Realtor Handbook

Realtor Handbook

Thank you for attending the Realtor class on Sustainable Heating. This Guide will help you remember the important concepts and data points we covered in the class. We encourage you to share this with your customers. If you have questions about how to reduce the carbon footprint from the heating system in a home you are buying or selling please feel free to reach out, we are here to help.

You don’t have to fill out the form below, but if you would like to ask a question or receive occasional clean heating news we would be glad to include you in our community! Heating technology is getting better all the time.

Winter well,
Jeff

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Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.