Five Percent: Conserve Energy

The Green Inc. blog had a good post today about building codes that require energy efficiency, along with the idea that there should be a national standard. In my former life, I worked in the building trades, has a builder’s license, and know that the idea of being an effective builder is to either a) build pretty close to the code, and no more, or 2) bribe your local inspector as needed. In either case, the building code set a standard, and most of the violations I saw were minimal — building codes work. (more…)

We recently had an energy audit for our house and learned a lot, including:

• The most of the corners of the house were never insulated the first time
• Our bulkhead door leaks like a sieve (maybe that’s why I can see light through it :-)
• The attic door and whole house fan let in a lot of air
• The chimney damper is pretty useless in terms of insulating
• Air pours into our basement through the sill and old windows
• Most of our windows still need to have caulking around the edges — air is getting in
• All the leaks result in a complete air exchange about once every 70 minutes in winter

How the Audit Worked

There were two parts: a “blower door test” and an infrared camera inspection (the actual reports are linked below). (more…)

Uninsulated Ceiling

I’ll write more about the details in another post, but it occurred to me that many, if not most houses could get a payback. If someone like me (obsessive, crazy) failed to take this simple step for at least 5 years, there’s something wrong. Here are some of the things I think need to happen:

• The rapid payback opportunity should be promoted more visibly;
• It should be a lot easier to find the companies that do this kind of service in your area;
• If there’s a tax incentive, I don’t know about it, but there should be;
• Utilities should have an incentive to promote this kind of action, and even do no-cost financing of the audit cost;
• There should be a good, current, easily accessible registry of contractors and “finder” tool on the EnergyStar site;
• There should be some certification for contractors who can do the audits, as well as those who can do mitigation; and
• Everyone should know that it’s easy, quick, low-cost, and has no downsides!

And probably a few others. (more…)

I have spent a lot of time and thought on how to save electricity, but not as much on how to save natural gas. I got a lot of information right from the bills, but I used a cool measuring device to get to some important details.

I have a gas furnace and water heater, and also a gas stove. Sure, I can see how much gas I use from the bill. But what do I do with that information (other than pay the bill?)

I wonder how our gas and electrical usage compare? They are both in dollars, but how does that translate to energy? To get that I need to read the bills and convert to a single unit of energy. Following the excellent model of WattzOn … sort of — they measure power, in Watts — how much power you are using now, and at every moment (watts measures power, which has the time factor, or rate built in).

But here I am looking at the energy that I use over some period of time, like a day, or a month or an hour. So I have decided to measure energy. And so we can compare, I can convert to a standard measure: kilowatt-hours (think: 10 old-fashioned 100W light-bulbs, all on for one hour). When you’re talking about things that use energy like water heaters, furnaces, lights, refrigerators, and so on it’s more important to think of how much you use them in a given day (or week, or moth, or year). I’ll pick “day”.

Read Your Gas and Oil Bills

According to our utility bills from the most recent billing cycle:

• Electricity: 616 kWh in the 33 day billing cycle, or 18.6 kWh/day
• Gas: 180 therms in the 25 day billing cycle, or 7.2 therms/day, and 1 therm = 29.3 kWh, so 5274 kWh, or 211 kWh/day

Wow! I used more than 11 times more energy in gas than in electricity. (Maybe I should spend more time focusing on that, especially in the winter!). Ok, how about relative price? (more…)

How it pains me to say this, but WalMart, indeed corporations as a whole, may not be villainous scalawags. At least not completely.

WalMart has beaten their goal of reducing its internal goals of increasing fleet efficiency by 25% in three years. And with the introduction of a fleet of new hybrid and not-just-diesel fueled trucks, they claim they’re on the way to their goal of doubling fleet efficiency, right through to (drum roll) sustainability.

Well damn, I am as cynical as they get, but even I can see that this is a pretty great thing. And I take credit. No, not full credit, but all of those of us who formerly reviled WalMart for their environmental turpitude guilt-ed them into helped them understand that they were leaders and what they do matters. A lot. Michael Moore and his ilk might have had a little more influence than I, but I am in better shape.

