Charlie Richardson, came by today. He's doing the technical audit portion of a city-subsidized energy audit I signed up for through the Center for Resource Conservation. Since I'd already had a blower door test done yesterday, we brainstormed some other ideas.
Refrigerator energy use
- based on the values that my Kill-a-Watt meter showed, my refrigerator is using about 431 kWh per year. Charlie directed me to a website that lists published energy usage for most models. At the Kouba-Caballo Associates website, we entered the refrigerator model and found predicted energy use of 561 kWh per year. Either way, it's surprisingly efficient.
Design heating load
- Charlie had a brilliant idea that had to do with the upcoming weather.The next few days were predicted to have 0F temperatures for multiple days. When you're sizing a heating system, you need to know how much heating you have to provide for these worst case days. People may use 5F or other similar numbers for Front Range locations. By reading the meter at 24 hour increments, and logging the temperatures inside and out, we could do a measurement to show actual heating energy use for days that had the actual design conditions. Another piece is the Hunter Set & Save thermostats (available from Lowe's) that Charlie said will track the amount of time the furnace runs (hours and minutes) for the current day, previous day, current week and previous week. This could give us another look at how close the current heating system is sized compared to the design load. Whoa....this is exciting!
As Charlie left he said, so you think you can get that thermostat installed this weekend? Oh wait, I have to actually do something?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment