How to boost energy efficiency in a large family house?
There are a lot of reasons why people decide to boost the energy efficiency of their homes and they become even more apparent if we’re talking about people with large families. Not only does this significantly lower your utility bill, but it will also prolong the life of your appliances and reduce the overall carbon footprint of your home.
Now, no matter the size of the home you live in, you should definitely give energy efficiency a shot, especially if you’re living in a large family home. That being said, here are some ways you can boost your property’s energy efficiency and start enjoying all the perks of a greener and environmentally friendlier living environment.
Install solar panels
Since you’re living in a big home with a large family, you’d probably wish to make it consume the least amount of energy possible. So, in order to make that possible, you should start producing your own energy. But how can you do that? Well, the solution to this lies in installing solar panels. The more panels you can afford to install on your home, the lower your energy consumption will be. And while this may seem somewhat expensive to you initially, it will significantly pay off in the long run.
Additionally, since solar panel systems usually consist of a collector as well, you will be more or less set throughout the year. Finally, they’re an excellent solution if you live in an area that experiences a lot of sunny days year-round, such as Australia, for instance.
Re-insulate where necessary
Next, you should inspect your home’s insulation thoroughly. Try to identify the areas that are not quite well-insulated and pay special attention to your kids’ rooms. You can do this by literally touching your home’s inner walls with your hand and determining which ones could use an additional layer of insulation.
Once you identify the culprits, there are a few ways you can remedy the situation. You can either choose to re-insulate all of your existing walls by covering them with an insulant from the outside, or you can apply the insulant to your inner walls instead. Alternatively, you can decide to replace the insulant that’s located in your walls, but this process is very invasive, it does tend to last long and it can turn out to be very expensive.
Make it easier on your AC
Furthermore, aside from the wall insulation, you should also inspect all of your doors and windows and see if there are any air leaks happening around them. If that’s the case, see to it that you seal the leaks and thus make your home more energy-efficient. Simply put, by doing so, you’ll prevent the conditioned air from escaping your home, which will reduce the need for your AC unit to work overtime.
Also, you should inspect your window treatments and see how much they affect the air in your home. If a particular side of your home is experiencing a lot of sunlight throughout the day and you have a lot of windows on that particular side, it can make your indoor air rise in temperature as the insides of your home will constantly get heated through those windows. This will also hugely depend on the climate. Having venetian blinds in Sydney, for example, where there is plenty of sunlight throughout the year, will prove to be an excellent way to reduce the amount of sunlight penetrating the home, thus providing not only the cooler environment but some additional privacy, as well.
Inspect your appliances
Finally, to ensure that all of your previous efforts were not in vain, you should inspect your appliances as well and see if anything can be done to improve their performance and reduce their energy consumption. The easiest way to approach the manner would, of course, be to simply replace all of your older appliances with low-energy ones, but – let’s face it – this is simply not possible always.
What you can do instead is call in an expert electrician to inspect all of your home appliances and see if any of them need to be repaired. Broken appliances tend to waste far more energy than the ones that are working properly, so see to it that all of your appliances are in mint condition. Also, you can consider replacing only the appliances you use multiple times on a daily basis first and upgrading the rest over a certain period of time.
As you can see, boosting the energy efficiency of your large family home is no different than doing so in a tiny house. The only true difference is in the scale of the project, but if you know which key elements to focus your attention to first, you’ll be able to achieve it in no time.
Author BIO
If one thing is true about Lillian Connors, her mind is utterly curious. That’s why she can’t resist the urge to embark on a myriad of green living/home improvement projects and spread the word about them. She cherishes the notion that sustainable housing and gardening will not only make us far less dependent on others regarding the dwellings we inhabit, but also contribute to our planet being a better place to live on. You can check her out LinkedIn.