Cumulative Home Energy Costs

– Why Every American Homeowner Should be Concerned
“The following table represents a scenario where home energy bills increase by a very modest 5% per year over a 50 year time frame. Look up your current monthly energy bill to see what your cumulative energy bill will be years into the future.

The column highlighted in red represents the average American homeowner’s energy bill for 2010. Could this be your house? Well if it is, by year 30 you will probably have paid as much for energy as your mortgage cost or somewhere around $300,000. But you’re not through paying just yet. You can look forward to another $600,000 in energy costs over the next 20 years. Wake up America! Is your home a zero energy home? If not, you’d better consider your future.

At EarthCo Building Systems, we consider a zero energy home as the bare minimum for a house to be worth owning. We would also like to see people deploy other energy and resource saving technologies to produce truly sustainable housing of the future. This would include (where appropriate) rainwater collection systems, grey-water recycling, composting toilets, passive solar design with minimal mechanical systems, and if necessary solar powered air conditioning and heating systems, fresh air induction systems, well insulated building envelopes built with EarthCo Megablock wall systems, smart electronic control systems, and an indoor greenhouse to provide for at least 50% of a families total food supply. We believe these ingredients are prerequisites for producing sustainable housing solutions.”

Source EarthCo Megablock.com

Comment: I suggest trying to reach the goal of zero energy housing as much as practical even if you can’t obtain 100% efficiency. For instance, due to budgetary constraints you may have to postpone some of the costlier improvements until later. This may mean your home falls short of the goal by a few percentage points, but you’ll obviously be way ahead in energy savings than most homes.

Also note how fiat currency is regularly devalued through inflation. The US dollar, for example, has lost about 99% of it’s value in the last century! This is like a hidden tax that’s gradually eroding our buying power.