well good evening everybody we have to use the mikes so they're there taping the c evening so people can watch us when they've got insomnia or something and so even though are a very small group we have to be speaking into  so my name is mark danner palooka and i work for the city hall and i'm a city planner and fortunate enough to be kind of the city's project manager for this residential energy audit in labeling program two and it's it's been a great fun very informative for myself and hopefully informative for you all also so we're kind of at the the end of the program in some regards and hopefully it's may be right in process or maybe at the beginning for some of you as you're as you're looking through your reports from the green home institute and in deciding what you may or may not want to do with that so but we trust everybody did receive the report the month or two ago and have been in correspondence with bret a little here and we trust that you've since you've come tonight you probably have some questions too and but we have brad is a prepared a final report for us because we thought it might be instructional or or interesting at least  you all had the opportunity to look at your kind of small segment of of how your home performs and brad is going to be sharing with you tonight kind of the broader picture of all fifty homes and some of the trends and the things that he's seen in the larger group of people that are in this pilot program and some of the the takeaways that the city can take from that and in going from there so really kind of without any well i guess just with mechanics tonight brad is going to give his presentation and i know that in a little while we're going to have a couple contractors here and maybe is there any in the audience right now ok i believe there's going to be a couple contractors coming in also should any of you have any questions and want to just start exploring things a little bit further with the contractor so i'm going to pass it over to brett and i think we can because we're really small tonight we can be real informal and please feel free to ask a broad questions right in the right in his presentation he does a real good job of doing that so thank you all right thanks mar said i'm just going to go through a quick summary of some of the stuff that we found and then hopefully try to help you all figure out if you have any specific technical questions on what to do how to read your  reports or even any financing ideas or who to work with we would love to help you out and feel free to stop any of them going so again my name is brett little executive director at the green home institute we are a five a one c three nonprofit located in grand rapids and we oversee residential green building training and programming throughout the midwest we have partners who do various programs throughout the mid west and today this is about the residential energy performance score or rep score so you'll see that logo and you probably saw it in some of your in some of the reports as well as we're going through that  just real quick on the top here in the average score of all fifty homes was roughly twenty four all together is what we found the highest performing score and two out of the fifty homes i believe was up by the thirty nine again this is out of seventy that's where it tops out and it starts at zero after upgrades if everybody all fifty homeowners were to implement all of the recommendations that we had made we would probably see about a forty two on the on the on the label and on an average is where most people can get to just some real quick on the numbering and meanings again the residential energy performance score is meant to be somewhat similar to a mpg rating to your car if you're thinking about the number of what your home would be or a home you would see with the reps label versus comparing it to a car and how a car performs so under twenty you know starting to get into that gas guzzler range twenty to forty you have a pretty good performing home that could use some more work potentially wind but mostly solar to get to those kinds of numbers there has been some questions about energy use intensity or even you know with  w you can go online and you can grab your body dropping in your energy bills and so some folks have been wondering what the difference between our score and their score was so what is measuring is energy use per square foot while our scores meant measuring energy use per year there's as per square foot per year and both you know are useful metrics and in fact you know if you just take our scores energy output and divide it by your square footage you can get your predicted using our tools well and so again they're both helpful tools just ours is not reported in an e u i fashion and so the number of what you see on your reps versus what you might see in the b p w is different in the sense that's not considering your per square foot usage some other housing details on average most of the homes we audited had three bedrooms two thousand but just over two thousand square feet was the average size home and interestingly the average age of the homes which were scattered all over the place you know dividing by your square footage and after upgrades if everybody followed all the improvements you would get a fourteen and just to contrast that michigan on average the average home in michigan today as a two thousand  report was an eleven that takes into consideration all the newly built homes which are much more energy efficient  know that's a that this is not part of that so on average the total energy usage is forty three six thousand kilowatt hours equivalent so what we do is we take your natural gas energy and we convert it which usually comes in c c f or therms and we convert it to kilowatt hours and we add it to the electrical energy and so you can see that forty six that's the number how we get to twenty four so if you take seventy minus forty six that's how you get the average of twenty four so that's a quick way to determine you know if you see a score really quick how much energy per year a house is rated to use after improvements if everybody were to follow all of our recommendations the average home would be using twenty eight thousand kilowatt hour equivalents again the average in michigan is actually about thirty six and the average in the midwest is about thirty two using energy information and data and just you know heating roughly accounted for about seventy eight percent of most people's energy use and we'll get into what our recommendations are based on that  again so on average the if you were to follow our recommendations fifty five percent energy