http://www.pushhogg.com/energy-saving-grants/
How to retrofit your home for maximum energy savings and biggest bang for your buck
Let’s say you had $15,000 to spend on making your home more energy efficient — and a charge to earn back the cost of the improvements you chose in saved energy as fast as possible. You’ve got three choices on how to spend the money. First, a 2-kilowatt solar panel on your roof. Second, a round of standard insulation and air seal improvements, along with adding Energy Star-rated lighting and appliances to the home. Or, third, replacing all the windows with “R-5 windows,” the super-efficient replacements for traditional single-pane and double-pane windows. Which do you choose?
Eliminating solar panels from the list should be fairly simple. We all know that building insulation offers the fastest and best payback per dollar of energy efficiency investment out of a range of options shown by the famous McKinsey Curve*. That’s one reason many state solar incentive programs require applicants to first do an energy efficiency audit of their homes before they even start thinking about solar.
So we’re down to two choices to maximize the ROI on $15,000 spent on energy efficiency. Nowadays, if you asked most contractors, they’d probably throw out the windows right along with the solar panels. Traditionally, more efficient windows are viewed as too expensive, compared to the option of replacing roof and wall insulation. Given that the same $15,000 could also replace a number of home appliances with Energy Star models, spending the whole amount on just new windows would seem even harder to justify.
But that common wisdom might need to be rethought, according to a new study from Ann V. Edminster, the green building expert and author of the new book “Energy Free: Homes For a Small Planet.” As part of the research for the book published in 2009, Edminster tested out these three $15,000 options on a 1,900-square-foot suburban type home in several climates.
The R-value rating is the full-frame window rating for resistance to heat flow. Single pane windows re around R-1, and dual pane are R-2 to R-3. Some windows (such as those from Serious Windows) go as high as R-11.
Edminster found that replacing standard double-pane windows with R-5 windows could indeed pay its own way in comparison to the more traditional insulation and EnergyStar route. If the home started out with single-pane windows, going the R-5 route offered an efficiency improvement almost three times as great as the insulation-and-appliances route.
As for the value of R-5 windows in new construction, Edminster stacked them up against a host of other options, including wall and roof insulation, HVAC equipment and building orientation, for hypothetical new detached suburban homes and urban style zero-lot homes located in the moderate Bay Area, the hot Palm Desert region and the cool Lake Tahoe region. Surprisingly, window insulation values gave the greatest range of potential influence over energy efficiency in five out of six of the hypothetical home building projects. Obviously, anyone building a new home can’t afford to overlook the importance of windows in delivering energy efficiency.
The Department of Energy says R-5 windows can reduce window heat loss by some 40 percent compared to their next most efficient cousin, R-3 windows. Given that windows account for some 30 percent of building heating and cooling energy loss in the United States — about 4.1 quadrillion BTUs lost every year — it’s no wonder that DOE has been making efforts to bring down the cost of these windows through its R-5 Volume Purchase Program.
At the same time, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has directed billions of dollars in federal grants toward improving home energy efficiency, and a new bill dubbed “Cash for Caulkers,” which recently passed the House of Representatives, would direct some $6 billion more toward rebates for homeowners. Looks like R-5 windows are about to get some serious second glances as a key way to put those billions to use saving energy — and saving the environment.
To learn more about high R value go to http://www.SeriousWindows.com
*The well-known McKinsey Report “A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction,” shows that building improvements offers by far the fastest and deepest payback out of a range of “negative cost” approaches to reducing energy use and resultant greenhouse gas emissions.
About the Author
Tips for an Energy Efficient Home