is walk through a house and show you all the things we can do on an older house.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

(No slides video transcript)

Today, we're going to look at residential housing, you know, the places where we live.

We're in a typical house, an older house that they're trying to make more energy-efficient. Some things
have been done, some things haven't. But it's more indicative of the kind of places that we live in the
United States and certainly in the rest of the world. You know, because right now, we have the
technology o build a net zero houses - houses that use no external energy. But what do we do with the
existing housing structure, the 130 million places that we live in this country? Well, let's come inside and
take a look.

Well, here we are inside the house. It's about a 50-year-old house. It's North Central Florida, what we'd
call a hot and humid climate. And being that it is a hot and humid climate, one of the things we do a lot
here in the South is air condition. So, what we have here on the floor is what we would call terrazzo."

It's a concrete base with a decorative finish on that, and it's ground coupled. And saying that means it's
coupled to the earth, which is an average temperature of about 68 to 72 degrees year round, and so you
get quite a little bit of free air conditioning when you do it this way. A lot of people have this slab on
grade design with typical design, but they cover it up with carpeting, which ruins that effect. So, in this
place, we have the old Florida design, which is much more natural and much more energy-efficient.

So, let's go on through this room, open architecture, and go into the kitchen. And what we see here in
the kitchen is appliances and lighting, and we've replaced the lighting with LED lightings, light emitting
diode lightings, much more efficient. You can see those over the stove and energy-efficient appliances.
So, when you really add up the things in the kitchen, it's lighting and appliances. Now, how do you
replace appliances? Well, usually, when they break. So, before that, and you know when they're about
ready to, because they're old and wonky and you have to fix them. But when they get to that point, plan
ahead and get an energy-efficient appliance already planned out so that when you do have to buy one,
you can pick wisely.

Another thing in our kitchen is that sometimes we don't think about is water use. And the water use is
related to energy because often we use hot water in our sink, fill up things, wash our hands, wash our
dishes. And right here, this point of use one of the things that we need to do is make sure we have a
low flow aerator on here. 2.2 gallons a minute is plenty for a kitchen, and often times, we'll have older
ones that let 3 and even 5 gallons may have come out here. So, a lot of water is wasted, and a lot of
energy is wasted. So, paying attention to your aerators on here, good design in there can save you both
water and energy.

Another thing in almost all of our houses and entertainment center of some sort, a television set
surround sound amplifiers, peripherals, all sorts of things. What we don't know, many of us don't know,
is that there is instant on features in many of these devices, and just sitting there, not being used,
they're sucking power. So, what I've done in my house is I've put them all into a power strip, and when I
go away or I'm asleep because I'm certainly not using them when I'm asleep I turn it all off the power
strip. And that saves me a lot of power throughout the year. And if you look at the red dots and blue
dots all over your house, think of that every time you see them, that phantom load, that instant on
feature that's on all the time. You can control that by having a power strip in back of this, and turning it
all off. That's your television set, your 5.1 surround sound stuff, your routers, your peripherals, and all
that stuff you can control that way.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

But right here in this corner, is another thing I'd like to look at and that is these windows. You can put
some blinds on here to cut out outside lighting and glare, also for privacy. But what we have for this 50-
year-old plus house is an aluminum frame, single pane window a real energy pig. But, you know, these
are costly to replace. They're in a lot of our houses in the Southeastern United States. So, how do you do
that? Well, in our house, what we did was we replaced them literally one wall at a time. My wife gave
me the logic that basically, when you see a house from the outside, you can only see one wall at a time.
So, if the finish on them, when you buy them five years later, on the back of the house is slightly
different, you're not going to be able to tell that. But these aluminum frame single pane windows and
you can feel that it's January here, or actually February 1st here in Florida and what we have is a very
cold surface. So, that's what you do on these is put these blinds on to cut that cold surface down, and
give you a little bit of buffer, and make a little warmer in here. Its reverse in the summertime. So that
gives us a little environmental difference even if we can't afford to replace the windows.

Here we are in the master bathroom. And one of the things I like to point out is when you are
renovating, which they did in this bathroom, they did replace this window, and this window was just like
the front, a single pane, aluminum frame. And they changed it out to a double pane, fiberglass finish or
frame on it and much more energy-efficient, and you can feel the difference when you're holding your
hand on this versus the one in front. So, an energy-efficient upgrade when you're remodeling pays for
itself. Some of the other things, in this bathroom, again, are low flow faucet areas for this laboratory
sink, so that you have a low flow stream there, so you don't waste a lot of hot water. We have an
energy-efficient light above the sink. Low flow shower heads over here. And if I get the right button, you
know, the vent fan in the bathroom is one of your quiet vent fans. Now, we're all use to the ones that
sounds like an aircraft taking off. Not only is this quiet, but it's also much more energy-efficient.

