Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Now that we’re well and truly settled in our new house (14 months in), I was interested to compare the energy usage here with our previous rental.

The happy gist is that the new Norway Street house costs about $730 less per year in energy (including heating, cooking, hot water etc), despite being about 38% larger in floor area than the Brooklyn rental. The new house also has the strange and wonderful feature of being warm everywhere in the house, all the time.

Our architects and builders put quite a lot of effort into making the house energy efficient, chiefly through air-tightness, insulation, window quality, and care with thermal bridging. Now it would be really interesting to compare the energy use with a similar-sized new house built closer to the standard required by the building code. Perhaps I can convince the neighbours …