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You can save BIG on your home heating bills!

Do you feel the pinch of rising heating costs in this economy?  Well don’t fret; you can make a difference on your heating bills.  You can do it by following the path of others who have done exactly that with their heating costs.  With the current economic downturn, and rising heating fuel costs, it only makes sense to:

1. reduce your consumption if possible,
2. increase the  efficiency of everything in your house, and

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  It’s in the cost and use details with some careful analysis that we make progress in the cost reduction efforts.  So let’s explore some of the details and analysis at an introductory level.

Getting Started

First you need to determine how much you use to heat your house – painful as it may be, by pulling out those old heating bills!  We need this information to determine how much you are spending as a baseline.  Also, we need to see how much oil or gas you are using each month to heat your home.

If you don’t have your past heating bills, here’s how to get them:

• Phone number for NJ Natural Gas, Customer service, 1-800-221-0051
  • Also, did you know there is a customer Bill of Rights?  And that you can call the Board of Public Utilities (BPU) directly for help? - 1-800-624-0241
  • Oil Delivery provider – need to contact your provider separately … if that’s a dead-end, find your checking account statements and determine from those documents.  Check out the price of oil from last year or all recent years if you visit the government website here:  http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_resid_dcu_SNJ_m.htm

You will need your old bills for the past 12 months, ideally for the past 24 months.  What it cost you per season, how many CCFs you used if natural gas or how many gallons you used if you have oil heat.  Each CCF is 100 cubic feet of natural gas and is used as the primary volume of natural gas delivery.  Sometimes a Therm is used, where a therm is 0.973 CCFs.

Therms are useful because they are equivalent to a heating rate of 100,000 BTUs per hour.  A BTU is a British Thermal unit, which many heating equipment suppliers use to rate their products for easy comparison as to how much heat they can deliver. To put this in practical terms, a cord of hardwood contains 29 million BTUs!

When tabulating over a few years for our home, we found an average of 1584 CCFs used of natural gas over the course of each year, with the majority of it being used in the winter.  This CCF total was costing us just under $2000 each year in Natural Gas bills.

Consumption of Fuel

The next part of our journey for savings is to determine where you are consuming energy.  For oil and natural gas this is an easy task, you just follow the fuel lines.  Most of us already know where in the house we have gas appliances and where an oil-burning or gas-burning furnace is located.

A typical list of places where fossil fuel is consumed and the ‘typical’ annual consumption in a 2000 square foot home* looks like this:

• Gas Furnace or oil-burning furnace                          560 CCFs or 500 gallons
• Gas or oil hot water heater                                                 280 CCFs
• Gas dryer                                                                              64 CCFs
• Gas range                                                                              42 CCFs
• Gas oven                                                                             150 CCFs
• Gas Fireplace                                                                       107 CCFs
• Outdoor Gas Grill or Barbecue                                               65 CCFs

*Each home is different in consumption based on how the appliances are used in the home/lifestyle

A good rule of thumb at this time is that each CCF costs you over $1.20.  So reducing those CCFs on our gas bills is a key priority for us.

As you go through the list, make a point of “visiting” with each of the sources, and see if there’s a tag or label stating heat output, efficiency or any other key details.  Be certain to take notice of any smell of oil or natural gas, and call your fuel provider immediately if you smell anything.  The goal of safety first is never to be compromised!  Our next goal is to understand how much natural gas or fuel oil is consumed by each appliance.

In my home it was determined that the following appliances consumed natural gas at their corresponding percentage levels:

1. Natural Gas Heating units, two zones                                   58%
2. Hot water Heater, Natural Gas                                              32%
3. Gas Clothes Dryer                                                                   5%
4. Gas Range                                                                               5%

So looking at each of these items for conservation or reduction of use was dominated by what we could do with heating the house and the hot water.  Since we had a well on property to supply the water, and then we used electricity to pump and filter the water, hot water was a key commodity, not to be wasted!

Where heat escapes / Where cold air intrudes

1. Our journey for thermal efficiency in your house will take us through four main focus points:

• Doors & windows
• Attics and basements
• Walls
• Fireplace

Let’s begin with the old saying that goes “Start at the bottom and work your way up”!  By starting at the lowest level of your house, you can find out where cold air may be intruding in basements, first floor foundations, and any doors or windows at the lowest level of your home.  If you have a basement in your home, arm yourself with a flashlight, some gloves and a pad and pencil.

Start at whatever entries to your basement exist to or from the outside world.  Check each window and door for seals, weather-stripping and fit conditions.  Anyplace where air can seep in from the outside is a potential opportunity.  Also make note of whether or not your windows are single pane windows and if the doors are hollow core insulated type or not.  Usually single pane basement windows represent a good opportunity for replacement to keep out the cold air.  The same goes for basement doors which are not insulated hollow-core style doors.

The walls in your basement should also be checked for cracks as well as the floor slab too!  Where possible, fill the cracks with silicone concrete sealer, which can be found at most hardware stores.  If the cracks are larger than 1/8 inch in width, you may want to contact a professional home repair specialist to determine if a larger problem exists.

