Work-Arounds

While the Home Energy Saver is the most comprehensive home energy model available on the web, there are inevitably specific systems or features that we have not yet explicitly incorporated. In some cases, there are reasonable work-arounds that the user can use to approximate the energy use of such features or systems. For example:

• Evaporative Cooling: HES Does not model Evaporative coolers. However, you can specify an appropriately high SEER (e.g. 22) in the air conditioning description to approximate the relatively low energy use of evaporative coolers. Note that this method will not yield any information about the water consumption by evaporative coolers, which also has a cost and environmental implications.
  
  
• Extended Vacations: HES does not explicitly allow you to specify periods over which you may be away from your home, with consequent savings in energy use. One way to approximate this is to adjust the utilization factors (e.g. % of floor area heated or cooled, numbers of loads of clothes washed and dried, etc.) to reflect. For example, if you are away from your home 10% of the time, you could reduce the utilization factors by 10%. Keep in mind that some appliances will run irrespective of whether or not you are home (e.g. refrigerators). The time of year you are away will also have an effect on weather-sensitive energy uses.
  
  
• Line-drying clothes: You can account for this by adjusting the loads of clothes dried per week. For example, if you line dry half the time and wash 4 loads of clothes per week, you can specify 2 loads of week for clothes drying.
  
  
• Ground-source heat pump: You can model this crudely by entering a higher SEER. Consult the manufacturer or mechanical contractor for a reasonable estimate of this value.