Two in one

I forgot to mention we had two people in the house yesterday, the ADT installer and a guy from our electric company to do a free energy audit.  This time the ADT installer showed up in the allotted time window, performed the work he was designated to do without incident for the price we were quoted and was out the door, nice.

Ali initiated the visit from the electric company.  We have suffered from astronomical electric bills forever and since they offered this service for free we figured why not take advantage of it.  In a way it seemed odd to me that the electric company would offer such a service as the end result could mean less dollars rolling in for them.

The energy auditor went through the house pointing out various issues that we could address to lower our electric bill.  He had a bunch of interesting advice as well as finding some problems.  One that caught my attention was he found that the duct work in the attic was leaking at the seams in several spots which is allowing cold air to escape into the hot attic, making the cooling system less efficient.  He also said that an investment in the expanding foam type insulation applied against the inside of the roof would dramatically reduce heat absorption from the outside.  The only problem is that type of insulation costs thousands of dollars.

He also suggested we revamp the way we run our pool pump.  I had read/been told that our pool pump should be running at least 8 hours in the summer and 6 in the winter. I have followed those guidelines since the pool was installed.  The auditor suggested that instead we set the timer to run the pool pump for 1 hour every 7 hours.  He said that it is unnecessary to run the pump as long as suggested.  He said that perhaps the reason a pool supply store would recommend that is it would result in more use of the expensive chlorinator tablets.  It’s a dramatic change but it’s worth a shot, I can run the pump that way for a week and see if I notice any degradation in the pool water quality.

So we are going to address as many of the issues that were brought up as we can.  It would be awesome to knock down our electric bill significantly by simply making a few inexpensive to zero cost changes.