The Problem of Pirates and Home Energy Audits

Yesterday I bought a Flip Video UltraHD camcorder, so you’ll be seeing some videos appear on the Energy Vanguard website soon. As a matter of fact, I’m heading out to Carrollton this morning to tape Jason Payne of Structured Energies doing a home energy rating for my friend Perry, who’s buying a hundred year old house and financing it with an Energy Efficient Mortgage. In case you didn’t catch it, I blogged last week that this house is a perfect candidate for an EEM.

I played around with the new camcorder a bit yesterday and am really looking forward to making some good videos to help show some of the things I’m talking about. Still photos are good, but sometimes they just don’t quite let the viewer see what’s really going on.

As part of my research into using video to promote home energy efficiency, I went to YouTube yesterday and watched a few videos that came up under my search on ‘energy audits.’ Most of what I saw was fair to middling, but then I found this one:

Green pirates?! That was the worst pirate talk I’ve ever heard. And more than half the video showed the guy sitting on his bed with his hands tied. Is he a descendant of Ed Wood?

In addition to this being a BAD video, he gives home energy audits short shrift. A true home energy audit includes looking at insulation, air-sealing, ductwork, windows, and the myriad other ways that houses waste energy. About half of a typical home’s energy use is in heating and cooling, and using the Kill-a-Watt can’t help you with that. It’s a good tool – it’s just limited to helping you with plug loads.

If I ever make a video that bad, I give you my permission in advance to do an intervention and take my video recorder away.