Home energy check

My electric company (as do many from what I understand) offers a service to customers where they will come to your home and check it out for energy efficiency. It's a free service and it's really quite helpful for homeowners to figure out where they can improve their energy usage. So being the frugal and environmentally conscious homeowner that I am, I set one of these things up for our house.

This morning the guy comes to the house and checks our A/C unit (the number 1 user of energy in the house), our hot water heater (the number 2 user of energy in the house), the duct work under the house (yes ducts run under the home), and the insulation in our crawl space (attic that isn't an attic cause it's too small). Here's the verdict:

• A/C unit is good, but needs to be serviced probably just to be sure it is running properly.
• Need to check hot water heater to see if the temp needs to change (that's just us playing with it)
• We need to have someone come in and fix our ducts. The guy checked and said that the tape is coming loose from the joints and that it is looking worn, so we scheduled another thing for the energy co. to come out and do a duct inspection for us so we can figure out what that will cost. It needs to be done cause I don't like heat and A/C escaping under my house. Plus with winter coming (I know mild Florida winter, but it still feels cold to me) and relatives visiting from a tropical Caribbean island, we need to keep warmth in the house, not under it.
• The insulation is low. We have the loose, blow type insulation and apparently you need 7-10 inches of it in your attic.....we have 1.5 inches. I feel like the inspector said something about the insulation in the crawl space, but I can't remember what....and between the bugs and now the insulation, I think I want to go back through that thing to be sure of what he did and did not mention.

So to keep my house from being absolutely freezing this winter I need to buy and install a new window for the bathroom (window bought, but not installed) because surprisingly tape doesn't do a great job of keeping cold air out, buy and install a new back door (again, tape doesn't really keep cold air out), fill my crawl space with several more inches of insulation, and get my duct work fixed. If I had to guesstimate what all this will cost me, I think we're looking at $2000 possibly.

For those of you expecting Christmas presents from me this year be prepared for a very thoughtful note and baked goods.