Lost heat costs residents millions
Website helps track homes’ inefficiencies
Calgarians may have barely stirred in their sleep one spring night in 2012 as a small-engine plane flew back and forth over the city’s neighbourhoods at low altitude.
But the images collected by a sophisticated, thermal imaging camera on board the aircraft are now waking residents to the financial and environmental cost of the heat that’s silently seeping from their homes.
A team of researchers at the University of Calgary used the images and city data to create a web-based map that shows potential greenhouse gas emissions for entire suburbs and pinpoints hot spots in each individual home where waste energy is escaping.
The project is the brainchild of geography professor Geoffrey Hay who began wondering four years ago why his recently constructed two-storey home in the Cougar Ridge subdivision was always cold.
While the home had triple-pane windows, a high-efficiency furnace and good insulation, images from the study prompted Hay to use a thermal camera that showed him there were gaps around his doors and leaks in a window that had been poorly caulked.
“The quality of building in Calgary, and other places in Canada is pretty appalling,” he said. “Collectively, we could be saving huge amounts of money.”
In part due to the climate, people in this country are among the highest per capita users of energy in the world.
Heating buildings in Canada accounts for about a third of all energy use and about 35 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
Hay said the beauty of the webbased map service is it allows homeowners to see where heat is leaking from their homes and to compare their residence to others in their neighbourhood.
“It’s hard to get people to act on something they can’t see,” he said.
“The images show hot spots from overhead that often correspond to poor roof insulation or leaking windows.”
The camera images show variances in temperature of as little 5/100th of one degree Celsius within an accuracy range of less than one metre on any given home.
Among the nearly 38,000 singlefamily homes in the northwest and southwest quadrants of Calgary that have been mapped so far, the web map estimates those homeowners could realize annual savings on heat of $4.9 million and avoid 29,000 tonnes in C02 emissions through efficiency improvements.
The U of C team hopes to expand the project and map every one of the city’s 350,000-plus residences if they can find the funding.
“I want to make this free for people to use so they can make good decisions,” said Hay, “but it costs money to build and maintain a website.”
Incomplete as it is, the map already raises interesting issues.
Homes in older neighbourhoods like Dalhousie and Brentwood score relatively well compared to those in some newer subdivisions like Patterson and Westgate.
Part of that difference may reflect the fact that the heat loss index weights for the larger living areas and stricter building code in effect at the time those subdivisions were developed, but Hay said it may also point to the fact that some new homes are not as well built as they’re billed.
“The results give me pause because my home is one of those,” he said.
“It’s cold and my heating bills are high, despite the fact that I invested a lot in buying something that I thought was energy efficient.”
Homeowners can check out the study’s findings at www.saveheat.co.