Admission Of Snake Oil

I try hard to bring the primary weatherization sponsor for Oregon, into my camp of Home Performance dissidence.

In a hopeful rebuttal of my views, I was alerted to this news article, on August 31st:
(Daily Blog for Portland, Oregon, of the Northwest's Daily Journal of Commerce, August 27, 2012)
http://djcoregon.com/dailyblog/2012/08/27/energy-efficiency-incentives-are-supporting-the-wrong-work/ 


The taunt said, "Break out your blower door, Phil."

On September 1st, I sent this message to the author of the article:

Hello Sam,

Will you please offer one example of attic weatherization (the most-important, to be done first and best), that required "science," in discovery by a blower door?

I offer many examples of jobs done correctly, where repairs could not be discovered by a blower door.

On September 4th, Sam said:

I didn't title that editorial, the DJC did.  I invite you read more closely, again.  I certainly didn't imply we should "stop offering incentives for the smaller jobs."  if you can provide an interpretation of my piece that does I will ask the DLC for a retraction!

I am merely advocating for an increase in the incentives and the types of work that support for our entire industry.  Most importantly I suggest we should incentivize larger, deep energy retrofits that use  building physics and energy modeling, using criteria provided not only by 

payback times but also by factors such as comfort and indoor air quality.

As for the one example, I guess I just say that blower doors measure the air leakage of a structure at a given pressure difference between inside and out side.  A blower door is a tool, not the science.  I hope I didn't say  that blower doors are the be-all-end-all of our trade or building science.  That being said, I know that we use blower doors, along with arduous physical inspections (down and dirty indeed), all the time to help us air seal buildings.  Are we doing something wrong?

On September 4th, I said:

Here is the challenge again, in the last paragraph of a blog post:

http://energyconservationhowto.blogspot.com/2009/09/sealing-attic-floor-pits.html 

If you do not have direct knowledge of an example, please ask others. I respect Hammer & Hand, from HBA exposure through the Urban Timberworks meeting. Repairs achieved, the diligence, should be noted in every job. I attach a recent example Diligence Report, with brief summary of repairs fully documented in photo albums. If lacking reports and associated billing, do you really believe diligence is achieved?

On September 27th, I said:

Hello Sam,

I now take your lack of response, as admission no one at Hammer & Hand can name an instance where a blower door was of service in any significant air sealing. Perhaps a window or door seal whistled in the odd inflow and was fixed, for negligible savings.

Am I wrong?

On September 27th, Sam said:

Phil-

Honestly, we are so far apart on this that I don't know what to say. I am at a loss. 

On September 27th, I said:

Hello Sam,

Again:

Will you please offer one example of attic weatherization (the most-important, to be done first and best), that required "science," in discovery by a blower door? 

Aside from my option to post this, I must suffer an end to the conversation.

Will my tiny public please judge: Who is right here?

Fresh Air Is Free

Fresh air is free. Heating it and handling it is necessary and affordable where there is not ridiculous excess. The cost of heating in a forced hot air system is not the heating of a small amount of fresh air. It  is primarily the cost of heating surfaces of floors, ceilings, walls, windows and doors, with the circulated air. Here is the math for my house.

My natural gas usage averages 300 therms per year, for the past six years. I choose to apply a cost of $2 per therm, as expressed in my web page, Insulation Math. The $2 per therm gas cost is $600 per year.

Here, I assessed the quantity of fresh air I receive, 1330 CFM50 in a 1000 sf single-story home. I reckon ACHnat at the high end of the desirable range of from 0.25 to 0.5  changes of the house air volume, per hour. This is slightly more than I want.

The Insulation Math converts this blower door result, to a heating cost, as 0.074*CFM50, about $100 per year. One sixth of my annual heating cost is for the fresh air, and a lesser fraction is voluntary. I am in the midst of upgrades in my home that will at last tighten things, by perhaps 500 CFM50. I'll still have enough fresh air. I will save less than $40 per year by the tightening. I will save a LOT more by insulation measures, completing the insulation of outside walls by interior drywall tear-down, and sealing/ conditioning my crawl space. I have new, airtight heat ducts in the crawl space, and I don't need a jerk with a duct blaster to prove the air tightness. My new 95% efficiency gas furnace will become more effective where the steel header from the furnace is lined, and individual registers are served by flexible ducts. The savings include leakage elimination and, much more importantly, the elimination of the old steel ducts heat capacity sucked up in each cycle.

The picture of relative significance of fresh air cost and losses through windows and walls is very similar, for the very dissimilar Uphill House, in upstate New York. About $100 per year  to heat air, of a total of about $500 per year for all heating costs.