savings a majority of that being in your natural gas bill some of it being in your luck trickle could be realized  average across all of the homes following these recommendations and so let's just get into some of the biggest opportunities we saw in a majority of the homes and then you can feel free to ask me questions on if how you could achieve those or we can wait to the end and have a discussion on that too so so the first thing we're in michigan we're primarily heating state so most of our energy is lost through convection so that's air movement so what we have found is measuring air changes per hour when jamison came in your house and set up that board or testing equipment he was measuring your air loss on average we found about a twelve ac h across all fifty  homes that's so twelve air changes pressure changes through the house through the walls to the attic every hour using air blower tool and just to put that in a little bit of perspective a newly built code home in michigan should get around seven a leader energy star home on average at its lowest should get five point five when the new michigan code comes into effect we're looking at a four and if anyone's ever heard the passive house term or passive  term which actually started here in the u s in during the energy crisis and then went to germany came back that's actually point six so you can't breathe in your house than we put in make up there so you'll be good so those are just some ways to look at those numbers kind of diving down into what the recommendations are the rain banjoist in basements seventy two percent of homes needed major improvements to the rim banjoist those improvements could mean a couple different things a majority of those i believe needed air sealing done the rest probably had just some fiberglass pushed into them that could be removed or sealed and either put back or put in a better non compressed insulation that's a little more effective so again that would both we were i think pretty impressed with the amount of attic insulation in the majority of the homes and so we probably saw a lot of i think fi of fiberglass so you know pretty of impressive amount of the vatican salacious and so our recommendations were to some degree essentially you know either pull that back an air seal under it again which is going to prevent convection or top it off with further insulation to bring it up to what we call our thirty eight which is resistance to heat which is michigan code or perhaps are forty nine  again if you want to go to a higher standard but air sealing it before you top it off would be a much better idea than just adding more insulation to it you know again if you feel like moving it back yeah does any of our energy professionals in the room want to take a good cra altogether only fifty five percent of all the light bulbs that we counted were high efficiency so there's a lot of room for improvement as your incandescents are burning out or or even before they burn out if you still could save some money  g over the l e d s is what we recommend right away there is a there is a rebate for that which i think at some degree cover about fifty percent of the cost depending on the type of alley do you get as far as some questions we get should i swap out see i maybe a little hard to be from back there but overall we would say we're pretty impressed by the amount of energy efficient back so heating systems that were in the homes you know the way that we read these is that energy efficient ones are about ninety percent or higher condensing closed furnace is the standard thirty four percent of majority the homes down there have eighty to ninety percent probably power  vented furnaces and then the i would say the old eight percent are eighty percent and under and naturally drafted as well as probably a majority of the boilers fell into the naturally drafted area too  did catch a couple maybe three of the homes with some potential carbon monoxide issues and some of the older furnaces but overall good to see that there were a lot of energy efficient  for instance in a majority of the homes thrown a little bit of a curveball in here water conservation we took a look at the opportunities for saving water which can also save energy you can save energy in two different ways one saving water you can save it in year hot water heater by running less more efficient water systems and the processing plant which isn't something that affects you directly but every month of water that comes in your house and then goes out of your house has to be process uses electrical energy and then also uses chemical inputs which can be a cost so the less water  use the more savings can be had and may not be directly impacting your bill but so what we found is that ninety five percent of the homes had really high flow water fixtures and so there's a lot of opportunities to get lower flow showerheads areas that you can just swap out in your fos it's in that high efficiency toilets which is going to save you hot water by any means but it's a huge impact for indoor water so we saw opportunity for sixty four percent indoor water savings by making these swaps and you know sometimes people think about especially shower heads you know consider lower flow of discomfort but now a lot of coal or you know everybody there are really good at making low flow to shower heads that feel just the same so there's there's been a lot of improvement in that area and it can also reduce your water bill but we don't do any kind of further calculations into that insulation and i'm the only thing you could really do if you have fiberglass insulation your walls and you're really trying to go for a super high performance home when you've done everything else is you could use poor in place foam most building scientists don't recommend this it can have a lot of issues with moisture and other problems but it is becoming more and more popular and you can put it in the walls we don't really know anyone that we recommend for it but again if you're trying to really air seal your wall and you've got the fiberglass batts and it that you know that could be a direction to go but you know i think that was in the couple of i reports as like later on options so the majority of the homes that don't have insulation in the walls joyous so now we're kind of getting into the really low impact things and then you know most of the stuff that we've covered already is going to save a majority of the energy should those be implemented interestingly enough  we looked at fridge age which can equal efficiency in you know a pretty good amount of them were newer or you know just second to newer sort of like i think two