Daily Home Renovation Tips

Last week we left off reviewing some of the items within the Energy Savings Tips section of our Energy Efficiency Evaluation Report as part of our participation in the ecoENERGY Grant program. Let us look at some additional tips.

For us, this one is not that practical as far as we can tell.

There are some conditions for such systems including an annual average wind speed approximating 14 kilometers per hour (9 miles per hour) according to some web sites. We have no idea if our area meets this or who to even ask. The noise of the system could be an annoyance to ourselves and possibly our neighbours (we live in a residential suburb). As far as cost, we’ve seen estimates of anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 depending on terrain.

The next energy saving tip, is more interesting and promising to us:

We remember seeing such a system at a home show last spring. It attaches not to one’s roof but to a south facing wall, and absorbs the sun’s heat in winter and generates hot air to help heat the house. Obviously not a summer time energy saver, but in the winter, could be huge. It would also help with the coolness of the basement for our part time resident (daughter away at college).

We could not locate the brochure we collected from the home show, but recall it costing approximately $5,000. The payback, per the salesperson, was around 5 years which also conveniently was the length of the product warranty.

We found a company with a great web site explaining how this works in easy to understand terms called SolarWall that would be worth you taking a look. Unfortunately, it shows its current uses in every type of building except single owned houses . Here is a link to a Canadian company which also provides such a product, Cansolair. We will go to the home show again this spring and see if we can find the company we found before (if we do we’ll let you know).

NOTE: We do not endorse either of these companies. They are merely presented to provide more detailed information to you.

To continue to the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 11.