While you are in the basement, check for your heating system condition.  Look for air leaks if you have forced hot-air heating.  Note any gaps and if the ducts are misaligned you may need to true them up.  Smaller gaps may be sealed with duct tape.  If you have hot-water baseboard style heat, make note of any exposed piping for the hot water.  This piping may be insulated with foam pipe insulation, also available at your local hardware store.

Once you are finished with the basement, proceed to the next higher levels of your home, noting any gaps in window and door seals.  Look for the occasional misaligned window or cracked pane, making notes to repair these.  If it’s already cold outside, feel the window frames with the back of your hands.  If any feel unusually cold, there is a problem in either the double pane seals or the insulation in the walls around the window.  I once had a window in my first home that was typically very cold.  When we decided to do something about it, I removed the moldings to find the builder had never insulated around the window frame.  Also pay particular attention to any fireplaces you have inside.  These are often a source of cold air intrusion when not in use, and placing some glass doors over a fireplace can provide less heat loss.  If it’s a fireplace you will never use, consider having it closed up or at least capped at the chimney top in addition to some fireplace doors.

The final stop inside the house is the attic.  Once again, look for any places where hot air may be escaping from the rooms below in your attic.  Make note of any duct work with holes or gaps, and any place the insulation needs updating or replacement.  A great deal of heat escapes into your attic, and it is mostly preventable.  If you are in a climate where it snows, make note after a snowstorm to see if there are any spots on the roof where the snow disappears first.  If they aren’t locations where the sun is causing it, you may have a problem.  You want your attic to be ice cold in winter, such that most of the heat is staying in the house and not leaking into the attic.

Once you have finished inside the house, take a walk around the outside, noting any places where heat might be escaping.  Pay particular attention to vents to the outside, especially if you have a dryer in the house.  Usually these vents have a closure with a spring that quickly wears out and remains open all the time.  Now might be a good time to replace that vent and or the spring.  Look for flashing around vents that may have been peeled back over time, the same with garage door seals and door seals.

Saving on energy consumed

The two places where you can make the most impact on how much energy you consume are your heating systems and hot water production.  Let’s look at your heating system first.

If you do not already have a setback thermostat for your heating system, go out and get one.  These programmable thermostats can be set up so that the heat is on when you are home and greatly reduced when you are not home.  Over 20% of your heating costs can be saved with such a thermostat program.  In our typical home, that would be over $100 in savings.  If you already have one, review the on and off times.  Are they already in sync with how you live in the home during the week and on weekends?  If not, make some adjustments.  Likewise, are the temperature set points in line with conservation and actual needs for comfort in the winter months?  A few degrees lower when you are out of the house for several hours can add up to big savings over the course of a winter heating season.  If you can lower your thermostat by 3 degrees, you can save up to 10% on your heating bills.  This one change alone can save you $50 or more.  If you have multiple heating zones, consider drastically reducing the upstairs one, as heat will rise up their anyway.  Make certain it starts later than the downstairs and is only on when you really need to be upstairs.

Saving on hot water can also yield big savings.  You can usually set the how water heater down a bit in temperature.  Installing low-flow shower heads will use significantly less hot water, up to 50% of your hot water consumption may be realized.  Per our table above, that can yield up to $140 of savings on your hot water bill over the course of a year.

Alternative energy

The final part of our story to saving big on heating bills is to investigate the use of renewable energy sources.  These include burning wood, geothermal systems, and using solar heating where possible.  The simplest solar heating idea is to make the most of any south –facing windows or doors.  Keep the curtains or shades open on sunny days.  Each window is worth the equivalent of an 800 watt heater on a sunny day. Any room with a south facing window will heat up within an hour if reasonably well insulated.

Other ideas for alternative energy are to:

• install a wood burning stove into a fireplace opening
• install a solar hot water heating system, and
• consider the use of Geothermal Heat Pumps.

Each of these ideas is a bit out of scope for this article, as these are considerably expensive and often have positive returns on the investment, but they may take years to realize the savings.  In our home, we installed a QuadraFire wood burning stove into the fireplace opening, and the payback was approximately 4.5 years, with a realized savings of over 20% beyond our initial conservation efforts to save on our heating bills.

You can learn more about how we can help at:

http://www.green-energyNJ.com

Summary

In summary, we have visited how to improve your home for savings on your heating bills.  We covered how to understand what you spend, how to determine how much fuel you use and where it goes.  We then reviewed how to better keep in the heat you produce and how to use your energy consumed in the most efficient manners.  Lastly, we touched upon renewable energy and it’s potential use as a next step. Between all the conservation efforts and the wood burning stove, we drove our energy consumption down by over 40% on our home and you can too!

About the Author

Joe Ficalora is an independent consultant and author in the areas of Green Energy, Lean Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma, and Crime Statistics. He has a Zero Utility Cost home in NJ, which is featured as a case example in his new book Quality Function Deployment and Six Sigma. He was formerly President of Global Services at SBTI and a certified Master Black Belt and Black Belt. He has extensive experience in Design for Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma, including workshop delivery to top executives, Champions and Black Belts. He is a sought after speaker on the topics of Lean Sigma and Design For Six Sigma. He co-authored SBTI's Master Black Belt Program, which consistently receives high accolades.

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