Add together all of your energy costs — for natural gas, electricity and gasoline — and you are likely spending $7,000 a year.
The average U.S. household pays $1,900 annually in utility bills, according to the Department of Energy. And the typical two-car family pays nearly $5,000 a year at the gas pump, after factoring in price spikes over the past year.
You can’t do much about the price of energy, but you can control how much of it you use by adding energy-saving improvements to your home. One place to start is with a home energy audit.
Do-it-yourselfers can try Energy Star’s Home Energy Yardstick or, for a more in-depth look, the Home Energy Saver, developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
For a more rigorous evaluation, you can hire an energy auditor. A typical audit takes three to four hours and costs $250 to $600. The auditor will size up your home inside and out, basement to attic, and run tests to measure the efficiency of your heating equipment and the leakiness of your home’s exterior. To find an auditor, visit energystar.gov. Or try the Residential Energy Services Network.
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Need more motivation? Invest in The Energy Detective, or TED ($120), a home energy monitor that continuously displays your electricity usage in kilowatt-hours. Place TED on your kitchen counter, and make a family game of figuring out how you can cut consumption.
Program thermostat
The biggest slices of a typical household’s energy budget are heating and cooling (about 40 percent) and water heating and lighting (each about 10 percent). With a few no-sweat moves, you can reduce your annual costs by $250 to $300.
Start by attacking your heating and cooling bills with a programmable thermostat. Set the temperature as high as you can tolerate it in the summer and as low as possible in winter, and program the thermostat for greater energy savings when you’re sleeping or away from the house. In summer, for example, every degree you set your air conditioning above 72 degrees will save you 3 to 5 percent on your energy bill. You’ll make a bigger dent by closing curtains or shades during the day.
If you haven’t replaced incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, target the five most-used or hardest-to-reach fixtures, such as in your kitchen or family room. Use your dishwasher’s air-dry option, or turn it off and crack the door after the final rinse. To save on hot water, keep showers short, and switch from the hot wash/warm rinse setting on your washing machine to warm/cold or cold/cold.
If you need to replace or add an appliance, big or small, buy an Energy Star model. One-fourth of all American homes have an energy-sucking second refrigerator, usually retired from the kitchen to the garage or basement. Your utility may offer an incentive if you remove it; it might even take it away for you. And stop the drain of “vampire” appliances and electronics that use energy when they’re turned off.
Power from the sun
Even if you don’t live in one of the nation’s sunnier climes, investing in a solar electric system could pay for itself in five to seven years. Your state’s tax incentives, beyond the federal government’s 30 percent credit, may be the deciding factor (visit dsireusa.org to see what’s available in your state). In some places, installing a system could cost $10,000 or less after incentives.
Check your electricity usage over the past year. Reducing your usage by sealing and insulating your home, for example, could allow you to buy a smaller solar electric system. Find certified contractors that will help you determine the appropriate-size system and give cost estimates. Bonus: Many states offer net metering, which allows homes producing excess energy to send it to the grid and get credit from the utility.
Two other solar projects cost much less and pay back much more quickly. The more ambitious is a solar hot water system. Basically, a flat black box on your roof (60 to 120 square feet, depending on the amount of hot water used) taps the sun’s energy to heat fluid that is piped into your home to heat water. These systems either have their own hot water tank or supply heated water to your existing tank.
The math gets a little complicated, but here is a rule of thumb: If you heat your water with natural gas, which is currently cheap, you won’t see much payback. However, solar can be an attractive option if you heat water with electricity, which can cost 21/2 times as much as natural gas.
If you want to explore the idea, have your local utility estimate your hot water energy costs, and read up on the pros and cons from the U.S. Department of Energy. Then contact contractors for cost estimates and state and local incentives.
A solar-powered attic fan to keep your attic cool in the summer is more of a slam-dunk. Electric-powered attic fans may be a better choice for large attics, but for about $500 to $600 you can buy a solar-powered attic fan that can reduce your air conditioning costs by 25 percent. These are also eligible for the 30 percent federal tax credit, so figure that you’ll pay roughly $420 after the tax credit and bank an energy savings of $100 per year.
Savings from underground
Here’s an eye-catching come-on: Heat and cool a typical 2,000-square-foot home for $1 a day. That’s a real possibility with a geothermal heat pump. In winter, a heat pump (also known as a geoexchange or ground-source heat pump) moves heat from the warmer ground of your yard to your home, and in summer it uses the colder temperature of the ground to cool your home. It can typically cut your annual energy bill by 30 percent to 60 percent, according to the Department of Energy.
A geothermal heat pump will work almost anywhere in the U.S., but the best type of system for your home and the cost to install it will depend on the area and layout of your land and its soil composition. The California Energy Commission says that, as a rule of thumb, a system will cost about $2,500 per ton of capacity (or $7,500 for a 3-ton system for a typical-size home), plus $10,000 to $30,000 or more for drilling and burying pipes.
Even so, payback is relatively quick — two to 10 years, depending on the system you choose, the financing you get and incentives for which you qualify. Geothermal heat pumps that meet efficiency requirements (all Energy Star-labeled models do) qualify for a federal tax credit of 30 percent of the cost, including installation. To find a qualified installer, check with your local utility provider or the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association.
While solar systems and heat pumps can be used by millions of homes, a home wind turbine is likely to be a green loser. To begin with, you’ll likely need at least an acre and a half of land to meet zoning requirements for the 100-foot-tall tower (it needs that height to catch the wind consistently). And that wind needs to be 10 mph, on average. Plus, if your electric rate is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour or less (the national average is about 11 cents), it’s not worth your while.
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