Is your toilet running? Catch him if you can!

Not sure about you but where I'm from we get our water bills quarterly. Personally a bill every 3 months is convenient for me in the sense that I'm not forced to open mail, make a payment and keep a record of that payment each and every month. However, the flip side to this is the inconvenience of not being able to monitor the happenings leading up to that quarterly bill. On my last bill it was indicated that there had been an increase in water consumption in my home. An increase high enough that I was able to rule out the cause being "user habit". Now I know enough about this energy efficiency stuff to know that toilets are responsible by far, for the most water use in almost any home, accounting for approximately 30% of a average home's water consumption.

As most of you have deduced by now you can guess that after reading this bill I made a B-line straight for the bathroom to stare (like a deer hunter) at my toilet while listening to it with the focus of a new mother with a 1 week old is napping upstairs.

After watching and listening for a couple minutes while never feeling more isolated I thought I had in fact noticed a little water movement but needed verification.

Hold on...

Back from the kitchen armed with a little food coloring I begin a test;

Step 1:

Step 2:

There you have it my friends --the leak, and only after a couple minutes. A toilet with no water leaking from the reserve tank would show no signs of color until the toilet was flushed. The reasons for a water leak may vary from readjusting the flapper to having to replace the entire flushing mechanism which may run you about $20-$30. In this case it was the flapper valve which needed replacing and only cost me about 4 bucks.

Keep in mind you can further reduce you water bills by;
Making sure you have aerators on all you faucets
Replacing those old inefficient toilets with more sensible ones that use 1.6 gallons or less per flush
Replacing those old wasteful shower heads with ones that use no more than 2 gallons per minute
There is even irrigation controllers out there to help from overwatering your lawn

-A. Monteiro

CSI: Energy Auditing

Last week here in Boston we had some snow fall, just about 2-3" or so. The snow is actually perfect if your a child and want to make some nice sticky snowballs, or if your an adult who likes to see a nice white blanket of snow covering yards and trees every once in while (without having to bust out the snowblower of course). Or if like me, you like to use this opportunity to learn more about particular houses without even going inside. Like an Energy Auditor who's gone rouge-- driving around snapping pictures of random houses without a warrant. Bad boy stuff...no big deal.

Today while on my beat I took note of a few interesting occurrences. Things that to the naked eye may have seemed like nothing out of the ordinary, but to myself indicated a crime had taken place.

If I may...

Well well well, what do we have here? Batt insulation in one of the stud bays falling away from the roof perhaps?

Inside these blue circles there is clearly heat loss happening. The skylight as well as the snow melting patters indicate that there are a couple finished rooms up there (or one big room). One of the more probable occurrences here is that the floors behind the knee-walls and possibly the knee-walls themselves aren't insulated and heat is rising from the floor below melting the snow on the roof. 

Again here we likely have an uninsulated floor behind a knee-wall causing plenty of heat to escape up and out through the roof. The contrast is rather sharp here...imaging all those dollars being wasted!

This looks like poor application here plain and simple. There are clearly spots where there is adequate insulation and clearly spots where there inadequate insulation.

This case is interesting ... As you can see several feet from the top of roof there is a horizontal area where the is clearly heat escaping the home. Now this is likely where the ceiling and wall meet on the second floor but what about the two larger spots indicated by the orange arrows? Hmmm, ok how about forced hot air supply ducts in each of the top floor rooms on the front facing walls. Further investigation necessary here...

A. Monteiro

Tired of drafty windows?

If you're like most you've contemplated spending thousands on new windows with the hopes that it would finally make the Winter months more comfortable in your home. Well before you take that economic plunge find out what the problems actually are. A lot of times windows are actually functioning as they should and the road to comfort is really a lot less expensive than originally thought.