Health & Fitness
A Better Thermal Boundry Makes Your Home More Efficient
Understanding how our homes work as a system we can begin the process of reducing our energy use and sustainably using our resources.
October is Energy Efficiency Month so it’s a good time to start evaluating your homes energy efficiency. With the heating season underway
and with the increasing costs of heating fuel people are looking to save more
while increasing their comfort. The key
to energy efficiency is building science, basically understanding how the home
works as a system. Understanding the thermal boundary is
one of the first steps in making your home more energy efficient. The thermal
boundary is the area that separates the conditioned space from the
unconditioned space or the living space and the outside. It’s important because you pay to heat the
conditioned space so any breach in the thermal boundary will cause the heat you
are paying for to leak into the unconditioned space, resulting in energy waste
and higher heating bills. So by identifying where it is we can evaluate its
effectiveness and start making intelligent decisions on what cost effective
measures can be made to improve the barrier between conditioned and
unconditioned space. In simple terms the thermal boundary is where your
insulation is, in the exterior walls, attic and ether the basement or crawl
space. Now anyone can add more
insulation increased the R value in what already exists in the home, but by how
much? And what is the effectiveness of all the extra insulation and does the
cost result in enough savings to justify the upgrade? Well there is a way to calculate all of this.
The best way to do this is have a certified professional come to your home and
preform a Comprehensive
energy assessment on your home. They will use building science considering
the structure the number of residents as well as the heating system in the home
along with other factors to give you a detailed report with specific
recommendations on how to improve the thermal boundary in your home. All of
this will consider the cost and show you the savings you can expect in reducing
your heating cost. After this evaluation
you can properly and accurately estimate the amount of insulation needed to
improve the thermal boundary. Not just throwing more insulation in the attic. By
understanding how our homes are put together and how the systems within them are
supposed to perform we can start the process of wisely managing our energy use.
The end result will be lower cost and increased comfort throughout the coming
cold season.