We call the lie then of this statement in the October 2012 issue of HBA News in Portland, Oregon:
Air leakage is the largest source of heat loss in most homes. Warm air leaks up and out openings high in the house, creating low pressure and sucking cold air through the openings low in the house.
The lie is necessary to the continuance of a Home Performance Industry, all those believers that all weatherization is in the numbers of blower door tests. Tell lies, and then go on to commit fraud through conflicts of interest and the can of foam trick, evidently taught and sponsored by the HPwES program developers.

The HBA News lie is expressed verbatim  in a release by Upper Valley Heat, in Lebanon New Hampshire. I don't think HBA News got their text from Upper Valley Heat.

LED Plate Lights Are Easier To Install, Than Can Lights

Every contractor who installs a product should do his part for energy
efficiency. This is not excusable.

Reducing the ceiling cutout, to tight plaster seal of a 4" junction box, requires some experience. The process is described here .  Viewed online, the complete pdf album has poor photo rendering. For clear photos, as above, please download the pdf file. 

Here is the completed installation of a T91 LED plate light. I think this is much prettier than a can light. Had 4” LED plate lights been available, I would have preferred two of them here, about 4 ft apart, for no thought of dimming.

Read more . .

Sharing Information

Gaining information worth sharing is hard work, and I have been engaged in this as an engineer and technical writer, down and dirty in attics and crawl spaces. At age 68, I will continue indefinitely to do the dirty work, where there are things to be learned or demonstrated. I need to move on, increasingly, to the harder work of sharing.  In the previous post , I suggested the sharing will move to a new venue much like book publishing. A first inspiration is in the remarkable work of David J. C. MacKay, available for free online, or purchased as a hard-cover book.
(Image Credit) 

An inventive customer brought this to my attention four months ago, with this link:
Energy saving measures from the point of view of an English physcist who thought a lot of what people were saying was BS.

http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html

The link for the book, for-free as pdf, is:
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html 

Read it online:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf 
With Errata:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/Errata.pdf 

I am overwhelmed and humbled by this work. I do all of my writing in appropriate software for such publishing, little-appreciated and poorly marketed by Adobe, FrameMaker. Hacked to look like any other hostile and arcane Adobe product, off-shored to India for further development, I have no interest in expensive versions newer than mine. v 5.5.6, of 1998. Wikipedia informs us of FrameMaker history. FrameMaker professional users talk at Framers List, joined through http://www.frameusers.com/. There is increasing grumbling among these users. 

In a future where many novices with valuable information publish, rather than blog or post web pages, competitor software is needed. Enter, Google? Such software will be needed too, if work quality assurance shifts to third-party verification by writer professionals, as in Diligence Reports. The software, and its usage, might be in the cloud.

Wear A Comfortable Respirator!

Here is a post extracted from my web site, which somehow is less discovered. I wanted it to be found with the Tools label, where labels make a blog more useful. I want to not name too many labels. That I go back and forth between a page and several blogs, tells me the future of free web sharing might be in some new venue. I think that future will be in focused book format.  Those who make the effort and earn readership will work hard. They will need small and fair compensation for their insight and work, through something like iTunes. Here is an example:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf 

This entry is prompted by dismay in following a thread at Inspection News. People working with insulation must look out for each other, not being tolerant of anything but comfortable, well-fitting,  P100 protection: oil proof, filters at least 99.97% of airborne particles. N95 throw-away covers never fit tightly, and are not acceptable.

This is the mask I use, and prefer from my own comparisons. There are many competitor products, and I will not attempt to be fair to others. This one is so comfortable, and out of the field of vision. The comfort is crucial to safety, and is worth any cost. Professional help to ensure good fit is worth any cost. I confess one reason to prefer the compact pancake filter is ability  to vacuum away too-rapid dust accumulation. I will vacuum filters several times a day when working in extreme dust, as with blowing or stirring cellulose or low-density fiberglass loose-fill insulation. That is better than choking in a cartridge mask that can not be cleared, not affording new cartridges at of the order of $10 per pair. I am thrifty, but do not begrudge the cost of frequent filter changes.

3M products are presented here. Follow manufacturer recommendations for filter renewal.

OSHA is in this conversation, with mandated worker training. I got mine in an online class purchased through my safety tools store.

At August, 2011, here is added comment. I have been making use of ideal weather, to paint another side of my house. It's sixty years old, and at thirty got painted with an early form of latex paint. All of that has to be delicately scraped off, with reveal and some disturbance of covered lead-base paint and primer. I'm removing seriously-checked soffit paint. I studiously wear this 3M respirator. Is it the right one for weatherization work, and for lead too? Here is one take on that, from PK Safety, confirming prescription of 2091 filters. 3M makes a confusing call. For various lead forms, they recommend disposable N100 respirators. There is never a call for more-expensive and better fitting P100 respirators. Surely N100 is a minimum; P100 is better.

