This article explains how to choose a home thermostat, remove your old thermostat, and install a new programmable home thermostat. According to energystar.gov, “The average household spends more than $2,000 a year on energy bills — nearly half of which goes to heating and cooling. Homeowners can save about $180 a year by properly setting their programmable thermostats and maintaining those settings.”

One of the hardest things to determine when thinking about going solar is, how much will it generate and how long will it take to pay for itself. Well imagine a mashup with Google Maps, Zillow and Lending Tree. Chris Bura founded RoofRay which now makes it possible for you to look at any roof through Google Maps and determine expected electrical output. So we put it to the test locally. We thought, why not show Duke how much the convention center might be able to produce utilizing the new tool from RoofRay. Take a look at the results for yourself in the image below:

So the total output for the main section of the Duke Energy Convention Center is calculated like this: According to Google Maps, the total rough square footage is 175,679 sq ft. Solar panels at a 41 degree pitch on a sunny day would yield roughly 12.91 watts DC giving the entire roof area a potential to generate a staggering 2,267,764.8 watts DC!

Here is how the site works: Enter any address which pulls up a satellite image of the buildings rooftop. Then utilizing the easy path drawing tool, simply outline the roof in focus. Using data from the National Renewable Energy Labs it automatically calculates slope of roof, power per square foot and overall total peak power.

Early one morning, standing in the bathroom I noticed I could hear the morning train much louder standing at the toilet.? After thinking I might have still been dreaming, I realized that there was a hole in the ceiling above my head! This is a hole designed to whisk away moisture and the smells associated with bathroom activities. The hole is a vent fan and is wide open to the outside, a gaping hole in my thermal envelop.

The problem from an energy standpoint is that the vent fan whether its on, or not, is leaking air outside through the thermal envelop. So I decided to try to create a dead air space to help insulate this area. In the thermal image (taken on a hot summer day) pictured up above, you can clearly see that temperatures of 115 degrees F is not helping my warm upstairs issue in the summer time, not to mention what leaks out during the winter time as it acts like a chimney.

How does the system work?

Air conditioners employ the same operating principles and basic components as your home refrigerator. Refrigerators use energy (usually electricity) to transfer heat from the cool interior of the refrigerator to the relatively warm surroundings of your home; likewise, an air conditioner uses energy to transfer heat from the interior of your home to the relatively warm outside environment.

An air conditioner cools your home with a cold indoor coil called the evaporator. The condenser, a hot outdoor coil, releases the collected heat outside. The evaporator and condenser coils are serpentine tubing surrounded by aluminum fins. This tubing is usually made of copper.