The Home Energy Diet: How to Save Money by Making Your House Energy-Smart (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)

In standard style, Amazon shows how much we save on the purchase price. For the 'The Home Energy Diet', that is only the beginning. Based on his years of conducting home energy audits, Paul Scheckel has organized this book as a virtual home energy audit. This is an effective approach for learning about energy usage in the home, how to recognize problem areas, choosing effective solutions, and changing old habits while maintaining a comfortable home environment.On the first page, this sentence immediately caught my attention: "I will not ask you to sit alone, shivering in the dark as some readers may remember being asked to do so during the 'energy crisis' of the 1970s." I was just a kid back then and I remember that fear-based misperception for energy conservation to this day!The author advocates a logical 'Triple A' method that generalizes well:- Awareness: Learn about the ways your home uses and loses energy.- Assessment: Evaluate your home's energy requirements.- Action: Choose effective solutions to reduce energy costs and implement.The book makes an important distinction between energy efficiency and conservation. Efficiency is taking advantage of reduced-energy technologies to do more or the same with less cost. Conservation is simply using less (e.g., turning off the light) which also reduces costs. Minimizing overall energy costs requires a combination of efficiency and conservation.For the action step, keep in mind that return on investment (ROI) should constrain what to install, what to replace, or what habit to change to reduce energy consumption. The question to ask is: What is the expected payback time from reduced energy consumption to recover the cost of this energy-saving investment? The shorter the time, the better. For me, less than a year is desired. I don't want to wait twenty years to break even.Chapter 1 provides an overview of energy literacy: Measurement of energy, sources for energy, and major areas of energy consumption. It is an essential chapter on energy basics. Each of the other chapters cover specific topics: Electricity, Appliances, Hot Water, Heating/Air Conditioning, Envelope (heat loss: air movement, walls, windows, foundation, and attic) and Buying New Appliances. The appendices show how to calculate your energy consumption profile, greenhouse gas profile, and home heat load.There are two types of text boxes included throughout each chapter: Math, Diet. Math boxes provide supplemental mathematics for many of the concepts. Diet boxes provide a list of key techniques to reduce energy costs. Nice addition to the overall book content.And finally ... There should be a chapter on the futility of energy conservation with teenagers in the home. It is not their fault. They just unknowingly consume every available BTU and KWH within reach.

Very informative. It puts home energy conservation in perspective with nation-wide energy use. It has helped inspire me to continue improving my home's energy efficiency and reducing my carbon footprint.

The Home Energy Diet should be required reading of every home owner in the United States. For a variety of reasons -- aging heating system, concern over potential fuel costs, and other reason's -- started looking into what I could be doing to improve my home's energy efficiency. I bumped into Home Energy Diet in the library ... and started to learn a lot and much of that learning has direct relevance to my own home. For example, Scheckel's material and explanations highlighted to me some serious problems in my attic insulation and ventilation that I simply was not aware of -- previously, I thought that it was reasonably well insulated. This drove me to a trip to the hardware store and an afternoon of work. With the first snow of the season, the 'roof' is proving that this work changed how my house is operating just how Scheckel's description said it would.Of great interest was the opening section, which provides a discussion of the 'energy system' in the United States, which is important background for understanding how one's home links into the large system. As part of that, roughly 20% of the nation's energy use is in homes. If every American home owner read this book and made minimal investments based on it, the nation could see a rapid cut in energy use -- through efficiency rather than any reduction in lifestyle.While everything in this book can be found elsewhere, this is a clear and relatively comprehensive discussion of key household energy issues. (And, if necessary, one can quickly track down more detail on other issues.) I've already recommended this book to over 50 people directly ... And, while I originally got this from the library, I find it of such use that I've bought a copy to have around as reference material ...

I like being able to save money on all Utilities, I live in a mobile home parkand there are only so many types of things one can do with a trailer tomake it fit the standards set by the manufacturer and city codes.

This was a quick read. The suggestions were mostly beginer or obvious. In hind sight, I should have rented it from the library as it has just sat on the shelf since the first read.