There are several websites that help homeowners figure out how to save energy and money by giving personalized recommendations. Three popular sites are Microsoft’s Hohm, Lawrence Berkeley Labs’ Home Energy Saver and Wattbot.  We ran a New York metro-area home through all three sites, and we’ll show you how the outputs compared.  We’re keeping the address of the home private, but it’s a split-level, 2000 sqft, single family home built in 1958, occupied by 2 parents and 3 children. The parents expect to live in the home for another 15 years.

Hohm recommended that our NY homeowner make small changes around the house such as lowering their water heater’s temperature, setting their computers to hibernate, installing CFLs, and replacing the refrigerator and air conditioner with energy-efficient models.

These sound like reasonable suggestions, but their computers already hibernate, they already have CFLs in all their sockets, they have insulation around their pipes, they replaced their kitchen refrigerator three years ago, and they don’t have a central air conditioning system, so this output wasn’t very valuable.

Home Energy Saver recommended the family switch to CFLs in their high-use fixtures, switch from an electric dryer to a gas dryer, get a more energy efficient washing machine, get a more efficient gas water heater, upgrade their wall insulation to R-11 and perform several more upgrades as you can see below. 

As we discussed earlier, this family already has CFLs in all their fixtures.  They also just purchased a new washer and dryer five years ago. They could still buy a more efficient gas water heater and add more insulation in their walls, so those two recommendations were valuable. If these two sites asked about upgrades that have already been done, the remaining recommendations would be more actionable.

But many homeowners are asking themselves, “Should I get solar panels or should I make energy efficient upgrades to my home?”  That’s a hard question to answer. We built Wattbot because there is no site out there that can compare energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy upgrades simultaneously.

Wattbot recommendations are split into three categories: Recommended, Worth Considering and Not Recommended, which is an important distinction when there are more than a few ways to upgrade your home.  For this homeowner, we are showing that solar electric is actually the most economic upgrade for this home.  The next best option for this family is to install a solar hot water system. After that, they should get a new energy efficient dishwasher because their current dishwasher is more than nine years old.  Wattbot shows the incentives and the tax rebates that they qualify for, and even show that they could get a loan to cover the up-front costs.  Once the homeowner decides to take action on any of the recommendations, Wattbot helps them connect to the best matching energy contractor.

Thinking of doing your own comparison now?  We’d love to hear your results.

We get this question a lot at Wattbot:  should I choose (or upgrade to) a tankless hot water heater?  The short answer:  don’t make the choice based on efficiency or lifetime costs, as both types are a wash over time.  Instead, choose purely on the basis of the installation.  If you don’t have the space for a tank, or you want an outdoor installation, then choose a tankless.  Otherwise, choose a tank model.

The reason we say that you should only choose a tankless system if you don’t have enough space to install a tank is pretty much for the same reasons that Consumer Reports noted in an October 2008 article:

• Despite heated claims over efficiency, it turns out that modern tank units are only slightly less efficient than tankless units, in real life settings.
• That slight efficiency advantage is rarely enough to make up for the additional up-front costs of a tankless unit over the life of the system.  In the end, a tankless system will at best break even, if a realistic cost analysis is performed.

So our advice is to ignore the partisan efficiency and cost arguments, since they are, for all practical purposes, a wash, and instead just pick your system on the basis of available space.  There’s a reason that tankless systems are popular in Japan — Japanese houses rarely have space for a hot water tank!

A post from one of our fans in Michigan talking about two home improvements she made and one behavior change.

I love the environment and I love saving energy, but I also love not choking over my Michigan apartment energy bills. Last winter I came up with some crafty ways to save money.

I made draft dodgers for all my outside doors - these cloth snakes sit at the bottom of your door and keep the cold from creeping in. I made mine from the sleeves of a thrift store sweater stuffed with old T-shirts and rags. (If you’re not a sewer, search “draft dodger” on etsy.com for some cute ones.) The only problem was, when I closed the door to leave the house, I couldn’t keep the dodger (which is on the inside of the apartment) up against the door. Enter the double-sided draft dodger. I made mine with cardboard poster tubes sewn into fabric (foam would work well too), then slipped it under the door. They work like a charm.

