What is Whole-House as a System? THE BASICS

This episode of Home Comfort Tactics shares several exciting and interesting ways you can think about your house as a system.  Chances are that your house will have at least one of the things on the list that might be neglected.  I was once an unsuspecting homeowner (and contractor simultaneously) living in uncomfortable houses and paying for new HVAC to fix the problem. There is much more to comfort and efficiency than new windows and HVAC.   Taking a whole-house approach does not mean you need to become an expert. But, if you can learn a few easy-to-understand things around your house, you can get on the right pathway to what is most important to you.  

00:00 Introduction 
00:50 House as a System Analogy: The Baby Car Seat 
03:08 Identifying Where the Bubble Needs to Be in YOUR House 
05:04 20% of Your Living Space is DEAD SPACE 
07:17 A Commonly Overlooked Home Exterior Problem 
08:55 The Thermal & Pressure Boundary of a House 
11:06 Ventilation Performance and Where is it Most Important? 
13:35 Air Leakage Test (Blower Door Test) for the House 
14:57 Ranking Your Home's Appliance Consumption

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Transcript

Hello, and thank you so much. If you're watching my podcast or any of my videos, I just wanted to take this moment here on this Saturday to thank you.  I appreciate it.  All the best to you. 

Hello and welcome to my podcast. My name is Eric Gans. This is Home Comfort Tactics and today  I want to talk to you about looking at your house as a whole system.  It's something that you may have heard about and it's something you're definitely going to hear about coming down the pike here with the Inflation Reduction Act  and I figured the first way that I would.

attack the subject is to talk about an experience that I had when, um, I had my first child, my only child.  And I remember going to a class. It was at a fire station on how to put a car seat in. And prior to that class, I didn't really think too much about a car seat. I saw a car seat. I saw a baby in a car seat.

I assumed the baby was safe. But once I went to the class and the fireman was teaching us how to put it in and all the important aspects and how to do it right and make sure it's pulled tight, obviously at that point it dawned on me that, you know, I got to take this seriously.  And I think there's a very similar type of, um, feeling that I got when I learned more about my house. 

So I went through a slight transformation there as well. I was a contractor and a homeowner and I learned about windows and doors and roofing and siding. And you know, that didn't really work out for me, but then I got into home performance and I started learning about how to make insulation better and how to tighten up the ducts and how airflow works in a house. 

And everything started to make a whole lot more sense.  So, I think that every homeowner needs to have just a little more insight into all of the different parts of their house and what makes each part work with the other so that when things are happening or maybe they're going wrong or maybe you're even in the market for some type of an improvement and somebody is trying to use maybe a scare tactic.

You're not going to be susceptible to any of that because you are going to have a basic understanding of how your house works. And it doesn't really take that much. If you think about it, kind of like you would the car seat.  Think about how each part is important to maintain and each part is important so that the other parts can work effectively. 

Alright, so let's get into that a little bit, and I gotta look at my notes here, but the first thing I had written down is, How is your house put together?  What path does it take? And I think what I'm saying there is, you have to think about your house in terms of finding  the bubble.  So in the traditional sense of bubble is round and it's pretty easy to figure out, you know, where all of the sides are, but  in a house, it's never really going to be perfect.

For example, if you have high slope ceilings upstairs, then the bubble is going to have to take a slightly different path than if You had all flat ceilings and down the basement it's going to also need to take a different path if you live on a partial basement that's finished or conditioned and a partial crawl space.

Things are going to have to change in terms of where the line or where the bubble, the path the bubble takes down, down there as well. It can even happen on the sides of the house.  But I just wanted to make sure that when you do think about your home as a system, you do have to take into consideration how it is put together, what type of foundation,  you know, how high are the ceilings,  do ceilings  You know, drop down to 8 foot and then, you know, go up to 12 feet.

All of these things, you don't really necessarily need to think about everything too, um, technically. But, when you are looking at the whole picture, understanding, you know, the pathway that the different parts of the house are taking, can help you. Okay.  If that didn't scare you off  Let's go into another concept that I think is important to understand when you're thinking about your house as a system. 

