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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

There are so many simple things we can do to make more energy efficient homes but builders and buyers don't care. They will happily spend thousands on dumb things that are highly visible but won't spend a few hundred on something as simple as sealing ducts so 30% of your conditioned air isn't lost.

A carbon tax would go a long way to solving this by giving people correct price information so they can make good decisions. If energy was more expensive people would demand more energy efficient homes.

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I'd rather see something like nutrition labels but instead efficiency measures in various areas for new homes before a tax.

Having bought a number of homes it's surprisingly painful and infeasible to compare apples-to-apples upfront. "Easy" to get details on a per-house level but just about impossible to filter your search early based on efficiency.

This is already a thing at least here in Portugal. This is a energy efficiency certificate that is now mandatory when renting and selling a house:

http://www.adene.pt/sites/default/files/documentos/certifica... (PDF)

All of EU, but in my opinion it's mostly a scam.

Companies that perform this certification lobbied to make it mandatory whenever selling a house. However, the certificate does not tell you the real energy consumption. The calculation is based on "weighting factors" for whatever energy production format the politicians want to favor currently, so at least where I live, in Finland - where energy consumption really matters in the winter - when you buy a house, you pay for a certificate that is not very useful, and then you ask the previous owner for the actual energy bills he had, to asses the real cost and consumption.

The latter is, of course, what everyone did already before this certificate system.

OK, it's just a few hundred euros per sale. A bigger problem in the various energy saving initiatives is that houses built to this code sometimes develop very nasty air quality problems (due to air not changing in some places fast enough, or subtle leakages in the airtight balloon where you live) which then forces costly renovations and in the worst case destroy health.

A blower door test is a great measure of a homes energy efficiency and it's quite cheap to have done.

Not sure if YT links are OK but check out Matt Risinger Blower Door Test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msZ_E-4GFs8

There are a couple of certification programs out there that are well regarded (with vary levels of real-world usage):

Energy Star: https://www.energystar.gov/newhomes/

Zero Energy Ready Homes: https://energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home

Passive House: http://www.phius.org/home-page

LEED for Homes: https://www.usgbc.org/cert-guide/homes

And my favorite, the Pretty Good House: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/guest-blogs/p...

Honestly, if you're buying a new home and the builder hasn't ponied up for Energy Star, you've got to wonder where their priorities are - it's not a difficult program to achieve. You can find Energy Star builders here: https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=new_homes_pa...

I agree, there is little transparency on the home-buying front, largely because adherence to one of these certifications is still pretty rare. Also, it's rarely taken into account in the appraisal process.

There is also the HERS Index, which is probably the most popular: https://www.resnet.us/hers-index.

22% of homes received HERS Index Scores in 2016. It is a simple score that indicates the efficiency of a home. A score of 0 represents Net-Zero, and score of 100 represents a "typical home". If you're buying a home (and you care), you should ask if it has been HERS Rated and to see the HERS Certificate.

Source for 22%: http://www.resnet.us/blog/national-renewable-energy-laborato...

Nice catch, I should have included the HERS Index. It's a decent standard with wide adoption.

I built an Energy Star certified home in Georgia for maybe 5% more than the cost would have been otherwise. It's been a great rental since we left the area.

Utility bills or estimated utility bills are the clearest way we have found to advertise the value to renters.

In many parts of Europe (probably all of EU), energy consumption has to be given when renting out or selling homes. Often, they also have to be advertised for public buildings.

Are there things that can cost-effectively be done in existing houses? That seems a good way to create demand for greater efficiency - demonstrate the value on a smaller scale first.

Yes. Low-flow shower-heads can pay for themselves in a few weeks. DIY air-sealing with caulk and sprayfoam will also pay for itself in a few weeks in most old homes.

LED lights pay for themselves in a few months if you get a good price on-line or from a home center.

Added attic insulation is another thing that will pay for itself in a few months DIY, or a few years if you pay to have it done.