Over here, there is a low flow toilet which has got the dual flush one smaller amount and one larger
amount so it saves water and energy. We have energy-efficient vent fan. The better window that's
energy efficient. Low flow water devices here, and energy-efficient lights. So, as you go around in some
room as innocuous as a bathroom, you can see there's some neat, some really important things you can
do to save energy right here in the bathroom.

Here we are, you know, you have a door inside your house and its got a grill on the bottom. What's that
all about? Well, I tell you that's where our air handler is, that heats and cools our house and that's a grill
work that allows return air from the rest of the house to come back into the air handler. So, let's take a
look inside

What we have before we get too far, I understand that's a solid core heavy duty door because that
separates out this air handler from the rest of the house. There's an opening in here to get fresh air for
this gas furnace to come in. And so, having that be a solid core, kind of a more insulated door is an
attribute here.

So here, we have our, our air conditioning unit and our furnace all in one piece. You can see the gas is
getting the combustion gas out of here. And that's the one thing you'll notice is there's a piece of
weather stripping right here. So, when I close this door that separates the bottom half, where air comes
in from the top half where the unit is. And when you look at it that way, a lot of older houses,
particularly this age, how this was built, is they built this platform in here and they didn't come down
and seal up the wall cavity below it. And so, you had it open all the way up into the attic. So, every time
this unit came on, you would suck hot air in the summer time down and really prevent you from
operating as efficiently as you could. So, this unit here has the sealed box and insulated box down below
with the nice weather stripping right here, the grill on the front of this door.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

And also a grill through this wall here into the other room is very well-designed, very well put together
and very efficient. Correctly sized with your thermostat set at the right temperatures 78 during the
summertime and 68 during the wintertime you can operate this house pretty cheaply with good
equipment and good design. One of the things you need to do with all of your furnace and air
conditioning style equipment is to be able to maintain them. And the homeowner needs to replace
certain things and keep an eye on certain things.

One of the things is an air filter. It filters the air. People think that's to keep bugs out of them, and dust
out of them, but actually, it's to keep the equipment clean. The heat exchange in there needs to be
clean, and so that, that's what we need to do with these things. Air filters sometimes are in the back of
grills, sometimes up in the ceiling. But in this unit, it's inside the equipment. So, let's take a look where
that is. That front side comes off pretty easy, that part comes off. You have to remember to do them in
order. And right here down at the bottom is a pleated air filter. Pleated gives you a lot more surface area
so it cleans better. And you need to keep an eye on it, it's different for every house, every machine. You
got a bunch of animals here and these terazzo floors, you can get some ferocious dust mites that can
really clog up a filter pretty quick. Other houses, not so much. So, when you see these getting dirty in
there, you need to replace them, sometimes once a month, sometimes once every couple of months. So
the cleaner they are, the cleaner the equipment stays and the better and more efficiently it operates.

Now, another part of your house that's important, that sometimes is ignored because it's out of sight,
out of mind, is our attic. Probably about 25% of your air conditioning load comes right out of what
happens up here. So, lets take a look. Always, when you're dealing with a ladder situation, you want to
be safe and one of the first things you see here is a plain piece of plywood and no weather stripping
around here. So, that environment is kind of poorly separated from our conditioned space. So, one of
the things you might want to do is weather-strip that fitting right here and actually put some insulation
on the back of that panel.

Alright, well, here we are in the attic and holy cow, you know, it's a place we don't often look at. It's full
of duct work wiring, and old, old insulation. So again, what we want to do is make sure that all the
houses in America have the, the right amount of insulation and 40% of them don't. And what we have
here charitably could be called R13. That R13, that's a measure of the thickness of the insulation and it's
ability to rest, resist heat flow. And so what we need in this part of the country is R30. it's about 9 inches
of fiberglass insulation, different for different materials. and what we might have here maybe is R3, so,
or R13, or 3 inches so again, what we do is add this insulation. And you can see in back of me and off to
the side, the bags of insulation things that we can use to replace what we have up here, not replace but
add on to it. And I can assure you the air conditioning bill will be much lower when we do that and the
heating bill in the winter. and we'll also be more comfortable inside the house.

Another thing, when you're up here, you always check for roof leaks. Always a problem. take a look at
the boards above us and see if we have any leaks. So, I don't see any in this attic. So, even though it's 50
some odd years old, it looks to be in good condition. A little bit of insulation and we'll be much more
energy-efficient.

