This document discusses strategies for making housing more energy efficient and green, including: 1) Conducting energy audits and offering low-interest loans to upgrade multifamily housing units with insulation and air sealing. 2) The first step to making a building more energy efficient and green is through insulation and air sealing, not renewable energy options, to reduce fossil fuel usage as much as possible. 3) Proper air sealing is important to control ventilation rather than relying on random air leaks, and can be tedious but important work.

1. Housing Action Illinois 2009 Greening RehabAlex FullerCenter for Neighborhood TechnologyCraig MattesonARC Insulation, Inc.

2. Energy Savers ProgramEnergy audits, construction management, low-interest loan through CICMultifamily building owners in private and subsidized markets260 buildings, 9,000 units audited so farMeasure impact of energy efficiency on affordability and housing preservation

3. Put up a wind turbineInstall photovoltaic panelsLiterally go greenBuild your own nuclear power plantInsulate and air-sealYou want to go green.The first thing you should do is

4. The Nightmare Scenario:An inefficient building that you try to run on renewable energy. First make the building burn as little fossil fuel as possible. Then go after renewable/sustainable/green/ clean/eco-friendly technology.

5. Measuring greenResidential Energy Services Network (RESNET)Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Energy Star

6. What’s important?ElectricityGas

7. Simplified House – A box of hot air in cold airColdHotCold

8. Conduction heat lossHotCold

9. Moral of the story: Worse than you’d think. Low R-values disproportionately drag down the overall R-value.

10. Heavily insulating one side is exponentially useless.

11. In an ideal world, insulate all sides evenly.Area-weighted R-values

12. Convection heat lossAir leaks out at the topSomewhere in the middle, no air leakageAir leaks in at the bottom

13. From Insulate and Weatherize by Bruce Harley:Older homes usually had little or no insulation and were quite leaky. They are the basis for that pearl of wisdom “a house has to breathe”…One approach to dealing with this is a head-in-the-sand stance: Let’s not make this house “too efficient” in the hope that it will “breathe” and stay healthy.Why make a house tight, and then spend money to ventilate it? Doesn’t it make more sense to just leave it a little bit leaky? The short answer is no. A leaky house experiences haphazard ventilation that may or may not be appropriate or adequate. A good ventilation system, on the other hand, allows you to control the introduction of fresh air into a home.

14. Air-sealing – Tedious but Important