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Comfort
Common Concerns: When to Invest in Home Comfort | What Makes a Home Comfortable | A Comfortable Home Functions Cohesively | Comfort can Pay for ItselfOverview
As the place where people spend much of their time, home is often where people want to relax and feel comfortable. A properly functioning home should provide shelter from the elements, but also a healthy and comfortable inside living environment. Unfortunately, many home systems are poorly designed and the home doesn’t function as intended. The result is that people either spend more to heat or to cool their house, are unable to feel comfortable, or both. Since people can only really control their thermostat, living in a house where setting the thermostat to a comfortable temperature is costly or ineffective may create the impression that there is nothing further that can be done. Indeed, many people conclude they have no other option than to simply live with a stuffy, drafty, or otherwise uncomfortable house.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is usually a set of straightforward home improvements that can make house much more comfortable and even save some money on energy bills, especially if bills were high before the improvements. By considering all of a house’s individual characteristics together as a system that works as a cohesive whole, it is possible to pinpoint and fix the problems which lead to moisture, drafts, and the inability to keep the house at a comfortable temperature. Fixing these problems helps the house function as a system and can often save money and improve indoor air quality in addition to making the home a more comfortable and pleasant place to live. This is because the same air leaks and moisture which make a house feel stuffy or drafty also make the heating or cooling system work harder (using more energy) and invite the entry of pollutants and the growth of mold and mildew which can cause health problems.
When the functional components of the home are considered together they complement each other instead of working against each other. The basic components of the whole home system are:
Common Concerns: When to Invest in Home Comfort
A home is most often judged by its location, size and aesthetics, and when thinking about ways to invest in the value of your home, improving functionality is not often a priority. However, if you stop to think if of the comfort issues you may have with your house, it may become apparent that there are some fundamental problems that need to be addressed. Common comfort concerns include:
What Makes a Home Comfortable
The concept of comfort is most often used to describe things such as shoes, clothing, or furniture. In these contexts comfort usually means that there is no pain due to lack of support, pressure or constriction of blood flow. But what does comfort mean in the context of a house?
There are three basic principles from physics which are used to described thermal comfort for a person in a building such as a house.
- Latent Heat: describes how relative humidity and air temperature affect the body’s capacity to regulate body temperature through evaporation of moisture from the skin
- Convective Heat: describes how skin temperature is affected by air temperature and air movement (such as from fans, drafts or air circulation from a central air furnace or air conditioner)
- Radiant Heat: describes how skin temperature is affected by the surface temperature of objects in the room around a person (cold uninsulated walls or window may draw heat away from a person, while a hot stove or radiator will radiate heat towards a person)
For better or for worse, all of these factors are influenced by all aspects in a home. Addressing insulation and holes in the home’s envelope (walls, ceiling, and floor) is just as important as addressing the functionality of the HVAC system when determining how comfortable a house will feel.
A Comfortable Home Functions Cohesively
A well insulated and sealed home will require less energy for attaining a comfortable temperature because less energy will be wasted or lost. Well insulated surfaces will also be easier to keep closer to the heating or cooling temperature inside the home. Properly sized and installed heating and cooling systems will be able to maintain more constant temperatures and deliver balanced temperatures throughout the home because air with varying temperatures will be effectively mixed and balanced. A smaller heating system or air conditioner will operate more of the time than, say, a large furnace that will supply blasts of heat from time to time.
Slow and steady temperature regulation helps air to circulate more frequently and uses convective heat transfer to keep the surface temperature of objects in a room closer to comfortable air temperature, minimizing discomfort from radiant heat effects. Moisture levels, which affect latent heat, are also kept more comfortable with a smaller system which runs for longer periods: over-sized furnaces may dry out the air, while over-sized air conditioners may not run long enough to remove enough moisture from the air. Air which is too dry or too humid will feel uncomfortable.
Since building envelope components such as air sealing, insulation and windows as well as heating, cooling, and ventilation components such as forced air furnaces, air conditioners and fresh air ventilation all affect moisture, air flow, surface and air temperatures, they all play a role in maintaining comfort in a home.
Comfort can Pay for Itself
When a home’s building envelope is leaky, high amounts of gas or electricity are often consumed attempting to reach comfortable interior temperatures. Unfortunately, people in such homes can pay high utility bills and still not be comfortable. Often, comfort improvements can pay for themselves over time, since improvements for a home’s comfort can be energy efficient as well. Comfort improvements which qualify as energy efficiency improvements can have at least some of their costs defrayed by:
- Energy Cost Savings: the return on investment which can pay for the improvements over time
- Energy Efficiency Rebates: defer upfront costs
- Financing: reasonable financing can match monthly payments to average monthly cost savings