The City of Decatur and the City of Atlanta have teamed 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.
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