Green Machines

After getting a couple of quotes we replaced our old furnace and hot water tank. We got an incredible deal on this Goodman furnace:

We were originally going to compromise and get a cheaper 92% efficiency Trane furnace (with no DC motor so it would get the smallest rebate) but at the last second our installer got a sweet deal on the Goodman 95% efficiency with a DC 2 stage electric motor. This model qualifies for the maximum rebate available so in the end it will come out to being less than we had originally budgeted for the lower end Trane. This should help bring our gas bill down in December! One thing we didn't realize is that these high efficiency furnaces produce a good amount of condensation when they are running so it is recommended that a drain be located nearby. Since we intend to relocate the washer and dryer nearby, when we run the drain for that we will put in a floor drain for the furnace.

For our water heater we got this Rinnai tankless hot water heater:

It is great to have the massive hot water tank out of the basement; and now we will never run out of hot water again. I had to open it up and change one of the jumper settings to let us set it above 120 degrees fahrenheit but after I changed that it gets the water nice and hot. It delivers a more consistent temperature than our old hot water heater that would gradually get less hot as the shower went on.

Going Green

Yes dear readers, we've finally gotten a home energy audit done. Given that we need a new hot water tank and furnace we figured it was time to bite the bullet and find out how inefficient our house is.

We haven't gotten our final report back yet, but the rebates available are impressive. We knew about the furnace and hot water tank rebates, but we also learned that we can get $80 for the window and door we put in our kitchen. We can also get $1,250 for framing and insulating our basement. Given that this is a task we could do ourselves, we suspect the cost will be less than the rebate to get this task done (*yippee*). It may also provide the much needed motivation to actually finish the basement.

We also learned that there is money up for grabs if you decrease air leaks. Air leakage is measured by doing a blower test where they seal the house and run a fan in the front door that measures how much air it sucks (or something to that effect). They feed this data to a computer program that will tell effectively how big of a hole in our house all the tiny leaks add up to. There is money up for grabs for decreasing the size of this hole by a certain percentage. Given that the remaining electrician holes in the kitchen are a huge source of leakage re-doing the kitchen should help us make a huge dent in our air leakage. Things like caulking around trim and sealing electrical boxes also helps.

We're really excited to see the official report that will tell us our actual efficiency number and we look forward to increasing it over the next few months!

In the mean time we're lining up furnace quotes *woo*.