subject: Fill In The Gaps With These 3 Steps And Save $1,000 Every Year [print this page] Scientific research has shown that our homes lose the greatest proportion of thermal energy due to cracks and holes in our home's exterior structure.
Not only do they allow cold air to enter your home, but they also let your home's heat escape more rapidly, which means you will have to heat up your home using your boiler/furnace more intensively and so consume more energy and money. Not to mention that cavities like cracks and holes also prevent your home's insulation from doing its job, no matter how good it may be.
Keeping your heating on for longer, at a higher temperature, is the probably the worst solution for this problem. In fact, it is not even a solution - the principle of thermal equilibrium in physics tells us that if you heat up an object and place it in a cold area, the heated object will lose its thermal energy quicker and quicker if you heat it up more and more.
The same goes for homes - if you heat up your home more and more in an attempt to reach a satisfactory temperature level, in reality you are just forcing the thermal energy to escape even quicker through cracks and holes. It's the same as throwing away 2-3 hundred dollars a year.
Surprisingly, this practice is very common amongst homeowners. If you are one of them, today will be a new beginning for you as you are about to learn exactly how to solve this problem and have an energy saving exterior - the right way.
Before we move on, let's take a look at the preliminary options we have when it comes to figuring out where the holes and cracks actually are. There are two ways we can do this - the first way is to have a team of experts analyze your home, as they would do in a home energy check up. If you have a large home, if you don't have time, or if you simply find it quicker and more efficient to allow experts to handle it, this is the better option. Otherwise, the second way is to do it yourself!
The good news is that this article will focus on telling you how you can find out where the cracks and holes are located in your home manually, by yourself. So, let's get started!
1. The first step is to go outside and take a walk around your home and pay attention to the details of your home's construction work. The aim is to look for any area where the construction work could use some improvement.
Areas needing improvements are usually where two different materials meet - for example, where your home's walls meet the ground, where the edges of your windows and doors meet the walls, and even where your chimney meets the roof siding.
If you have a wall mounted air conditioning system, make sure that the edges of the system are tightly sealed. You should do the same for your windows and doors, or any other system that isn't made of the same material as your walls, but makes a barrier between the outside of your home and the inside.
Once you have found out where your cracks are, you've done the hardest part of the job! All you need to do next is to make a little investment in something called draft excluders. Contact your local DIY store for more information on these. They will be able to guide you through the process of filling in the cracks and holes depending on where they are located in your home.
2. The next step is to take a look at your attic. The outside surface of your attic is most affected by rain, snow, and sunshine. How can you take advantage of this? You may have seen that solar panels are placed on home roofs rather than walls, and now you know the why. As for snow and rain, you must ensure that you have vapor barriers installed underneath the surface of your attic roof.
A good vapor barrier will protect your insulation from water vapor migration and prevent it from losing its efficiency, which can save you the cost of replacing it - about $400; more than 3 times the amount you need for a high quality vapor barrier.
Vapor barriers are usually made of plastic, meaning that they can last for years and years whereas even brand-new insulation will begin losing its efficiency after a short time of solid raining, without a vapor barrier, of course.
3. The final step is to ensure that your exterior walls and roofs have the correct and up-to-date insulation materials inside them. This is most important once you have the cracks and holes and any other cavities in the structure of your home all patched up, simply because the purpose of your insulation is to reflect heat back into your home rather than letting it escape; which it cannot do if it is in a place near even the smallest of cracks and holes.
By combining all 3 of the steps correctly and professionally, can save you up to $1,000 on your energy bills per year, if not more.
Applying what you have learnt so far will lead you to even further steps to saving energy at home and each step will cut even more of the money you spend on your bills. The investments may be large to begin with, but the bites they'll take out of the money you're spending every year will certainly outweigh what you paid for them.
Energy efficiency in homes is one of the very few guaranteed ways you can save money immediately and perpetually - but it's the only guaranteed way of saving money, saving energy, helping the environment and even making money - and what you have read so far is just the beginning!
