{"id":14682,"date":"2012-08-14T12:12:31","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T18:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-367309-1145705.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=14682"},"modified":"2012-08-14T12:12:31","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T18:12:31","slug":"the-most-energy-efficient-home-is-small-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/the-most-energy-efficient-home-is-small-right\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Energy Efficient Home is Small… Right?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"large<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently, I overheard a two people arguing about the relative efficiency of an old, small, inefficient, cold climate home in the Northeast versus a newly constructed large Southern California home using energy efficient methods<\/a>. At first I guessed that because of the house size, the NE home would be hard to beat out, but then I realized that I was unsure. So I decided to do some back of the envelope<\/a> math.<\/p>\n

To frame the context with some kind of starting point variables, I used a home from La Costa Life<\/a>, an upscale development in California, vs a dilapidated home in the Northeast. \u00a0Basically, I\u2019m going to use the best efficiency in the new home and the worst possible in the small NE home in any instance that is unknown (which is basically all of them). \u00a0I\u2019ll be making plenty of assumptions along the way, so hold on to your seats, and know that the conclusions would likely shift with different assumptions. \u00a0Based on my reading, I\u2019ll assume that a small Northeastern home uses 50-60% of it energy on heating, but has roughly half the square footage.<\/p>\n

The best data I found was from the US Energy Information Administration. \u00a0Every four years they conduct the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) and compile the results into reports<\/a>. \u00a0There are a lot of categories broken down, but not really enough to accurately compare the Large SoCo home and the Small Northeast home. \u00a0The main issue is that it doesn\u2019t break the energy usage into categories, just how many homes use certain types of heating (natural gas, electric, etc). \u00a0Then energy usage is lumped into averages based on things like year of construction, income level, and square footage.<\/p>\n

Although they didn\u2019t directly answer the questions I had, they did get closer than anything else I found, and gave a few interesting takeaway generalizations:<\/p>\n