People are getting pretty fancy when it comes to sustainable building. These days you can get your heat from a geothermal pump under your house. You can plant a garden on your roof or tile it with hundreds of photovoltaic panels. You can install light fixtures that will automatically dim as the sun gets brighter, or even hook up your child's television to a stationary bicycle. It's amazing what's out there, and I promise you, it will pay off in the long run!
But what if you aren't building a new house? Or what if, no matter how much you care about the environment, and no matter how splendidly it will pay off in the long run, you just plain don't have $30,000 to spend on solar panels right now? And you don't have good Southern exposure anyway?
If you live in the Midwest, or the Northeast, or the South, or the Great Plains, or the Northwest, or any place where you have to heat and/or cool your home, odds are good that you can do quite a lot to decrease your home energy use by tightening up your house.
Cheryl Pomeroy of Chicago's Informed Energy Decisions, a residential and commercial energy auditor, calls insulation and air-sealing the "low-hanging fruit" of energy conservation.
"If you really only have a certain amount of money, it makes me sad to see people spending it all on solar power if they still have a leaky house." Solar makes sense, she says, once you've tightened and insulated your house.
Informed Energy typically has two types of residential customers: owners of drafty old houses with no insulation who are tired of freezing their booties off, and owners of newly-built or renovated homes who suffer some sort of catastrophe, such as a bad HVAC system or a collapsed ceiling. Although principles of energy-efficient construction have been established for awhile—at least 1978, when energy-conscious California passed a new set of building regulations—many builders are not familiar with them.
"They have the skill, but not the knowledge," says Pomeroy.
The company will sometimes be called in to remediate a bad job of new furnaces and ductwork, for example. If the furnace is in "unconditioned" or uninsulated space, "It's disheartening to tell someone who's just been through an expensive remodel that it's been done all wrong," she says. "It's hard for us to say, and hard for them to hear."
Founded in 2003 by John Porterfield and Cappy Kidd, Informed Energy Decisions has a snappy website at www.energydetectives.com (which does cause one to wonder why on earth they chose such a supremely forgettable, if accurate, name for their company if they had the good sense to choose such a catchy web address?). More and more, builders and architects are calling Informed Energy in early in the game, to get things right the first time. In addition to performing energy audits and consulting on major design and renovation projects, the company also recently certified the Energy Star rating of Chicago's Intercontinental Hotel.
The company has seen quite a rise in their business since the beginning of the year, when every newspaper and magazine seemed to pronounce 2008 the Year of Green. Since then, Pomeroy says, people seem to be concerned not only about cost, but also about lowering their carbon footprint: "People are saying, 'I want to do the right thing; I'm concerned about the future. I want to lower my footprint.''"
"It's a craze," she says, "The tipping point has happened."
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