Home Energy Analysis

As of today, the price of the Home Energy Analysis System has been reduced to $US19.95.

The price of a software is dependent very much on the viewpoint of the observer. Some regard it as a stream of electrical impulses costing a few cents to download and therefore begrudge  paying anything. Some take perverse delight in never paying.

Software developers on the other hand, are conscious of the time, training and cost of tools behind the creation of their masterpiece and believe that $20 (or $100 or $500) is an almost laughable amount to receive.

In the end, the market decides, you out there who make a judgement as to what you are willing to pay.

So why have I dropped the price? Let’s say that I want to make $5000 from HEAS: perhaps I could work hard to find one customer willing to pay $5000, so then I could do something else. Or, perhaps there are 50 people willing to pay $100? I’m hoping there is more chance of finding 250 who will pay $20, which would feed a coffee habit for no more than a few days.

In a month or so, I will know the answer to this. One promise I will make is that any price increases will be notified well in advance and be associated with significant additional features and benefits. 

Oh, another promise is that there won’t be another price reduction.

My last post mentioned in passing that new houses in Victoria, Australia are required to achieve a 5 star rating. The expectation was that these houses would be 50% more energy efficient than the typical home. Yesterday  details
 from a yet to be officially released report revealed that these homes actually have energy related emissions six percent higher than average emissions of existing dwellings. True, this increase is largely caused by growth in emissions from lighting not covered by the 5 star legislation. The buildings also average 30% more floor space but even so have not achieved the promised savings per unit of floor area.

Efficiencies would have been much higher if the new houses had been designed to use compact fluorescent lighting rather than the popular halogen lights. Australia proposes to phase out incandescent lights for CFs by 2012 so we might then achieve overall savings in our new houses.

The variance between the 50% saving promised by the regulations and the 6% increase measured illustrates that models must be validated by measurement. Which is a way for me to bring up the point that the Home Energy Analysis System enables its users to bring measurements to life.

5 Star homes achieve that rating, at least in part, by analysing the plans using a purpose built software package.  There is a tendency to believe that once the house rating software is satisfied, the job is done. In Victoria’s case, the model was incomplete in omitting lighting. There are many web sites that predict energy usage by allowing the householder to nominate the types of energy using devices in the home. Useful starting points yes, but inadequate for anyone who really wishes to understand and control energy use and accurately estimate their carbon dioxide output. Read your meters, keep your bills, download and use HEAS! Well, think about it anyway …

Replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent units will reduce greenhouse emissions - slightly. It is difficult to see how even a large number of such laudable actions will deliver the savings needed in the future.

Michael Sykes, the designer of Enertia houses, was the Grand Prize winner in the History Channel Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge. His houses require little or no external heating or cooling. They treat the house as a system using a South facing wall (Northern Hemisphere) to heat air in a “sunspace” and a basement to provide geothermal stability. The house has inner walls that allow air to circulate between basement and roof. When I first read about it in David Pogues’s blog my initial reaction was enthusiasm for the concept. However, reading the comments on the original post and a little googling has reduced my zeal a little.

The concept has apparently been around since the 1970s under the term “envelope houses”. Some have been built and they appear to have performed quite well. They are very well insulated because of their construction and this is an important component of their performance. They are more expensive to construct because of the double shell and the in-ground air-space or basement. Fires are likely to be able to spread rapidly unless additional measures are taken.

I suspect that it would be difficult to gain approval to build such a house in Victoria at the moment. Regulations now require new houses to reach 5-star rating by attention to materials, orientation and window placement and size. Apparently most existing houses are approximately 2 star. My very uninformed guess is that an Enertia house would achieve a rating much higher than 5 stars.

The title is the front page heading of “The Age”, one of Melbourne’s two daily newspapers. It refers to a report which warns that by 2030 average daily temperatures will be 0.5 to 1.5 degrees (celsius) higher than in 1990 for Victoria. The rise will cause infrastructure damage due to worse than normal storms, floods, drought and bushfires.

This prediction comes after we have just experienced the driest 365 day period on record. Our average annual rainfall is 639 mm but we only received 316 mm in the year ending May 15. Victoria has now had ten below average years in succession. Our water storages are at record low levels and will need several years of above average rainfall to recover.

Prime Minister John Howard has changed from a global warming climate change sceptic to “realist”. Australia’s major river system, the Murray Darling basin, is in sufficient trouble that Mr Howard wants to spend ten billion dollars in remediation measures. He and Malcolm Turnbull (Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) are both adamant that Australia shouldn’t act against its own economic interests. After all, we are a major coal exporter to China. An election is due later this year and many believe that climate change measures will be announced as a vote buying exercise. Our leaders are gradually changing their views.

I emailed Mr Turnbull late last year before he became minister and he took the trouble to look at the website and emailed me twice with comments. Not quite enough to use as a testimonial but he was supportive.

I recently asked the folks at the Business of Sofware http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz to have a look at the website and the software itself. There were about ten responses focussing on various aspects.

One reviewer discovered some annoying and superfluous error messages as well as a problem for users with dates of the mm/dd/yy structure. Since the majority of visitors come from the US, this problem must have scared off many downloaders. It was rectified very quickly. It is a fact of life for me as a system developer that very few people will report bugs of any sort. So, if you like the idea of HEAS enough to download and trial it, please don’t hesitate to send an email with comments, suggestions, whatever. I’ll be pathetically grateful.

Other reviewers made suggestions regarding the layout of the website that are gradually being implemented. A total redesign will probably be made in the future.

Four comments have forced me to think about who the potential Home Energy Analysis System (HEAS) clients really are.  And the answer here is that people interested in HEAS will already be convinced of the need to adopt a low-energy, low carbon lifestyle. If they want to measure their improvement, HEAS will be of value. They will also need either to be patient or have a drawer full of past bills before they can begin to reap the benefits of the application. The website had a page explaining the greenhouse effect. I’ve deleted this page because the typical HEAS client does not need this information. I’ll also rewrite the other text in an effort to make it more focussed.

A number of people suggested it would be a good idea to have HEAS let its users know how they stand against other users, to build a table of best practice figures. The short answer is that I’d love to do this but there are many practical difficulties. One example: I live in Melbourne, Australia and our electricity is mainly generated by burning brown (low grade, high water content) coal. Consumers a few hundred miles away will be using electricity generated from hydro-electric plants with minimal carbon dioxide emissions. Australian consumers can choose to pay a little more and receive low emissions electricity purchased on their behalf. Our household hasn’t done this yet, but we intend to soon.