Sunday, August 30, 2009

GREEN LIVING: Your Personal Home Energy Audit - Looking at the Outside

By Dan Bossenbroek

Typically most water and energy saving products and strategies focus on the interior of your house. However, if you start by taking a survey of your property and the spaces around it, you will gain a better understanding of the environment around your house and the natural resources that are available to help you make your home more energy efficient.

Before you pick up your tape measure and camera and head outside, you may want to search a little for some "official" information that may already be available. Many times mortgage documents will contain a legal survey of your property. This legal survey will indicate the specific size and orientation of your property and any improvements, also know as houses, porches, garages, drives, walks, patios, decks, pools, etc that are on the property.

If you can't find a legal survey of your property, you may have luck at your county auditor's website or map room. Many auditor websites have maps which show your property lines and have a rough dimensioned sketch of your house. If you strike out with your auditor, then it's time to start from scratch, take out a pad of paper and pencil and draw a rough sketch of your property.

This rough sketch should show the property lines and the outline of any improvements. Next you should add a number of other items such as: play structures, fences, walls, trees, gardens, site lighting, utilities, water features, slopes and any other significant features. Finally, you may also want to sketch the location of these types of items that are on your neighbor's property, especially if they might impact your property. For instance there might be a 100' tall oak tree 10' from your property line that casts a shadow on your front yard for most of the day.

Now it is time to grab a friend or two and a tape measure and measure everything. That being said, you don't need to be that accurate: take your measurements to the nearest foot. Make sure that you measure the distance from you house to the property lines and the location of any large trees.

Once you have measured everything it is time to transform this into a site plan. First get out a sheet of graph paper and then figure out what scale drawing of your site will fit on the page. One square may equal three feet or maybe even four or five. Take your time and sketch your new site plan according to the measurements that you took.

Finally, if you started your site plan from scratch you should verify how your house is oriented to the compass, in other words figure out which way your front door faces. You might think that it faces directly north, but if you are off by 20 or 30 degrees it could have a significant impact on some of the energy saving and alternative energy strategies that you might employ. The one easy way to verify this is to enter your address on Google Earth, or you could just get out your handy Boy Scout compass.

Once you have finished sketching your site plan it is time to photograph the outside of your house so that you have a better idea of how it relates to the site. The goal here is to get a straight on shot of each side of your house. Stand far enough away in order to get the entire house in the photograph if possible. If this is not possible stand as far back as possible and take several photos that can be spliced together to form one larger image. Along with this you will also want to photograph the various windows, doors and other openings or penetrations in the walls.

This site plan in combination with the photographs of your house will help you understand the resources and limitations that you have on your property. They will help to illustrate where you might want to plant a shade tree, wind screen or vegetable garden, and where you might place solar panels, rain barrels or sun shades.

The third article in this series, coming soon, will help you collect information on the building envelope that you will need for your personal home energy audit.

Dan Bossenbroek is a registered architect and has been incorporating energy conservation design strategies into his projects for over seventeen years. He has extensive experience in residential design, is a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional (LEED™ AP) and his area of expertise is high performance buildings and sustainable design. Furthermore, he is an avid do-it-yourselfer having renovated several older homes. For energy saving products and home improvement advice he recommends http://www.justgreenhomes.com and http://www.justgreenhomes.net.

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