Our home energy audit: pocket doors and vermiculite
by Warren Scanga
(Hamilton Ontario)
Our auditor put a seal around the front door, some kind of plastic. It had a sleeve in it for a big powerful fan, and some kind of pressure meter.
He turned on the fan and we watched the needles on the pressure gauges bounce up and down. Seems the difference between the two pressures tells you how much air is getting sucked in through other places like gaps in the walls. So while the fan's running he went around and felt the outside walls, windows and floor, looking for drafts.
We haven't got our audit report yet but I think we'll do pretty well. He didn't find any major leaks anywhere except in the kitchen. That was the main surprise. We added a breakfast nook five years ago and put pocket doors in so we could close it off. I don't even remember why we did that - we hardly ever close the doors. It turns out that there's a big air leak coming from the pockets where the doors go in when they're open. Not sure how we'll fix it but he said it's a big enough leak we should do something. Maybe we'll just get rid of the pocket doors and seal the pockets.
We keep an electric heater in the breakfast nook from about October to April because it's usually too cold in there without it. That's probably costing us a pretty penny. I always thought the cold was just because the room juts out over the main footprint of the house and has a crawlspace under it that isn't heated. If a big part of it being cold is from a leak inside the pocket doors then we might be able to fix it from inside the crawl space without spending a fortune. If we're lucky we'll be able to live without the electric heater.
The attic has vermiculite insulation, which he said there's a small possibility it might contain asbestos. Apparently some of the vermiculite made until the mid 1990's came from a mine in the US that had traces of asbestos mixed in with whatever the stuff is vermiculite is made from. Since the level of insulation is pretty good he said best to leave it in place. Sometimes, he said, the audit will recommend raking it around or blowing in more insulation, but with vermiculite the safest thing is not to disturb it at all. We could have it tested to see if it's the asbestos kind but for now I'm inclined to leave it be. Bit of a bummer but he said it won't kill us, unless of course we go up there and have pillow fights.
I think a home energy audit is a great idea. We paid $150 for it and we still have to pay for a follow-up audit, but we will get some money back from the government for the follow-up audit as well as some extra money (maybe hundreds or over a thousand, depending on how much things improve in the second audit). Even just knowing our house isn't leaking buckets of heat is worth the money because we know there's not much point in spending a fortune on things like new windows, and we know not to mess with the attic.
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