thousand right jamison you know so you  know a little opportunity for electrical savings if you don't if you're swapping out your fridge or it or and but you know pretty good shape here for a majority of the homes washers we looked at just look ones can can save water but we didn't do any specific calculations on those sixty eight percent of the homes had actual central air conditioning that's not considering if you put in a there were a few of those ok yes we don't put those into our reports specifically but this is just looking at the actual centralized centralized air so the way ac is rated is unseasonal energy efficiency rating seer so the average rating was about eleven recommendations especially if you're going to add a new cd or are a new ac you don't have one and you want to add one at least go with thirteen and if you're trying to do a high performance and you've already knocked out all your other things and sixteen are better for the for the air conditioning but not a lot of lot of opportunity there and mostly we're a cooling or heating state especially these last two years it's been colder than average almost  a dryer fuel again we actually look at gas for electric believe it or not electrical energy is actually more energy efficient than gas it's not cheaper but it is more energy efficient and we found one homeowner that we work to that was interesting they swapped out their their electric dryer for a gas dryer and they will end up in theory according to our reports save money but end up using more energy so it actually made their score worse because our scores based on energy savings so the current way that we have everything set up natural gas coming into your house is actually cheaper to burn but a little less efficient but again not in a huge area of of concern  for overall energy efficiency you know you can't look at energy efficiency in a home without looking at dura billeted and health and indoor air quality so we did go through and assess also some of these issues while we are there they don't necessarily affect your score but there are certain things with your score can improve that can impact your health and their quality in either positive or negative ways so from an indoor air quality standpoint looking at naturally drafting water heaters and furnace is an carbon monoxide risk we tested that sixteen percent of the homes had a potential back draft issue which ideally probably had to do with  heaters so james and we flipped and i think the bath and the range hood and then that could show that some of the emissions from your hot water heater are getting pulled up into the house you know which can reduce air quality so sixteen percent not too bad but something worth considering if you want to swap out your water heater ninety five percent of the hot water heaters were naturally drafting water heat changing a water heater really isn't going to save that much energy the reason you'd probably want to do it is to prevent that natural drafting switching to a point on demand water heater if in fact we'll probably end up using more energy so just to reiterate that i probably said it one hundred times we're not recommending people go out and swap out their water heaters to demand much less even even hype high efficiency tank ones unless they believe there's an actual issue or want to get rid of so that's an impressive number two to see at that low and that's good to hear twenty six percent of homes did not have appropriate amount of carbon monoxide detectors an appropriate amount can mean two different things it could mean there were either none or there see there there weren't too many that's an easy fix and you know instantly saves energy on the on the ventilation side most homes had appropriate air changes per hour meaning they weren't too tight i would have been a good problem to have  so every home was getting quality fresh air being pulled in right through the walls and in the attic fourteen percent had either no or inappropriate bath fan venting which can mean two different things either there wasn't a bath fan relating hood ranges so it's just pouring everything right back at you or they were being dumped into the attic and not out the side of the house or the attic similar to the bath and so again pretty impressive numbers for ventilation pretty good ventilation overall and the majority of the homes this may look pretty bad but the leaky duct where is actually leaking into condition space so you're not wasting any energy if anything if you're interested in you can get to your docs it's very cheap to seal them yourself we had one person go through and seal their ductwork in their basement and they had a little workshop down in the basement which i don't believe they were intentionally trying to be and they found immediately that that room was a lot colder that's because the heat was getting more efficiently distributed up stairs where they mostly most likely wanted it so you know behind walls if you really want to steal your ductwork and improve the comfort of your home you know it can be pretty expensive to use them some applications that can essentially blow in a sealant into your duct so those aren't huge recommendations that we have but something to think about if you if you want to make big correct we did not use duct we could testing it was just this isn't sealed so y yeah i'm talking loose risk on a one to three scale they rate all the counties in the country but rating can be different on a home by home basis and we see this happening in reality every day we're still missing some of the radon test from several homes so if any of you and just tell him you're working with him and he will give you a free kit and if that cut kit comes back as a problem he'll give you a free ninety take it which is a little more efficient so they're very very great really really willing to work with us and we've already sent a couple homeowners their way to came back as potential risks high level risks in a into homes both through testing the basement and the first floor so those homeowners are further investigating that and that can usually lead to basement retrofit which potentially if you're trying to air sealing until your basement it could be a two for one at the same time getting it all done if your basement already finished then that could be a lot more work so we're still collecting data and results and so if you have any questions either for me or go to the health department and they'll be willing to to work with you on that just real quick a solar energy we saw about twenty four percent of homes twelve home homes had good south facing roofs for solar energy about fourteen percent seven homes