The logic behind energy-efficient improvements...

Thinking about upgrading your old (or new) home..?

Wondering what the difference is in cost between your current home payments and your future costs if you invest in Energy-Star appliances, upgraded insulation, windows, etc..?

Here's the plain and simple logic:

Home costs = mortgage + utilities

(sure there are other payments in there, but let's keep this simple)

If your utility bills are high, but you bought a cheap house, you might be paying close to the cost of owning an expensive home with low-to-no utility costs!

Let's look at the chart:

On the X-axis we have increasing home performance - from code compliance to best possible home.

On the Y-axis, we have increasing costs.

Remember... home costs = mortgage + utilities

• The red line is Energy cost ...as we expect, it goes down as technology improves along the X-axis (utilities)
  

PLUS

• The thin blue line is your mortgage cost ...also as to be expected, it increases with improved technology (mortgage)
  

EQUALS

• The thick blue line is the your home cost... it is the sum of the mortgage plus the utility lines!
  

(home costs)

What we clearly see, is that, given values for the points along this line, we can calculate a point of minimum cost.

What is really cool, is that if we look at the red arrow indicating the cost of the code-compliant home, and we travel along the thick blue line (total home cost line), we can go WAY PAST the minimum cost point and quite some distance along the line of increasing performance before we are at a cost that meets or exceeds your home payments for an unimproved home!!!

Conclusion:

It's not just green to improve the energy-efficiency of your home, but it saves green to do so, even if you put quite a bit in!!!

This is not even taking into consideration Return On Investment (ROI). I'll leave this for a later post, but there are quite good numbers out there now showing that green homes sell quicker and for a higher price-point than equivalent standard homes.

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