Dealing with high energy bills 
Increasingly high home energy bills can cause a strain on your family budget, as a result many people are looking for ways to conserve energy in their homes.  Whether you live in a newer home or an older home, there are a number of relatively inexpensive steps you can take to bring your monthly bills down.  Below are a few of the fundamentals:

  
Ventilation:
For a new or pre-owned home, proper ventilation is the key.  Hot air gets into your attic as the sun shines down on your shingles, which in turn heats up the decking, which then deposits hot air into your attic.  Hot air rises, so in order for this hot air to get out of your attic their needs to be an adequate number of vents installed in your attic.  A properly vented attic will have a proportioned amount of soffit vents allowing cooler air to enter the attic at the lower section, heating up and rising all the way up and out of the attic at the ridge.

Insulation:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              How much insulation is enough?  To reach the R30 levels that homes in Texas should have, there should be roughly 10” of fiberglass loose fill insulation in your attic.  Other types may take anywhere from 7”-10” for other blown insulation types (cellulose, rock wool etc…,)   Just because your buying a new home doesn’t necessarily mean your home is properly insulated. 

Summers in the North Texas can be scorching.   An unvented or inadequately vented attic space can act like an oven, with temperatures above 150 °.   Roof decking can reach temperatures of 170° and can cook the underside of shingles, causing accelerated deterioration and warping, which can eventually cause leaks and lead to expensive repairs.  The attic flooring can reach 140°, which makes the rooms underneath them uncomfortable. 
 
In the Winter the problem is moisture.  Your furnace sends warm air through your home which absorbs the moisture from showers, range hoods, and dryer vents.  This high humidity air enters the attic through diffusion (process in which high humidity air in your home works it’s way into your low humidity attic), and also cracks around your attic entry door (be sure to weather strip and insulate the door) , recessed lighting, light fixtures, exhaust fans, wall plugs, are all entry points for this air.  This high humidity air hits your attic framing and condensates into drops of water, which either drip onto your insulation or are absorbed into the framing.  The results can include:  damage to your framing, moisture stains on your ceiling, damage to insulation leading to higher utility bills, wood rot, and damage to your roofing materials.

Below is a quick list of home improvements you can make to reduce your energy usage and lower your monthly bill:

• Replace all the incandescent light bulbs in your home with fluorescent bulbs.   
• Replace you’re A/C filter regularly, and have your system serviced annually.                                 
• Use a programmable thermostat  
• Invest in solar screens for your windows
• Replace caulking on your windows and weather-strip your doorways 
• Use ceiling fans to lower room temperature
• Ventilate and insulate 
• Have your A/C unit(s) replaced with a newer more energy efficient model