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Home & Garden

Navigating Electricity Savings with the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR Program

As the cold weather season begins, people are inevitably reacquainted with the inefficiencies of their homes.  Whether it’s drafts stealing their way inside your home or wallet shrinking oil deliveries, homeowners tend to place a higher value on efficiency in the winter. 

If you have decided to upgrade your home this winter and take advantage of NYSERDA incentives, know this: you can also improve electrical efficiency through the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program.  Incentives for air sealing and insulation also apply to lighting upgrades, meaning you can ditch those old incandescents and replace them with bulbs that use 4-10x less energy. 

The first step towards making these improvements is to have a contractor perform a comprehensive energy assessment of your home.  In addition to looking at air leaks and insulation potential, the assessment also includes an examination of the electrical efficiency of your lighting and appliances, as well as electrical heating and hot water systems.  During the assessment, talk with your contractor about potential electrical upgrades.  Here are a few of the benefits of simply changing your lights, and why upgrading can have a huge impact on your bills:

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Lower energy consumption: Upgrading can drastically reduce consumption in a home lit with incandescents, as only about 10% of the electricity used for incandescents is converted into light.  The remainder is dispersed as heat.  This is one of the clearest examples of inefficient energy use in homes.  To see if a bulb is inefficient, simply put your hand near it.  If you can feel the heat, it’s time to upgrade.

A typical indoor incandescent light bulb uses 60W.  A standard CFL replacement reduces this number to 13W.  LEDs can go as low as 6-8W.  With recent advancements and the breadth of available options, you can easily upgrade your lights without sacrificing quality, color, or brightness.

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Reduce environment impact: Lower wattage bulbs, LEDs in particular, have a much lower environmental impact than incandescents.  Incandescent bulbs draw copious amounts of energy unnecessarily, increasing the demand for coal-fired power plants to produce energy.  Producing energy from coal has environmental and health repercussions, most notably contamination of water supplies and air pollution, which has been linked to asthma and COPD. 

If you are concerned about energy usage and the environment, go with LEDs.  Not only do they use less energy, they also contain no mercury.  This gives them a leg up on CFLs, which require small amounts of mercury to function.

Prep your home for solar:  Many people are excited about the opportunities for solar in Westchester.  What some do not realize, however, is that the cost of upgrading to solar is impacted by the energy consumption of their homes.  The higher your consumption, the larger the solar panel system required to accommodate your needs, and thus the higher the cost of the system.  Implementing simple energy reduction strategies, such as upgrading lights or switching to ENERGY STAR-rated appliances, can go a long way towards reducing the cost of going solar.

To learn more about the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program, visit www.EnergizeNY.org, or click here to apply.  Most New Yorkers will qualify for a free or reduced cost energy assessment that analyzes the energy saving potential for their homes.  On the website you will find more information, as well as the Energize NY Contractor Rating Index, which scores NYSERDA-approved contractors for Westchester based on several criteria, including post-upgrade customer satisfaction surveys.  This tool will help you choose the right contractor for your home.  And be sure to ask them about lighting efficiency upgrades for your home!

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