Rip-off

You might ask why we go to all the trouble to add so many energy efficient products to the house. Well, when you are beholden to Georgia Power for your electrical service you've got to cut costs wherever you can because they certainly won't.

With the Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery fee that the Public Service Commision allowed we are pre-paying for Southern Company's new nuclear plants at Vogtle.

So our bills are up 6.5%, there are already cost overruns with the construction and we will certainly shoulder any additional costs in the future. The fee percentage goes up each year, so our bills will be higher again next year.

I thought more supply meant lower prices...

NEST

Can't say enough good things about the NEST thermostat; but here's a few:

I can turn it on/off with my phone

I can see how long the heat was on each day.

It tells me that I can save money if I want it to

It sends me a report every month on how
much energy I've used from month
to month.

January was cooold, my gas bill was only
$70

NEST

I received an offer from Infinite Energy to get a free NEST thermostat if I switched to their company for natural gas.

I had been already looking at the NEST for a year or so and had actually tried to purchase one one day from Lowe's but they didn't have it.

When the offer came I jumped on it. It just arrived on Friday. It literally took just a couple of minutes to install.

It is very cool. It connects via WiFi to the home network and from there I can access it from any where else with an Android app.

It gathers information so it can "learn" how you like your house temperature. It has a motion sensor and will show the settings when you walk past it. It also shows the humidity on the app.

So far the weather has been really mild and it hasn't had to utilize the air conditioner but once and I basically did that to check to see if it was installed correctly.

The NEST would normally cost $259.

Problems

On Tuesday Luke from Green Summit came over to do an energy audit on the house. An energy audit is a procedure designed to test a house and see what it's energy deficiencies are. Through a series of tests they can determine the house's efficiency level and tell you where you should concentrate your efforts on making your house more efficient.

I knew already that my house had some deficiencies. The house has a whole house attic fan which is basically a 4' x 4' hole in the ceiling. This enormous hole in the ceiling allows hot air to radiate into the conditioned space. Why these fans became popular in the south is not clear to me. They definitely work against air conditioning, they may have helped in the days before a/c, but I'm not certain.

Our house has no insulation in the attic. So basically a 120 degree mass of hot air sits right on top of the conditioned space which makes the a/c work harder. The a/c unit is in the crawl space. The crawl space is vented and not sealed at all which basically means it is outdoors. Moisture, hot and cold air and dirty air is sucked right into the indoors with this configuration.

Next week I will get the results back from the energy audit and post them here.