How Does Your Home Measure Up?

Have you ever wondered if you are doing enough of your part to save energy during the hot summer months? Do you wonder how your neighbors are doing? Homeenergy.org published an article entitled “Comparing Your Home’s Energy Use to Others,” which can be found on their page http://www.homeenergy.org/consumerinfo/benchmarking-energy-usage.php. One of the easiest and low-tech ways to determine an estimate of your home’s energy usage is benchmarking. In the article, the “do-it-yourself” section provides a section on what benchmarking is and how to do it. What is is: Benchmarking is a way to roughly compare the energy your house is using to the energy used by similar houses near by. It is an easy to do, somewhat accurate way to get an idea of how energy efficient your home is. If you want to do this manually, as described in the Home Energy article, you will need to know how much fuel you used last winter, the square footage of the heatable space in your house and about how cold the weather was. However, if you are like me and try to avoid math, you can head over to http://hes3.lbl.gov/hes/hes.taf?f=top. This takes us back to a very helpful web page, The Home Energy Saver web site. This site will give you an average electrical bill for homes in your area (found by typing in your zip code). Then, the web page will also generate a possible bill if energy saving appliances and techniques were used. In my case, our zip code is 91723. The average Home Energy Bill for Homes in my zip code is $1,314.

The Home Energy Bill with Energy Efficient appliances/precautions is $899.

That's a savings of $415 a year.

If that is enough information for you, you can stop there. But if you want to see how your energy bill can look more like the lower estimate, there are questions on the bottom section of the page that you can answer that will give you a ‘prescription’ of appliances to change out or upgrade to impact your bill. These questions include describing the type of insulation in your home, the number of windows and even the geographical direction your home faces. After answering basic questions like these, the website will then generate a calculation of possible upgrades you can make to your house and the amount of money those upgrades would save you (with the payback amount and time period already factored in). Upon completing the questions and calculations you will be taken to a “results” page where you can then map your homes carbon footprint. This was very interesting to me. According to http://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonfootprint.html, a carbon footprint is

“is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.”

The explanation continues as the web page splits the carbon footprint term into a primary and a secondary footprint (explaining corresponding calculations used in the definitions). The whole carbon footprint is found by adding the primary and secondary traits together. The primary footprint is the direct usage of fossil fuels (like driving in your car, or taking a flight). The secondary footprint comes from products we buy and how long it is going to take for the products we buy to decompose. The carbon footprint calculator on energy website calculates your “carbon footprint” a little bit differently because it is examining the energy usage of your home, not you as an individual. It also has a mapping system so that you can compare your energy usage with the median usage of homes near you (in your same zip code) as well as others on the map. To see the numbers the calculator uses as well as the methodology please visit http://hes3.lbl.gov/hes/footprint_map/index.taf?session_id=1110331&_UserReference=5621E7A2A0F286594851845B. After you have input your information and viewed the map of your zip code, the “summary stats” tab allows you to see your energy consumption on a graph compared to “Annual Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Emissions per Home” other homeowners, as well as a line representing homeowners across the United States.

This is the ‘pins’ that show how the energy usage in my area. The green represents 0-5 levels of carbon emissions, and the yellow represents 5.1-15 levels and the red represents 15.1-999. Green is a great level of carbon emissions, yellow is ok, and red levels should be avoided.

If you are interested in finding out your carbon footprint for other than your primary footprint (like how much carbon is utilized during travel or household waste, visit: http://www.coolcalifornia.org/ A carbon footprint, usually looks like this:

They give options to help reduce your carbon footprint: “Tips to Reduce Your Primary Footprint” according to http://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonfootprint.html

• When traveling for Holidays, they recommend avoiding air travel – as it uses more fuel than travel by land
• Utilize renewable energy or energy saving appliances as much as possible.
• “Try solar water heating – this can reduce your gas bill by up to 70% over a year.”
• Use public transportation as much as possible.
• Also, car sharing reduces your impact.

Carbonfootprint.com also provides tips to reduce the secondary footprint

• Pay closer attention to the materials you buy and the processes used to make them. So, for example, they recommend drinking bottled water because it is safe to drink tap water in most counties and recycling bottles adds to emissions.
• Buy as locally grown/made as possible. If local wine is produced, there will be less miles traveled, and therefore less emissions. The same goes for clothing. If clothes have to travel more than 1,000 miles, that is a large percentage of your footprint.
• Eat less red meat and avoid any goods that have unnecessary packaging.

There are many easy ways to reduce your impact on the environment, and also save money off of your energy bills. Why not do something easy and helpful? Stay posted for more information about saving money on your electric bills!