Category Archives: energy retrofitting

Sealing Air Leaks for Increased Home Efficiency

Posted on December 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

To seal air leaks, you first need to identify them, either on your own or with the help of a professional energy auditor. Most professional energy audits cost a few hundred dollars, and they provide you with a thorough analysis of your home’s energy use. To identify leaks yourself, begin by looking for large openings in outside walls, then search for smaller, less visible openings. On windy days, you can find these leaks by feeling around doors and window frames, at the base of walls, and anywhere else with an opening from outside to inside walls. You can also detect leaks with a stick of burning incense—air leaking into a home will deflect the smoke. Be sure to check around electrical outlets and light switches (even those on interior walls). Ceiling fixtures—especially recessed lighting and whole-house fans—are another major source of heat loss in the winter. Follow this step-by-step guide to conduct a full home energy assessment.

read entire article: https://www.naturalhomeandgarden.com/energy-efficiency/sealing-air-leaks-zmfz12jfzmel.aspx

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SDG&E Request to Change Rules on How it Pays Homes – Con Opinion

Posted on December 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is not an opinion of the Green Real Estate Appraiser Blog. This is an article from the San Diego Union Tribune Newspaper.

“Just figure out what’s next,” visionary CEO of Apple, the late Steve Jobs, told an interviewer when asked about his success.

Jobs’s computer industry was infinitely more competitive than the static world of regulated utility companies. Jobs wasn’t running a monopoly with captive customers whose daily lives would collapse without his products. He didn’t have guaranteed profits predetermined by regulators. He couldn’t run to the public for rate increases.

Jobs did, however, have an unyielding compulsion to move forward, not backward. SDG&E’s controversial proposal to slap solar customers with a “network use charge” doesn’t just turn back the clock on responsible energy policy. It is a wholesale attempt to wipe out rooftop solar in order to protect an antiquated way of doing business by a company that, unlike Jobs, failed to evolve.

SDG&E argues that solar customers, who typically contribute power into the region’s grid during the day and draw from the grid at night, aren’t paying their fair share of upkeep costs. With public interest in solar soaring – prior to SDG&E’s proposal, county government was on pace to issue 1,336 solar permits by June 2012, a 36 percent increase over the prior year – the utility argues that non-solar customers are somehow “subsidizing” their neighbors.

SDG&E’s claims ring fantastically hollow when you count up the regional benefits of rooftop solar and weigh them against the devastating consequences of SDG&E’s network use charge.

Read entire article: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/dec/04/sdges-hollow-claims-hide-utilitys-real-motive/

Disclaimer: For information and entertainment purposes only

SDG&E Request to Change Rules on How it Pays Homes – Pro Opinion

Posted on December 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

This is not an opinion of the Green Real Estate Appraiser Blog. This is an article from the San Diego Union Tribune Newspaper.

San Diego is blessed with tremendous solar resources. Our climate and the way our region’s energy use peaks during hot afternoons make San Diego ground zero for the nation’s solar revolution. The energy source is clean and has tremendous environmental benefits.

California’s current solar marketplace on its face is pretty simple. Customers invest in a rooftop system, connect to the grid and the meter spins backwards when they are producing more power than they consume. When the sun goes down, they use the grid and the meter spins forward. At the end of the month, the utility gives solar customers the energy credit, and they pay the lowest tiered energy costs for the power they draw from the system.