Okay, so coming down out of the attic, you know, there's a couple of things we finished off the major
areas of the house. But there's a couple issues like notice all the light reflecting out of this bathroom.
That's all daylight. It comes from a solar tube, a daylighting tube that goes through the attic and brings
in sunlight, and so that's another way to save energy is use the natural lighting around us. that way, you
don't have to turn the lights on.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

Another area we haven't talked about is ceiling fans. The main living room here has a ceiling fan, the
bedrooms have ceiling fans. What that does is enable you to turn the air conditioning to a hotter
temperature or off entirely and just use fans to cool us during the hotter parts of the months. It saves a
lot of energy and you feel just as comfortable. So, let's take a look outside and see what the outside
world is doing to our house and how we can save energy there, too.

[SOUND] Here we are on the outside of the house and a couple things you want to notice right off the
bat are the direction. This side of the house faces North. and also the style of construction where
concrete block here, concrete block is good and used all over the South East because termites don't eat
concrete, at least not yet.

And through here, we can take a look at some other things, like this doorway. This is a doorway directly
into the house. It's an insulated doorway and it's also shaded by this carport. That's a western direction
this way. So, for afternoon sunlight, would be facing this without the carport. You'd have this baking
right on this door, heating up the house right when you wouldn't want to. So, shading our eastern and
western approaches keeps that from happening.

So, let's take a look on the outside of the house from the backyard and see what we got out here. Here
we are on the back side of the house. A couple of things you want to notice right off the bat, is this, the
front is the north face, this is the south face. We have good access to the summer sun and we have
some shade that'll keep a lot of the direct sunlight off. But right here, we have our air conditioning unit.
This is our compressing unit outside of the house. And a couple things you want to be aware of to
maintain on your own house is this coil here is actually what dumps the heat from the inside of the
house to the outside and it needs to be kept clean. A lot of times, if we're not careful how we mow the
lawn, we'll actually have the chute pointed at something like this and fill the grill work full of grass
blades and ruin the efficiency of that.

So, of course, this one on this house is kept nice and clean and in good condition. Right behind it though,
stuck on the wall, is something a little different. This is our gas water heater for the house. It is tankless
style, so there's no storage tank and no waste associated with keeping that storage tank hot all the time
so, you don't have any standby losses. This only comes on when you actually demand hot water. And
what's really interesting about that is if I use a low flow device inside, like a low flow sink aerator, like
we talked about. Some of the models here, will not come on until you get a certain flow. But I can turn
the temperature down, so I can demand a lower temperature. So no matter what flow rate I need, that
gas water heater will come on. And so, by tweaking that and adjusting that and being careful about how
you it, you can make this super efficient. And gas prices right now are pretty low so this is a very
efficient, cheap, inexpensive way to get hot water in your house. So, let's take a look at some other
things on the other side of the house.

Okay. Before we get around the corner here, these are canopy canopy style or awning style windows.
They're aluminum frame single pane. And if you look at how they're situated here, they crank open and
over the years, they're nearly impossible to seal. And you can the middle ones down at the bottom,
there's a little bit of gap there. And that's because the mechanisms over time get older and a little bit
bent. And so, that ability to seal there is almost impossible. That's one of the other reasons you need to
keep an eye out for changing your windows, upgrading your windows. Not only for aesthetics and not
only for a better insulation during cold temperatures but actual air leaks into and out of the house
depending on the season.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So something we ought to look at when we go by. So, let's take a look around this outside of the house
on the other side. Here we are on the eastern side of the house. That would be the morning time sun
that you have to worry about. And here's our good old electric meter. And do you know, the wheel on
here, the faster that moves, the more you're paying. And holy, wow, that's hardly moving at all. One
heck of an energy-efficient house. But wait a minute, what's on the side of the building here, it says, grid
tie solar inverter. Wait a minute, there might be something else on the house, let's go back in the
backyard and take a look at what else is on this house. Okay, so we saw the extra meters over there so it
made us think about what's on the house. And what's on the house is a 3.85 kilowatt solar array. It's
facing the southern sun, the southern sky, and so it collects that solar energy everyday and every time
the sun is out. And that produces power to be used both in the house and on the grid.

Alright, so, we've taken a look on top of the house and we've got a solar array on this house. We also
have two electric meters. This meter over here tells me how much my solar array has produced actually
since it's been installed. So, I have a meter here that says, the sunlight has produced this much electrical
energy for use in this house and this neighborhood. And this one over here is our old standby that tells
us how much we've actually used on the house. So, I can keep the two of those separate and figure out
what I'm doing as far as the solar system is concerned and as far as the house is consuming.

