The Duggan family on their front porch newly decorated with holiday cheer.
In July 2011, the City of Decatur and City of Atlanta partnered to create the Home Energy Makeover Contest. Hundreds of entries were received and we are proud to announce that the Decatur winning home has been selected and will receive a home energy makeover worth up to $10,000! Not a bad holiday gift right?
Dana Duggan, an Oakhurst resident and proud mother of 3 daughters, was selected based on her home’s ability to demonstrate the significant difference that energy efficiency improvements can make to reduce energy bills and increase comfort. This 1,500 square foot house was built in 1970, and had an addition built in 2003. Despite enormous energy bills, areas of the home remain uncomfortable year round. “You can be freezing in the back room, and then sweating while you eat dinner in the front,” says Ms. Duggan.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Duggan and touring her home last week with the contractors who will be donating their energy efficiency services. The energy audit of her home was donated by Joe Thomas of Renewal System Solutions. Home energy audits are a great way to get professional advice on how your particular home, with all its unique characteristics, can be retrofitted to reduce your utility bills. This service is being offered by more providers every day, and the prices have become competitive. Ms. Duggan’s audit showed a significant amount of air leakage, meaning the that home’s inside air is exchanging with the outside air through leaks and holes too frequently. This is measured using a blower door test. The test of this home showed a leakage of .77 air changes per hour (ACH), meaning that every hour approximately 77% of the house’s air will exchange with the outside air. High performance homes rank less than .35 ACH.
Even more alarming was her duct leakage test. Duct leakage is expressed as a percent: duct leakage divided by total floor area served by that duct system. Ms. Duggan’s leakage was 76%. High performance homes rank less than 5%. This means that a high percentage of the air she is paying to have heated and cooled is never making it into her living areas. This likely due to loose and leaky duct work around various connection points in the home. Older homes generally rank between 20-30%. As a reference, when my 1940’s era home was tested last year, I had 36% leakage.
The home also suffers from missing and improperly installed insulation and old heating and air conditioning equipment. So what are we going to do about it? Several partners have stepped up to help.
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Partners
We plan to share all the details on the work done to Ms. Duggan’s home in January, however we would like to take this opportunity to thank the contractors and companies that have stepped up to donate their services to this makeover. This list is likely to grow and change as the scope of work is finalized in the coming weeks.
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Wellhome is serving as the primary contractor. Their contribution will likely include insulation work in the attic and crawlspace. |
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ACS Inc. is providing installation of a new heat pump and replacement of the duct system. |
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Lennox has agreed to donate a new heat pump needed to replace the old and aging equipment currently in the home. |
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Renewal System Solutions provided the energy audit for the home which will be used to prepare the scope of work. |
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[…] Posted Home » All » Dectaur Home Energy Makeover The City of Decatur and the City of Atlanta have teemed up on a program to promote energy conservation to their homeowners. To do this, they borrowed the concept from some of today’s most watched reality TV shows and came up with the Home Energy Makeover contest. After a selection process, one homeowner from each City was selected to receive a Home Energy Makeover worth approximately $10,000. The home and homeowner that was selected had to exhibit a significant need for these services. For the City of Decatur, Dana Duggan was selected. Dana is a mother of 3 daughters and lives in a great older house in the Oakwood area. Dana’s home has significant leakage and her energy bills are way too high for her 1500 square foot house. Dana’s duct leakage was tested to be around 70+%. This means that about 70% of the air flowing through her ductwork is escaping and being replaced by either attic or crawl space air (she has ductwork in both places). Not to mention the fact that her house heats and cools unevenly. The master bedroom and family room are almost too uncomfortable to live in during times of extreme temperature. Lennox was asked to participate with both Decatur and Atlanta in this project. They sought out two dealers to partner with them. Lennox is providing the equipment and the dealer will provide the labor and any other materials required to get the system up to acceptable standards. Lennox chose ACS Heating and Air Conditioning to partner with them on the Decatur project for Dana. Of course, we gladly accepted. On my first trip to the house, I was astonished at how poorly the ductwork had been installed. The distribution was not only falling apart, but the design and layout would never heat and cool the house properly. Dana’s furnace is quite old, but her AC is only a few years old. So, we decided that for our scope of work, we would replace her furnace with a new Lennox 95% efficient model, keep the existing AC system, but replace all of the ductwork. We will replace the ductwork so that it will be energy efficient and it will heat and cool evenly. To do this, we will need to add a new supply register to the family room and a new return air duct in both the family room and master bedroom. Other vendors will be working on some basic shell (whole house) air sealing and will be replacing all of the insulation in the attic with new R-30 insulation. Work begins today! After the work is completed, the City of Decatur will monitor Dana’s energy usage and bills over the next year or two. Bills and usage have been complied for the last year or two, so comparisons and a payback analysis will be able to be done on this house after the work is completed. We will continue to report on the progress of the job and the results of the analysis as they are made public. This is a very exciting project and will hopefully encourage others to spend a few dollars in the right places, make your homes more energy efficient and enjoy a more comfortable house as well as lower energy bills. Thanks to both the City of Decatur and Lennox for allowing us to partner with them on this project! To find out more, please see the blog from the City of Decatur. […]
[…] December, the City of Decatur announced that the Duggan family won the $10,000 Home Energy Makeover Contest. With the generous donations made by the project’s sponsors, work began in mid-January. […]