Next, I installed a programmable thermostat. My apartment is old and my thermostat was relying on a rather unreliable mercury tube to assess the temperature. For about $20 I bought a programmable thermostat so that my heat would automatically turn off during the day when I’m at work, and go down low overnight when I’m snuggled in bed. It was a little challenging to install, but with some help from the Internet and the instructions provided, it was ready to go within an hour.

And finally, the ultimate test of courage. I’m the kind of person that gets cold when it’s breezy and 75 degrees outside. So, instead of cranking the heat in the winter, I play a little game with myself that goes like this: if I’m cold at home, I put on one more layer - another sweater or a fleece, a pair of long underwear etc. If I’m still cold after 10 minutes, then I allow myself to turn up the heat a couple degrees. But usually, within 10 minutes, I’ve forgotten that I was cold.

Isabella Weber is a graduate student at the University of Michigan
School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the intersection of
human health and the natural environment.

I had to laugh when I read, Scott Adams’ recent WSJ article “How I (Almost) Saved the Earth” because he hit the nail on the head: it’s hard being green.  Listen to what the Dilbert Creator says:

One day you run into an engineer who, unlike yourself, actually knows something. He listens to your whining about your energy bill and speculates that perhaps the walls weren’t packed densely enough. Or maybe there was too much moisture in the mix. Or maybe magazine articles are a bad way to learn about the science of insulation. Or perhaps, he speculates, while choosing his words carefully, you were too ignorant to realize that the majority of your energy loss is through your windows and roof.

It’s so true - there are a gazillion and one things to think about when building or renovating your home and it’s hard to get lost in the details.  Some people focus on the materials being green, others focus on the amount of materials they diverted from the landfill in the process and others focus on the amount of energy their home will use in years to come.  If you’re in that third group, make sure you check out what the best way for you to save money on your energy bills are and then share your story with us and we’ll pass it along to Scott too.

A few weeks ago, I came across this wedding registry site, HatchMyHouse, that allows couples to put items of a house on their gift wishlist instead of the typical serving tray and fine china.

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could have your wedding guests contribute to a pot of money that would allow you to renovate all your windows to double-paned ones, which are more energy-efficient.  Or even to help you put a down payment on a solar pv system.  Depending on which financing program you qualify for, you could get a solar pv system installed on your roof for as cheap as $250 a month.  The potential to educate future homeowners about the most cost-effective ways to save money on their new home is huge and what better time than right after their honeymoon. :)

Light bulbs are measured in watts, which is how much energy they use.  A typical light fixture in your home takes a 60 watt bulb, but if it were a CFL, which is more energy efficient, you would only need 13 watts to give you the same amount of light.  This can be confusing when you just want to replace that burned out light and can’t find the same wattage on the shelves at your hardware store. 

Light bulbs can also be measured in lumens, which is the amount of light they give off, or brightness.  In the example below, the incandescent bulb gives off 820 lumens of light and uses 60 watts, whereas the CFL (on the right) gives off 870 lumens of light and uses only 13 watts.

Compact fluorescent bulbs can produce the same amount of light (lumens) as a traditional incandescent bulb, while using significantly less energy (watts).  However, current light bulb packaging only advertises watts, but in mid-2011, the packaging will be more like nutrition facts that call out lumens, the estimated yearly energy cost, lifetime expectancy and light temperature of the bulb.

Does it really matter what the terminology is for wasting energy? It’s not as important as doing something to use less energy or produce your own, but we have to applaud ConEdison for educating the residents of New York City.  Although, it’s the people in the suburbs that ConEdison should be educating, because the homes are bigger hence they are using more energy.

We’re looking forward to more marketing campaigns on the LIRR and MetroNorth.  Send us photos of the best utility marketing campaigns you’ve seen.

According to a recent survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average US consumer spends 7% of their paycheck on utilities, fuels and public services.

Let’s say for example that you make $100K a year, that means that you’d spend $7,000 a year on utilities, which is $584 a month. 

What if your household makes $200K a year?  Then according to this survey, you’d be spending a little over $1000 a month on utilities.

So are you paying more or less than the national average on utilities?

Thanks to Visual Economics for the infographic.