Okay, so we've looked to all aspects of this house. It's an older house, it's a more typical house than,
than you see all over the southern part of this country. And, and I'm sure no matter where you live,
you look at the same thing. There's typical construction, typical ways we live in our homes. We've
looked at water use, we've looked at energy use in appliances, we've even looked at energy production
from a solar array.

And the broad based numbers, you know, before the current homeowner lived in the house, this house
for one person used over 13,000 kilowatt hours a year. After a few fairly inexpensive changes inside the
house, the current owners use around 8,500, around 8,000 to 8,800 kilowatt hours a year for a
family of four. Now, if you include what is produced by the solar ray, the total energy expenditures in
the house drop down to 4,000 kilowatt hours a year. And you look at those numbers and how they keep
going down, you're talking about a savings of nearly 75% overall.

Nothing special nothing untoward, these things are cost-effective, they have rates of return, economic
rates of returns on everything done here. So, when you think about that nationally on 130 million
structures throughout this United States of America, we can save a heck of a lot of energy on the same
pathway this homeowner took.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So, we've just walked through a house here in Gainesville, Florida and shown many things we can do to
save energy. So to kind of wrap this up, let's look at our figures again.One of the things we can do, or
many things we can do are low cost, no cost. In fact, probably about 30% of your energy bill is how you
operate your home. These are thermostat settings, phantom loads replacing lights turning things off is
always a big champion of mine because it's the one thing you absolutely have control over. When you
leave a room, turn the fan off. When you leave the room, turn the lights off. And wow, the TV set on all
day in the back kids' bedroom you know, that's we're, we're paying for that.

Again, there's a lot of money to be saved. It's a rich vein. we can change our family finances by really
looking into this very heavily. Saving money and low cost, no cost can allow us to save up money to
replace our appliances, maybe not every year but one every couple of years. And after a period of five or
six years, you've got all very energy-efficient appliances in your house, house and you're saving even
more money. That gives us some money to insulate our attics.

Again, reiterating what we said in the beginning, over 40% of our attics in this country are under
insulated. As was the house that we looked at, but you saw that he had the insulation already placed up
there, waiting for a nice cool day this winter so he can crawl up there and lay the insulation out himself.
So, that's a good thing that he's doing. He'll save even more money and make him more comfortable in
the house, too, and his family.

But that last bullet on there is acknowledge your climate. You know, where do you live? what kind of
environment do you live in? And taking advantages of your swing months, your months where you don't
need a whole lot of heating or cooling, open up the house, get a nice breeze and air condition naturally.
so, there's a lot of things we can do to live within our climate to save energy.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

So, back to the, the big ticket thing is if we make our homes more efficient, we can save a lot of energy,
reducing the need to build the coal-fired power plants or natural gas-fired power plants. So, making our
energy systems in this country more sustainable just by becoming more efficient. In fact, making our
homes twice as efficient would save over 770 million megawatt hours a year, an extensive amount of
energy in this country. So, to put it another way, if you put renewable energy production in this country
with energy savings. With energy efficient homes, together, that would be more than equal to all the
coal-fired electricity production in this country. So, we could shut off all our coal-fired plants by
combining those two together. So, that's a goal that we should probably look at and probably try to
attain because no matter what length of time we have on burning fossil fuels, they are inherently
unsustainable. They're not being created in any sort of human-based time, only geologic time.

if we added our commercial sector, that we'll look at next, on our next module, if we add our savings in
that, we would save 1.5 billion megawatt hours a year, nearly 40% of all electricity produced in this
country. And really changing the landscape of how we produce and use energy in this country. So, the
example here in this module, where we walked through this house, the homeowner now has four times
as many people in the house. A family of four, a husband, wife and two kids and the owner previously
was just one person in the house. Now, with 4 people in the house, a newly revamped house, they use
30% less energy than a single home owner did, and they're also producing energy by having the solar
array on the roof. So, their carbon footprint is quite a bit different than a typical house, and their bill,
the important thing for them and their finances, is quite a bit different. They're saving an extensive
amount of money by what they've done.

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Module 4: Residential Energy Consumption Lecture

so again, what we can do is change our homes. my own home that we'll look at in a later module I've
saved 60% of the energy I used to use in that home. it used to be over 22,000 kilowatt hours a year and
now I'm around 8,000 kilowatt hours a year total use of electricity in my home.

A real energy pig of a house that I've worked long and hard at but I haven't had any solar and haven't
done anything really strange to the house, just all little bits and pieces like we talked about in this
module. So, it's economically viable, it's economically attractive, it makes the home more comfortable, it
puts a lot of money in your pocket. There's a lot of things we can do that make a lot of sense, so let's get
started. Let's go from here.

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