Step I: Operation Energy (Audit)

I spent a few hours this Saturday touring a 100 year-old craftsman home in Seattle's Phinney Ridge neighborhood.  The owners, who purchased the house about 7 years ago have spent the better part of their years since retrofitting the house to preserve the historic character and reduce energy consumption.

The first thing I liked about the tour and the homeowners, Pam Burton and Jeremy Smithson, was that this wasn't a bunch of rich folks with money to burn.  They had to make choices, and used mostly salvaged materials for renovations.  With the added R-value to walls and windows a solar water heating system and several photovoltaic panels, they've managed to reduce their energy consumption by 86%, and they're still working on it.

There are several notable differences between us and the Phinney couple.  We have small kids, neither of us are engineering types, and our house is a little bigger.  Still there were many lessons learned and I managed to record the whole tour with my iPod (recording forthcoming).

Oh and from the $10 I paid EOS Alliance for the tour I leverage a free energy audit - a $385 value - from a recently certified auditor looking to test her skills and equipment.  I also got this free, sort of broken, compost bin that you roll to turn (my truck was there - it was a weak moment).