In part 1 and part 2 of this interview, Patti talks about how our communities really need energy efficiency and how easy it is if people knew to focus on unnecessary waste. This is part 3 of the interview where she shares examples from her energy coaching where people were shocked to find the true culprits behind their high electricity and gas bills.

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TRAVIS:  We were talking to Chris, who’s also an energy coach, last time. He shared some memorable stories from energy coaching. One of them was that he found this guy didn’t know what was causing such huge bills in his home. And then it so happened he had his own car washer. A full blown, drive through car washer at his house!

PATTI SEXTON:  Oh, no kidding.

TRAVIS:  I thought that was pretty funny. There were some other ones that were less funny, but just more shocking. Like, wow, I didn’t know that that was actually the culprit. Do you have any of these cases to share that’s memorable or shocking?

PATTI SEXTON:  Yes, I sure do have examples. It’s always interesting how people use energy, and they don’t even think about how it takes energy to run certain things in their homes. One example: I visited a couple that had lived in their home for several years. They were saying that their electricity bill was really high. I did take a look at the analysis through HomeIntel Smart Audit. The energy profile did show the probable cause was a recirculating pump for their water heater.

PATTI SEXTON:  So, I said, “Okay, it looks like you’ve got to recirculating pump here. We can take a look at that.” They said, “Oh, gosh, I don’t think we have one because we’ve been thinking about adding some upgrades to the house. That was one of the upgrades that we thought that we might add.” I’m like, “Oh, gosh. Well, let’s go ahead and take a look. Let’s go to your water heater and take a look at it.” We went to the garage and opened up the closet that the water heater was in. Sure enough, there was a recirculating pump there. I pointed that out. And I said, “This recirculating pump is on, and I imagine it’s running all the time.”

PATTI SEXTON:  The husband and wife, they were just so embarrassed. They said, “Oh my goodness, we had no idea we had one. And I guess it’s been running ever since we bought the house several years ago.” Typically, the cost of running a recirculating pump 24/7 is $600 annually, about $50 per month extra people will pay in their electricity and natural gas bills for having a recirculating pump running all the time. They were very surprised.

TRAVIS:  That’s 600 bucks a year that you can do something about.

PATTI SEXTON:  Oh, exactly, because the benefit that you get from a recirculating pump is just a very small amount. Anyway, that was one example. There was another example. I went to a home that was quite large,–maybe 3,000 square foot house–with only one person living in there. This fellow said, “No, I don’t understand why my bills are so high because I really don’t have a lot going on in the house. I’m the only one who lives here.” He’s got a computer and one refrigerator. I did a walkthrough of the house, and there really wasn’t much. But then we went into the garage, and I heard the fan and his furnace running. Now, this was May. So, the temperature outside was really good. No need to be have the furnace on and by the way, there was no heating actively going on. Just the blower fan and the HVAC system was running.

PATTI SEXTON:  I asked him, “Is there any reason that you’ve got this fan going all the time?” He said, “Oh no.” He goes, “I just thought that was the way it was. That’s the way it operated.” I said, “Well, let’s go take a look at your thermostat.” Sure enough, the thermostat had the fan setting on “on.” The fan is constantly used to blow the warm or cool air around the house. It was set to the “on” position rather than “auto.”

PATTI SEXTON:  I said, “Because you’ve got it on the on position, the fan is pushing air around even when you don’t need warmer or cooler air distributed to the rooms in your home.” He said, “Oh, gosh, I had no idea that somehow this had turned on.” Again, I took a look at his energy analysis for the last 12 months. I could see that it was middle of December that his base load increased by about 400 to 500 watts and stayed very constant up until I went to visit and check out his energy usage.

PATTI SEXTON:  It seemed like either he or someone else that visited just made that little change on the thermostat, and basically caused his electricity bill to be increased by about probably $150 per month for every month.

TRAVIS:  That’s crazy. For a fan that’s eating a 400 watts in the middle of December. Okay, well that’s a good one. I’m sure that he didn’t feel anything giving that up.

PATTI SEXTON:  Oh yeah, he was very happy to just change that switch from “on” to “auto.” He was fine with that and he got the savings from then on. There’s another interesting situation that I ran into. It was an older retired person. In her garage, she had an older, upright freezer. It wasn’t a huge freezer. But the strange thing about this freezer was that the rubber seal around the door, or somehow the door had not closed all the way but there was enough condensation that had built up so that the ice basically was wedging the door open. You couldn’t actually close the freezer door all the way.

PATTI SEXTON:  A huge amount of ice had built up and the compressor for that freezer was just running all the time trying to do its best to cool the interior of that freezer to the point where the thermostat would turn it off, but of course it never got to that point. So, it was always running.

PATTI SEXTON:  Even in the summertime, when that garage got really hot, the compressor was just doing its best to keep the freezer cold, but the warm air in the garage was always seeping into the freezer. It was a never-ending energy drain from that appliance.

TRAVIS:  Any idea how much that costed the resident?

PATTI SEXTON:  Oh, I wasn’t able to measure the amount of electricity that that compressor was taking. Unfortunately, no. But I just know that it wa a lot.

TRAVIS:  That can’t be good. It cannot be good because making something cold takes a lot of energy. If you’re constantly making that thing work 24/7, that can’t be good.

PATTI SEXTON:  Exactly. Then there was a home that I went into that had changed out the lighting system. It was really one of those fancy lighting systems where each room had a control panel, and then you could press a button, say when you came into the front door, and then the hallway lights and the kitchen light and maybe the living room light would turn on automatically because that was your pathway lighting.

PATTI SEXTON:  Anyway, every room of this house had all these different lighting scenarios. But the way to achieve that was basically a system that required a computer to run all of these different lighting controls in each room. It required DC power. Instead of the lighting using AC power, it actually had to be converted. In this house, mostly the garage and the attic, there were like 20 different AC to DC converter boxes.

PATTI SEXTON:  When I researched and got the manufacturers specification and added up all of these transformers, the amount of inefficiency that was in the transformer, even if every single light bulb in that house was turned off, it was still using about $75 a month worth of electricity with no lights being on.

TRAVIS:  That’s a good case of a vampire load.

PATTI SEXTON:  Exactly, right. It was a vampire load. Because these people, they had put the system in back when they were both working and earning a lot. So, he high energy bills wasn’t a problem. But then they retired and realized “Oh my goodness.” They’re having to pull out of savings to pay for these really high monthly energy bills. They were willing at that point to turn off lights when it’s not being used and things like that. They really wanted to conserve at that point. But I explained to them that, they could conserve all they wanted to, but they were still paying $75 a month before they turned on the first light bulb.

TRAVIS:  Well, Patti, thank you very much for taking your time to speak with us today. I know you’re quite busy with energy coaching. The Bay Area is only getting more expensive. I think both affordability and climate change makes energy efficiency a bigger and bigger issue for a lot of people. I think everybody appreciates people like you out there who are doing this–really helping people out and cutting out waste. Doing it without really sacrificing lifestyle. I think that’s pretty important.