I did some research on this and what I came up with is about 20 percent of any given house, home,  is dead space.  So in other words, The walls, space in between walls, uh, maybe there's space for a chimney. Um, maybe there's other mechanical areas of the house that you can't get to. The point is, is that 20 percent of your living space is dead space. 

The thing about that is, just because it's dead space and you can't hang out there, it doesn't mean you can neglect it.  So, the biggest takeaway that I'm saying here is, often times, it is the dead space that you don't see, that you're not living in, that is costing you. The most in terms of your comfort and your energy bill. 

And the reason that is, is because even though that dead space may be covered by drywall, so you can't see it when you're standing in the room,  I can promise you when you're in the attic Or possibly in a crawl space or basement. You can absolutely see the problem because it's open. And the air inside of your home,  it's not biased.

It's not staying out of the spaces that you don't live in so that it can serve you better. The air is going to take the path of least resistance to wherever it wants to go. So if you have warm conditioned air and you have an open, you know, hole in a ceiling inside of that dead space,  that warm air is still going to find its way back behind that wall up and out and into, you know, whatever the attic or, um, wherever it may be going. 

So I just wanted to kind of hopefully draw some  light or shed, I guess, some light on some of these problems that are literally hiding in plain sight.  Alright, another one. Exterior. So yes, everybody wants their home to look beautiful, right? Siding, people dream about having new siding, new windows.  There's a connection with energy efficiency and windows, and siding too, but not as much as you may think. 

Um, everybody wants their roof to look good. Everybody wants to have a house that Has good curb appeal.  And yeah, I think for the most part, most want their house to be working. We want to make sure the water is, you know, not  getting into the house, but one of the biggest problems that I see time and time again as an example of how the outside can affect, you know, the whole system is that the downspout The gutters are pristine, the downspout looks brand new, it's tapped up to the house, everything looks great.

But the downspout is dumping, you know, within 12 inches of the foundation wall.  And that's going to cause problems. It's going to cause humidity in the basement. It's going to cause foundation problems over the long haul. So the point here is that we want to make sure that, for that particular example, that we get any type of water, any type of rain carrying system.

We want to make sure that that's done. 10 feet away from the foundation so that you can prevent, you know, those problems, the high humidity in the basement or even, you know, foundation problems.  Moving on. The thermal and pressure boundary inspection. Well that ties a little bit into the first thing that I said about the pathway that the house takes.

Because when you are evaluating the pathway and you're looking at the bubble, the bubble is consistent, or consists of, I should say, two parts. You have the thermal, and pressure boundary. So the thermal boundary and the pressure boundary. And that's going to create your bubble. So what is that? Well, in lay terms the thermal boundary, that is your insulation.

That's the pink stuff. That's the stuff that everybody understands when they see it, they know what it is.  But the other one that's a little less known, but  Equally, if not more important, is the air barrier. And that's what most houses are lacking. And the other trick to all this, it sounds easy enough.

Okay, Eric, we need to have an air barrier right where there is the  thermal barrier. Insulation and the air sealing, they need to go hand in hand.  And yes, it is a simple concept. But, when you have a house that is taking, you know, several different paths and you have a bunch of different features, it's going to make figuring that out a little more tricky. 

And that's, you know, part of the whole house assessment. And the thing about all this is, I'm telling you this not to have you try to understand every nuance about what I'm saying, but if you have a general overview of what I'm talking about, or a general idea about, you know, what goes into some of this stuff, then it's going to help you.

It's going to help you pinpoint problems and Because all of the complicated things that I'm talking about, they don't usually apply to every single house. And if you live in your home and you pick up on something I'm talking about, then you may see a sign of that around your house based on something I said. 

Anyway, I'm going on and on here. You kind of get what I'm saying.  Alright, the next part of a whole house assessment and a big part of your comfort and energy efficiency is ventilation.  And a lot of people want to, you know, really home in on, or hone in I should say, on the ventilation in the attic. But I'm here to tell you that the ventilation in the attic is more for preserving things. 

