Beacon

Energy efficiency was seen as important to many people participating in the study, though not your top priority. 

The good news was that HomeSmart Renovation participants were overall lower energy users than the general population.  About half of all households in the study met Beacon’s HSS High Standard of Sustainability® benchmarks for energy use:

The bad news was that temperatures and moisture levels were still high in these homes.  Home performance is not just about saving energy - you need to be warm, healthy and dry as well.

About 20% of participants were very high energy users, using more than 12,000 kWh of electricity and gas each year.  Sadly, these households were not generally the warmest homes.  A lot of their energy use is wasted energy, trying to heat homes that are not insulated, using inefficient heaters.

Surprisingly there was very little use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. 16.4% of homes have no CFLs while the majority of dwellings have ten or less CFLs.  Yet only 16.7% of households were unable to replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs.

Related Documents

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  31-May-2010 (Report HR2420/13)

  HomeSmart Renovations: Householder Actions and Responses to Dwelling Performance (PDF 1.1MB)

  Kay Saville Smith, Ruth Fraser, Nikki Buckett, Michael Camilleri

  This report presents self-reported and monitored data from householders participating in the HomeSmart Renovation Project. It describes the profile of those householders, their perceptions of house condition, and their past, intended and actual renovations. It considers the profile of house performance of the subset of householders whose dwellings were monitored for temperature and the impact of renovations on electricity and water consumption.