had a good east orientation and then just because i have a none list there that could be west facing homes which isn't highly recommended or could just mean there's a couple scrub trees that need to be trimmed and potentially removed to add more to that list we're not recommending anybody kill any trees but just sometimes people want to take trees down or trim them and you know you might go to open up some shading and on your house some of the potential we saw overall if  all if all of the south facing homes were to add solar we could get about sixty seven kilowatt just to put that in a little perspective on the average home could fit about three point three kilowatts of solar which on average should save about fifty five dollars a month on the electric bill takes about two hundred forty square feet of roof and almost over four thousand kilowatts a year on a system like that and over a lifetime so over one hundred thousand kilowatts can be generated and put back into the grid the east tasting facing potential was about thirty k w and with east facing panels you lose about twenty percent efficiency but we haven't seen that stop some folks put them under their homes if every home were to realize their solar we would have twelve thousand kilowatts produced in one year nearly three million over twenty five years not only that and this isn't included in anybody's score but you could bump your score up another ten points and we could see scores up into the fifty's and sixty's and again i'm not recommending everyone go out and slap solar on their homes energy efficiency is much cheaper and much more recommended so if you're trying to get to that next level trying to get that super high score that's where you're going to want to look at the next or if you want to be the coolest person on the block and you know show off your solar panels that's another reason to do it and i want to invite you all out link we just got recognized in woman's lifestyle magazine is this is not her house by the way but she's having a big solar party she's coming up on our one year anniversary in muskegon you neighbor to the north around from come on out  food in a fun time and she'll be showing off for her eco bling her solar panels and talking a little bit about why she put them up so what we want we want to help people score higher  d missing on that but experienced home performance contractor we recommend working with an experienced home for performance contractor to help you do your work help sure everything is installed correctly that you purchased the right materials the right products  and to help you improve your score make sure your bids that you're getting back from your contractors match the recommendations on your audits match the recommendations on your rebates that  if they're under you won't get your rebate and you'll suffer in energy efficiency you know let us know if if you get some bids in if you want us to take a look we'll be more than happy to take a look at them and just give you some  pointers you know i mean even this even happened to me i was working with a project with my on my own mother's house and you know a plumber installed the wrong water heater and it was naturally drafted and didn't meet the incentive and and it just happens you know that's not like they were misleading and even if you tell them what to install it doesn't mean it's always getting done right maybe they just had the wrong model on the back of the truck so it's always good to make sure to cross check your vids ask ask your home performance contractor and make sure  everything is what it is to help you improve your score and increase the health of your home once all your work is done we're going to come on back and do a test out probably a blower door test to reinspect your house make sure everything was done right let you know if any other areas of opportunities and then give you your improved score and there's no cost to that that something we are going to come out and do for you and you can you know buy jamison a coffee or a lunch while he's out there  somewhere so a lot of questions of it coming in and i'm just going to briefly cover this at a really high level because there have been some questions on some of the recommendations we've put out there and there's all sorts of strategies that you can take to approach this and we kind of want to hear from you on what you plan to do as well so we can learn something you can pay for your all of your upgrade out of pocket if you like you can pay for them through a what we call service agreement this is something that's unique and to be quite honest is being piloted but you guys are all being piloted so we all know how pilots go just a real quick overview of what this is let's say your average energy bill your electric and your gas or three hundred dollars a month just you know i know it goes up and down but just say on average and let's say you do you you know you work with a service agreement and you invested seven thousand dollars into some kind of home improvement and energy efficiency upgrade now let's say you get your bill down to one hundred fifty a month you would actually then only pay the difference of one hundred thirty five a month to pay off the loan find a loan i'm sorry a service agreement over the car over the course of ten to fifteen years through this special contract  so that's a little bit just on a high level of how that works and i would love to go into more detail on that with anybody who's interested in exploring it and there's no cost to to explore it the other one is michigan saves really great people over  there interest rates are going down the used to be seven now they're four point nine nine or even lower on a ten year loan and you can borrow up to thirty thousand dollars to make improvements that go even beyond energy efficiency and look at knob and tube especially this removal rate on mitigation and help improve their ability and comfort and health issues along with energy efficiency issues in your home utility rebates make sure that you're getting all of the rebates from both some co and ho w i put together a list of them but make sure you're on their website looking at their list because those are probably getting updated more often than ours though i'll try to keep that one that's on line updated we had one home or i think take advantage of some local grants available there are some grants in very specific neighborhoods and then there's some other grants for the city home improvement loans i believe so take a look and see if you qualify for those  and then i also you can use all of these strategies and mix them all together to meet your financial goals they all