BuildItSolar has a slightly dated but still useful section about cutting your energy use in half at: http://builditsolar.com/References/Half/Half.htm

The high impact retrofits are better windows, more insulation and new mechanical systems.

Getting insulation into walls is hard and at some point doesn't help a lot if there are air gaps.

New mechanical systems aren't really cost effective (because operating costs aren't that high; hundreds of dollars of monthly savings on a $10,000 upgrade). For people that use a lot of cooling replacing an old air conditioner can be a big win.

Not entirely sure about that statement. In Russia, they certainly do.

A good building is considered one if it has proper thermal design, and definitely commands higher price.

In this country, some provinces spend 1/3 of their GDP on energy.

Here, buildings with 30cm+ insulation and triple glazed, metalised, air-tight windows are not rare.

I, like many others, live in an area where there is already roughly enough housing. There is little space to build a new 1 family home, not does it make sense to. If I tore down my current house, It would make economic sense to turn it into a crappy medium rent apartment building. Building a home is already information overload, you need to make it trendy or economical. If it was clear the TCO was lower with this tech, it WILL sell. But buyers are conservative, and for good reason. That new tech is now their 30 year investment.

It is abundantly clear that the TCO of zero-energy or energy-positive homes is lower than traditional construction. The nearly nonexistent utility costs are immediately apparent. The math will only shift more in their favor as energy costs continue to rise.

Energy costs won't rise: energy demand growth has halted across the first world (aging population + efficiency gains), and adding renewables each year is going to drive the price of energy down.

People should still build energy efficient dwellings, but there is no energy price spike around the corner (for electricity at least).

An hour of sunlight on Earth supplies enough energy to power humanity for a year.

Never underestimate the power of combined industry and government incompetence and greed. Australia is the world's top natural gas exporter, but also has the developed world's highest electricity prices. Natural gas prices have increased several fold in the domestic market over the last couple of years, with concomitant increase in electricity prices.

Increases in electricity prices can definitely happen.

Surely Australia could be self sufficient just using solar.

Inflation still increases the long term costs. This makes a very important difference when home loans are ~4%.

Inflation generally grows more slowly than reasonable time-value-of-money values. Payback times much beyond maybe 10 years aren't things generally worth doing. Personally even at 5 I'm getting a bit skeptical.

That said, most people who have never even started optimizing their house can find things that will payback in months, where it definitely is worth it.

Example: When I moved into this house about 8 years ago, every single light in the place was incandescent, and every fixture that could take multiple bulbs had them all full. The house was IMHO actually painfully bright, and that via incandescents. There was an easy win there even 8 years ago with CFLs, and it's only gotten better since.

(Do you really need 4 80-watt unfrosted (!) incandescent bulbs over your bathroom mirror? I sincerely hope somebody just slapped them there to make the house look "better" for the sale by not having empty sockets there being unsightly. I've got one 14W CFL in there and that's plenty of light.)

Clearly you aren't doing your makeup in that mirror.

However, no, 4x80W bulbs aren't needed. When someone does need to do makeup, replace them with 4 1200 lumen 5000K bulbs (15-17W each).

Inflation is not a given. Notice how inflation can't be pushed up in first world countries, even with trillions of dollars of quantitive easing by central banks [1].

Yes, you can create asset bubbles in the stock market and real estate. But the cost of everything else (besides RE, equities, health care, and education) is going down. The cost of energy will continue to decline, because we are awash in renewable energy, and the collection mechanisms are technology that continues to decline in cost precipitously.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-16/fed-minut...

US inflation rate has been positive over most of the last 10 years and generally close to the FED's targets.

Remember, the FED can make unlimited cash just show up so they have unlimited leverage. They are simply cautious.

You also have to consider the opportunity cost of the higher construction costs.

The difference in construction cost may be not very significant compared to the rework cost needed to fix houses that have problems due to structures and arrangements that turn out to not work quite as intended.

> There are so many simple things we can do to make more energy efficient homes but builders and buyers don't care.

Here's an article that talks about this unfortunate disconnect: http://www.finehomebuilding.com/2017/04/26/dont-build-better...

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