Cutting Fiberglass Batts

Here is the best tool I have found for cutting fiberglass insulation batts:

Victorinox 12-Inch Wavy Edge BreadKnife, Rosewood Handle
by Forschner, Victorinox, Swiss Army Brands.

Use it for cutting Rockwool batts, too. They cut best with a long knife. Taping knives sold as usable with insulation batts and always inferior, are useless with Rockwool.

I found mine among quality knives at  a locksmith shop, and have used it for six years with complete satisfaction, never dulling. It is twice as hefty as my previous choice, a standard bread knife. I like to cut against decking plywood when I can, not leaving a score with the dull knife tip. I measure length or width by tape measure, always to over-fill a space. End cuts are always by eye upon measure. A length cut is often guided by some slot or by an edge over-hang. Cut full-depth without compression, or angle across the batt; an initial accurate lineup is easy to maintain.

Anyone may readily buy one from Kerekes bakedeco.com, Item 40146, at a very-fair price of $62 in March 2022. The Amazon price is  $85.


This knife will not cut cotton batts, which are best put down whole. Even a sharp hand saw struggles with batt tie threads, making a mess. The irregular cotton batts, not compressible, demand periodic fill-in with easily-cut fiberglass batts.

Basement wall insulation, to be tucked over half-buried heating ducts, is sliced with large scissors, following a drywall square.

Satisfaction With The BPA/ RTF Work Product

The following is a post of perhaps 2010, surfaced to the present in error in the course of applying labels. I don't know how to put it back. Instead, please read this in the present, updated. I have been interested in the excuse given by my rebates organization, Energy Trust of Oregon, that their policies for weatherization incentives are based on payback studies by Bonneville Power Administration and its contracted Regional Technical Forum. No criticism or improvement I offer can have any effect, against this slow Goliath. I studied the RTF documents in 2010 and reported that numbers presented have no evident bases. 

The RTF web presence for residential weatherization is now found at http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/rtf/subcommittees/res/ 
Here I look for a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet, understood to be RTF's "Work Product."
This link works.

A 2011 document describes the RTF processes:
http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/rtf/measures/support/guidelines/Guidelines%20for%20RTF%20Savings%20Estimation%20Methods%20(Release%206-1-11).pdf

RTF receives large funding, for no evident good result. A half million dollars being spent on existing measures review in 2012. Is anyone watching?

The "work product" of Bonneville Power Administration/ Regional Technical 
Forum, is in lists of "Deemed Measures." Such lists aim to give decisive figures from technical methodologies, of involved savings in Demand Side Management, DSM, for the power generator. Lists in areas of residential energy savings, are not for guidance of contractors or home owners.

The list at September, 2012 is:
http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/rtf/measures/res/ResSFWx_v2_4.xlsm 
This is a link for download of an Excel file. It is more conveniently viewed via my Google Drive:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Byj-qncyomXmMVFxVzVXX25SN00 

My comparative study in 2010 is based on ResWXSF_FY10v2_1, which is no longer posted at nwcouncil.org. It may be seen instead where I have posted it at my Google Drive:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Byj-qncyomXmM0QtS1NiZWNGRUE. 

These Excel spreadsheets are large and I am entitled to consider significance of these to me, as a weatherization contractor, and as a home owner. I look only at residential weatherization matters, to see that worthy work, happens. In this BPA can't help, they only control rates paid to them by Utility customers. RTF has no direct role in helping. The existing courses of action are through government and other entities that handle funds to be given out or to be on-loan. 

The lack of BPA heart in weatherization is evident in its posting of consumer and contractor links of end-result Specifications documents. The core authorship is at Portland, Oregon neighbor, Energy Trust of Oregon, ETO. Posted ETO specifications are two years out of date. Although BPA tries to push ETO specifications throughout the Columbia River watershed service area, and ETO blames specification deficiencies on RTF limitations, BPA is not paying much attention. No one is in charge; certainly not BPA.


I have asked BPA and RTF to justify their so-expensive work product vs. my measures review with understandable bases, done at no cost. They will not reply, being somehow beyond criticism. At September 2012, I look for changes on insulation measures that matter to me. Comparing documents v2.1, v2.3 and v2.4, I find no progress. A few numbers shift by strange small amounts.
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Byj-qncyomXmVWgyZjZRcDYycFk 


A respondent to this survey, stated:
"It would be helpful to have actual savings data to back up estimated energy savings."


I know that savings Insulation Math has predicted for my customers, have been of no interest to my rebates organization. The improved utility bills of my customers are not being tracked.