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Investors Business Daily ^ | 02/23/2024 | KIT NORTON

[Tell It Right]

I suggest wherever you move to, consider building your own home. I've done as much with my house to improve my energy independent to take advantage of economies of scale, but any more I do from here has a low ROI because of the law of diminishing returns.

If you build your house (or have it built), go behind the workers and make sure all the gaps are caulked before insulation covers up the gaps, then make sure everything is insulated really well before sheetrock is added, have triple paned windows, install a hybrid water heater just below the attic (i.e. not in the basement of a multi-story home but in the top floor of a home), duct from the attic to the air intake of the water heater, duct from the water heater's air output to the outside wall (like the clothes dryer) but with a duct lever to let you redirect that free cold air from the water heater to the HVAC intake during the warm half of the year to help cool the home, HVAC will be either variable speed heat pump with variable speed air handler or mini splits, if you move to somewhere like Alabama and do solar don't do natural gas furnace instead do electric heat strips for the times it's too cold for the heat pump, heavily insulate the attic and under the floor, build a metal roof, and if you don't want to cut down a lot of trees for the solar array build the house and roof line so that you have plenty of south facing roof for solar panels with at least half of the roof at a steep pitch for winter sun.

I have some of that but not all of that. It'd be cost prohibitive to do all of that to my existing house. But if my wife and I decide that our two-story home is too big for us in retirement and need to downsize, I every now and then think about how to make our future home more energy efficient. Stuff like that is at least as important as the specs on the solar equipment and such.

[fireman15]

I suggest wherever you move to, consider building your own home.

I come from a family of prolific developers and home builders. But my wife and I just spent 8 years fixing up a house built in 1900. We haven't got enough energy or time to start another multi-year project, which I can guarantee this would likely turn into. But I agree that making a house energy efficient is likely the most cost-effective way of becoming more energy independent.

We had a bunch of house flippers make us low ball offers. I put a ton of insulation in the house along with energy efficient windows, etc... All of the flippers said that they almost never added insulation because it added little value to their sales.

Instead, they add heat pumps and furnaces and sometimes even solar panels that they can claim are highly efficient. This of course is a gimmick that people fall for. It hardly matters if your furnace or heat pump is 98% efficient if the heat or cold that they make are escaping through old single pane windows and uninsulated drafty walls and ceilings.

I do appreciate the suggestion and where you are coming from. I wouldn't mind building a big garage, airplane hangar or pool. But we are completely burned out on home building or large improvement projects.