Numbers guys

Big day today--the final evaluation of exactly how tight this house is.

Rich Urban from Focus on Energy conducts the blower door test which sucks air out of the house and checks the amount that the house will 'allow' to blow out. Clear as mud?

Here Charlie videotapes the mud.

And here's what the numbers say. The average new home has a relative number of 100. Charlie's best home until today, had a number of 56, which means that it was 44% more efficient than the average new home. Our house is 44.4, 12% more efficient than Charlie's best to date.

That was somewhat predicted. But here are the numbers that make more sense to me.

Predicted cost to heat the water for heat and domestic hot water? $513 (PER YEAR! Take that Wisconsin Public Service). However, even with that we will emit, get this, 10.6 tons of carbon dioxide, 57.2 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and 29.1 somethings (I can't read my notes) of nitrous oxide.

Since these are only expected and do contain some variables, we will report a year's worth of data to Rich to determine how close they came--the therms, not the nitrous oxide, whatever that is.