work well together so you don't have to pick one or another and perhaps you have seven eight nine ten that you could share with the rest of us to help us figure out how to achieve this and then several folks are waiting for on the financing which i'm glad to see that the governor passed and it's amazing and i think it's going to put our state on the map and  we're going to do a lot of good with that so i just know that right now it's a i don't believe it's available from a financing metric so but what should be on its way just a real quick plug here thanks to the folks at panasonic for sponsoring us so if you want to refer a friend in the city of holland to get a home energy audit from us not only will we take fifty dollars off of that audit but you'll be entered into  super quiet which isn't always a good thing i guess in bathrooms but super quiet super energy efficient that fan i have one installed in my house and it's amazing that it's energy efficient and it pulls out all the moisture which is really the point of having bath and so we have three of them and i'm going to bring one tonight sitting in our office ready for you guys when you you when when you get a friend plugged in and this is going through the whole year and we're getting a couple more sponsors to throw in some weather is we're partnering you know i hear that these kinds of things are popping up everywhere we're specifically partnering with effortless energy out of chicago who is running this through chicago but if anybody's interested what we do is we send them your audit and then we send in the contractor bit and then they say here's what we can do for you and if you go online and look at their website you won't find anything because their website doesn't have much information so just so you know s so if you do geo system and if you do a p v system you can get a thirty percent tax deduction and i believe that's about it there was a five hundred dollar kickback and i think when yeah when when when all of those incentives froze up in congress it never got renewed but that to get that five hundred dollars you had to do a lot of work and so i had that on my original list and then when the year turned over that dried up so so that's gone i got to believe that's a good question you know anybody have anything that they did they want to share that went good went bad did i know we worked with somebody to improve your score i don't know if you're here today or not  feeling that you talk about i would just say on a broad level without knowing the specific you know on a specific by specific it would be anywhere from just a white spray foam there's do it yourself  improvement so you know as far as energy risk savings go paired to you know considering the cost of energy and what else you need to do to get to other areas you know versus trying to get to all your been studied to off gas and put pollutants into the home and also while they're off guessing they lose their r value which means they reduce their efficiency there's all sorts of different films on the market some phones have air quality ratings there's late some of the best ones have green school it's called green schools ratings so they're rated for young children in schools so i always highly recommend you know getting the more  better air quality and ratings on the phones or if you believe you have any issues you know using alternative strategies to air seal you know such as cock such as a water yeah yeah replacing replacing windows you would do for a couple reasons if there's a hole in it that's a good reason to replace it if it's a window that you just you don't like the look of it and it's something you want from a static standpoint but from an energy efficiency standpoint for the most part it's just really expensive and the payback just isn't there and compares and everything else so unless you've done everything else on the list that's one of the last things you can do existing windows can be caulked around they can be taken apart and old put back together and then you can put storm windows on them and make them more energy efficient  i've got them all in my house i didn't do anything the windows of the room seal them and put on storm windows and it made a pretty big difference on someone it's the homes from one hundred twenty eight old with windows and with and that works and it's way cheaper  any other questions or yeah that's a really good question so on bill financing specifically isn't isn't here yet but the service agreement which acts a little bit like that yeah other there ones one's a utility program the other one's a market based program that's run separate from the utility company and that one would allow you to retain and make use of the rebates along with michigan sa mean it's based having a certain amount of savings over ten to fifteen years if you're if you're improvements return on investment is beyond that length of time you would pay a little bit more money than your utility savings and that makes sense dollars you know over the course of over the course of ten years but then let's say you're like no i want the next level up of maybe it's a water heater and it only save you that hundred dollars over the course of twenty years well then they're going to want you to pay a little extra to have that better water heater to make up for the longer payback so we might have you pay like one hundred fifty dollars  the only thing is without having a specific like for me to show you the specifics i can't you know get into too much detail but if there was a specific project and a specific product you're trying to finance then it would say oh i get it this is if i choose option a it's exactly what i say but if i choose option b i have to pay you know almost double than what i save on my energy bill y know and if you want to explore it we can explore with you and again there's improvements are less than fifteen years on a return on investment standpoint then you only pay what you save according to the agreement so there's no there's nothing else that would be thrown on  top of that so you know but if it goes beyond that then you could pay more which you could call interest if you wanted to you know you'd have a couple different options you could pay it off you could transfer it with the sale or you could take it with you and ideally your home would be worth more in you know ideally i mean that's the goal we're trying to you know there's not any other questions we've got some pros here yeah yeah savers and we got brandy from green put home many other surprise home performance professionals here built guy who can help answer any specific technical questions that yeah yeah you're welcome