Energy Audit Follow Up

Our top four recommendations were:
1. Ventilation ( this is to address our water problem)
2. Attic sealing up leakage and insulation
3. Water heater to gas-tankless
4. Sidewall insulation

We are going to work on 1 and 2...since 3/4 are big ticket items.

Our next steps are:
1. get at least two bids from contractors to do the work outlined in our Energy Audit ( Laura made it easy to get bids. She gave us a list of businesses to contact and drafted a request for bids)
2. Get a hygrometer to measure the humidity in our house. We need a baseline so we can tell if we are making a difference.

The reason we have a lot of water: We have 4 people taking showers, cooking, and breathing in a relatively small space in tightly sealed house. These leads to quite a bit of water in the house which condenses on the windows ( esp. at night) and leads to water soaked wood and mold. We need to get the water out of our house ( stronger fans, run them longer)

Good News Bad News

First the good news: Although I don't have the final report...it seems our house is pretty energy efficient.

Here is Laurie using the infared camera...looking for air leaking...and she had a hard time.  She did find some spots but not as much as she usually does.


And here she is doing the blower door test...to see how tight our house is.  She had to stop the fan and go to a smaller one because our house was tighter than she expected.

And here she is checking our really noisy fans ( the ones I was hoping didn't really work) but it turns out they work just fine...in fact better than fine...above average.

So what's the bad news...we have a real problem with water on our windows and not just a little condensation...I wipe up puddles and we have to watch for mold.  Laurie felt this was the challenge to our house..where is the water coming from and what can we do about it.

Stay tuned...we should get the report in the next week or so.