Beginning to take conservation seriously, society is shocked by the data on energy waste. Nowhere is this truer than in the way we heat and cool dwellings. For generations, back to electrification, our knowledge of home energy use was masked by dial thermostats that helped us to be comfortable but hid most of the cost. In recent years, programmable thermostats, conservation-minded but hard for most of us to use, have begun to replace the simple dial. What this “comfort” thermostat has hidden from us is that buildings account for 40% of our energy use and HVAC (heating, cooling and ventilation) 56% of that, that the leaks in most buildings make their HVAC work harder, that HVAC systems themselves are energy hogs, and that most are badly installed or maintained, to the extent that duct leaks alone make them run on average 20% less efficiently in our dwellings than they do in manufacturer's tests. read more

less than 83 day(s) - Tuesday December,29 2009 @ 03:03 AM
More on Solveclimate.com