savings

Save Thousands of Dollars By Using One of These!

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We get a lot of calls from home owners who have stars in their eyes for solar arrays, geo thermal heat/cooling, or other fancy expensive “green” gadgets.

Here is a device that costs around $100 or less that can save you thousands of dollars in energy bills. Better yet, you can buy one at the home center and even install this yourself.

These are programable thermostats. A programable thermostat allows you to program various temperature settings into it, so you only use the fuel you need to be comfortable when you need it.

The thermostat on the left handles whole house/zone heating and cooling. You can see, its set for 57 degrees. Thats our “away” setting for the house. This thermostat, combined with some new insulation and the low settings when we were sleeping or away from home saved us well over 20% in heating costs last winter.

The thermostat on the right is for the electric radiant heat in our foyer area. This can be an efficient way to heat a room but it has to be planned for before renovation.

Call us if you need a hand.

Energy Rate Caps Expiring: How Prepared Are You?

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There’s good news and bad news when it comes to electricity consumption in Pennsylvania. The good news is the rates that electricity suppliers could charge you have been capped since 1996 as part of Pennsylvania’s “Electricity Generation Customer Choice and Competition Act.”

The bad news is those caps have already expired – or will do so by year’s end – across the state. Those markets that have already become “uncapped” include those served by UGI Utilities Inc., Pike County Light & Power Company, Citizens Electric of Lewisburg, Wellsboro Electric Company, Duquesne Light Company, Pennsylvania Power Company and PPL Electric Utilities Inc. The remainder – areas served by West Penn Power Company, Pennsylvania Electric Company, Metropolitan Edison Company and PECO – will expire on 12/31/10.

In some cases, consumers have found that their rates have gone down after the caps came off, but in the majority of cases, the costs have skyrocketed – in fact, some rates are predicted to rise by as much as 70%!

So what’s an energy consumer to do? As a result of loosened restrictions, there are many companies that will now be able to supply your electricity through the infrastructure supplied by your current utility company. Start shopping now for a competitive electricity supplier to try to minimize the hit you’ll take. To find a list of suppliers in your area, visit The Public Utility Commission’s website You can also take steps to minimize your electricity usage – including installing proper insulation and energy-efficient windows, doors, appliances and lightbulbs, keeping your thermostat at a moderate setting, and unplugging small appliances and turning off lights when not in use.

Investing in Energy Upgrades? Spend Your $$ Wisely

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We recently caught up with one of our HVAC pros. He’s a very nice and knowledgeable guy who works for a large HVAC company, whose name I won’t mention here. He let us know they have been installing a lot of geothermal HVAC systems and had just completed one for a house in Mt. Airy, a town on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Let me provide a little backstory on this. Typically, geothermal is done for houses with yards since the geothermal heat/cool collectors are placed in drilled holes in the ground, or under a lot of soil, or in ponds. In other words, you need access to soil or groundwater to make use of the system. That’s because these systems use the constant heat/cold differential of the earth, or a pool of water, to condition the air in your home.

This particular home is about 1,500 sf — not a big house, by any means — located in an area that typically offers minimal yard space. In the case of this project, we were told they drilled three 250-foot-deep holes for the system installation, and the project cost $30,000. We didn’t get the background on the house or why the homeowners wanted to replace their existing system. It could be they had an original hot-water heat system and no A/C at all. We see that a lot in Philly. Because these old heaters had few moving parts, they can still be in use after 60 to 80 years. Typically, these old heaters are very inefficient, and the houses are uninsulated with old wooden windows.

Make no mistake: we think geothermal is a great system to use, and we consider this option for some of the homes that we work on. But $30,000 is a lot of money, even with the 30 percent tax break currently offered by the government. Did this homeowner make the best decision when it came to spending his renovation dollars? Sounds like he was happy enough.

But maybe a general contractor who looked at the whole-house system with the homeowner might have suggested conducting an efficiency audit for $500, followed by super-insulating the house for $2,000 to $3,000, and then installing a simple gas-fired hot water heat and domestic hot-water system. For this size house, that HVAC system would run about $10,000 – $13,000 installed, A/C included. In this scenario, the homeowner would have paid about half the price of the geothermal system and would still be eligible for tax breaks for all of these efficiency measures.

Keep in mind that energy efficiency means using less energy, and the most expensive solution is not always the most appropriate one. Typically, installing proper insulation after an efficiency audit will yield impressive results. Once that is done, heating and cooling appliances can be chosen to suit the homeowner’s needs and complete the efficiency upgrade.