The wood dry. It's to just get some air flowing. We don't want it to get stagnant and get mold or moisture trapped in the attic.  A lot of times people think that getting an attic fan or, you know, putting baffles in. to the attic is going to help with heat upstairs in the summer  and yeah I mean if you can keep your attic a little cooler organically than it would be otherwise sure that's probably going to translate into maybe a little bit easier work that your HVAC has to do to make your house cooler up there but I'm here to tell you the more important You know, thing to pay attention to when it comes to getting your house more comfortable and cooler in the summer is the boundary,  you know, the thermal and pressure boundary between that hot attic, stagnant, hot attic air and the inside where you want it to be nice and cool and dry. 

Oh, ventilation. So, the more important  thing to be thinking about when it comes to ventilation  is exhaust fans. Think about it. In the summer particularly, you take a nice hot shower, the shower is bleeding off humid air, or humidity I should say, and it's mixing with your air, and if you don't have anything to pull it out, to get it out of the house, then it's just contributing  to the problem because a humid home is a warm, uncomfortable, hot home,  a nice dry home.

You could keep the temperature a little higher in a dry home and still feel much more comfortable than if it's the same temperature and you have a lot of residual humidity from showering and  also other problems. So keep that in mind.  Another part of the whole house. Which does also tie a little bit into the pressure boundary is an air leakage test.

You want to figure out how leaky your house is or possibly how leaky it's not. Knowing how much your house is leaking air and having some quantifiable number to it through a whole house assessment, it does set the stage. to help you solve other problems. So getting a whole house assessment through a professional is going to give you that information.

I just want you to understand that uncontrolled air leakage, which happens  in most older homes, built even before 2012,  it's problematic. And it could be the source of several different problems in a house, and we won't get into all that right now, but if you have comfort, you might have condensation on ducts.

There's lots of different problems related to, uh, having a house that is very leaky.  Pests. You know, you could get a lot of bugs and critters coming in as well.  Alright, and then the last thing, well it's really not the last thing, there are so many parts to all of this, and it can really get a little bit complicated, and I don't want to get this going too long here, so the last thing I want to talk about are appliances.

And one interesting, funny story about that is, I once went in to do an energy audit, and you know, I always ask, you know, what's led you down this path, what's got you wanting to do this today. And.  This person said that they are sick and tired of their high energy bill.  And, you know, amongst other things, one of the things that I found to be really interesting and curious is that  they had, I think, four refrigerators running.

Three of which were from the 90s.  And one thing I always tell people is that the biggest  energy draw in a house, the biggest energy suck is going to come from your HVAC. So we want to try to figure out how to, you know, not have that turn on as much.  The second is your water heater. Okay, so we want to get that at 120 degrees.

You know, I've gone into houses where the water is kicking out at 150 degrees. And that's just costing, because your hot water heater is constantly working to keep it at 150, and you don't even need it to be 150. 120 is going to kill bacteria, and it's also not going to scald the skin or baby skin. It's going to be right there where you need it.

That's the magic number for that. But back to it.  The three refrigerators, that is your third biggest energy draw in a house, your refrigerator. So if you've got three old ones, mind you, you know, pulling energy, then that is definitely going to be a reason why your energy bill is a little bit out of control.

So just keep that in mind. And that's part of the energy audit. If you get one, or the whole house assessment, then those things are going to be looked at. And, you know, for that person, you know, I don't. want to beat them up or anything, they didn't really think of it in those terms, but once they understood that, then they're empowered to make a decision.

They can either continue to run those three extra refrigerators and  You know, pay that extra, or they could upgrade maybe one or two of them and maybe reduce down to two and have two energy stars so you can reduce your bill that way.  Or they can, you know, completely go without and see how much that would help.

But you get the point  looking at your house as a whole system. It's the way of the future is coming down the pike and everybody's going to have to get it done. So hopefully this is helpful. It's giving you some insights. I think every homeowner should become a building scientist to some degree. I think it will, you know, make so much sense, but I understand why also we're not, we are very busy and it's hard to, you know, know everything about everything.

But. When it comes to your house, you spend a lot of money to live there, you might as well make it  a nice little oasis. And you can actually make it more comfortable and spend less, and that just makes so much sense. So, thanks for listening.