Oh, sure, WalMart still treats their employees like crap (more…)

Over the last years, as I have been writing this blog I have made a lot of little changes that have added up — the biggest change by far has been simply becoming aware of how my actions use resources. A new site called WattzOn aims to make becoming aware of your impact a simpler proposition.

Figuring out how much energy you use seems easy, or at least it did to me until I tried it. Sure you can add up the things that appear to be the “biggies” — the gas you buy for your car, the electricity bill, the heating and cooling bill and so on.

But that calculus represents a misleading picture of your impact. For one, we eat. It takes a lot of energy to make (and deliver, store, etc.) food. Oh, and we buy things, too. Everything takes energy just to get to your front door before you even turn it on (or trash it when you’re done).

And one I regularly forget: the services our governments provide, from making roads to heating the state house all add up to a huge chunk, too. And what about businesses — how do we add them in?

WattzOn asks you a few key questions, then does a good job of trying to count all of these things up, and then let you see how you’re doing compared to others. My gas company has a similar tool, but it only thinks about gas and electricity. WattzOn is taking on a larger pie, and that’s important. It’s also a lot harder. (more…)

When I installed our real-time PowerCost Monitor, we were able to measure our total electrical usage and see how what we did used electricity. It has had an incredible effect on our behavior. Likewise, the real-time mileage display in our Toyota Prius had a similar effect.

So, now I want real-time energy measurements for several other aspects of our house and life. And I want the data to be aggregated. In an iPhone application (and a web page, of course). And also a display that sits on our kitchen counter-top, like the power cost monitor with a readout. It seems so simple … well, sort of.

Energy Data, Wherefore art Thou?

I think the actual data is obtainable. We use gas to heat our house and to make hot water, as well as for cooking — it’s all carefully metered, but only read and recorded every month. We record all of our expenses for food, and gasoline, taxes, and everything else in Quicken, and most stuff we buy is on a credit card.

Natural Gas

The gas usage is a big one, since no doubt heating and hot water are likely to be the biggest energy consumers in the house. But I cannot currently tell how much gas is used for hot water versus for heat. (more…)

A recent conversation reminded me that many people believe it’s a bad idea to set your programmable thermostat too low, asserting that it will use more energy to bring your house back up to temperature than it would to leave the temperature closer to normal.

This is wrong. False. Myth. Not true. No way, no how.

(Update: 12/2010: More detailed scientific theory about why programmable thermostats will indeed save money, if you use them correctly in a new post.)

Every moment your house is warmer than the outside air, (heat) energy is leaking out. The greater the difference, the more energy leaks out.

Every moment your home heater is on, energy is being used. The longer it’s on, the more energy is used.

Period. (more…)

A walking school bus is a simple idea. One or two parents sign up to be drivers, routes and times are set, and every day, our kids walk along to school.

An industrious parent in my daughter’s elementary school organized ours. She found leaders and started four routes last week; I have been “driving” one. We have about 10 kids in our route, and I think the others do as well.

Of course all I care about is that it’s “green” :-) But there’s so much more.

It’s convenient for parents — they just drop their child at a stop at the appointed time and say goodbye.

It’s fun for the kids. Friends who didn’t know they lived close to each other have met. Several kids who were a little uncertain at first are having a blast.

It’s painless for the driver. (more…)

It is a wonderful thing that car manufacturers are moving to hybrid versions of their vehicles.

Like many of the incremental features introduced in cars over the years, the good ones catch on. Shoulder belts, air bags, anti-lock braking, and many others have made cars safer.

And now, many cars are available with hybrid engines. This adds to the price of the car a little (or sometimes, it seems, a lot). And a hybrid system makes the car greener, right?

Why, the Chevy Tahoe is the green car of the year if you can believe that. (It costs $11,000 more to get the “green” hybrid version, so the car can get a paltry 22 miles per gallon).

A hybrid system does not make a car “green”, it just makes a car a little less of a bad thing. (more…)