Americans Don’t Know Jack About Saving Energy

by Shana Fong on August 19, 2010
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In this illuminating post by Grist, we learn through a recent survey by The Earth Institute at Columbia University that Americans really don’t know jack about saving energy.

The largest group, nearly 20 percent, cited turning off lights as the best approach—an action that affects energy budgets relatively little. Very few cited buying decisions that experts say would cut U.S. energy consumption dramatically, such as more efficient cars (cited by only 2.8 percent), more efficient appliances (cited by 3.2 percent) or weatherizing homes (cited by 2.1 percent).

About 2.8 percent of those responding said they could save energy by sleeping or relaxing more, compared with 2.1 percent who said they could do so by insulating their homes (can you guess which is actually more effective?).

Jonathan Hiskes of Grist asserts:

The theme of the confusion was that participants tended to name steps that involved doing less or using less of things — turning off lights, turning down thermostats — rather than solutions that allow them to get the same amount of light and heat through less energy (via insulation and LED bulbs). That gets at a key difference between conservation and efficiency. The first means using less; the second means getting the same results through more intelligent use of resources. Both have a place, but it’s a problem if people understand all of efficiency as “sacrifice.” A home retrofit that cuts $500 off your heating bills for the year isn’t a sacrifice — it’s a financial and environmental win.

Eco-Cooling Tips for Your Home

by Shana Fong on August 18, 2010
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Here’s a piece written by Matt Golden and Jess Chamberlain for Sunset Magazine on best practices for keeping your house cool, the environmentally friendly way.

To keep a house cool, it’s really about either:

  • Keeping the sun out, or
  • Keeping the air cool/conditioned

In a retrofit situation, you have to first assess what your possibilities are:

  • Is there an attic we can insulate?
  • Are there eaves that are blocking some of the summer sun?
  • Is there an existing cooling system?

This really affects what the best approach to take is.

For an average house in a cooling climate with an attic, we’d recommend reducing the cooling load as much as possible and utilizing passive cooling:
1. Air sealing
2. Adequate attic insulation (min. R-38) to create a thermal barrier
3. Radiant barrier, if there are ducts in attic; on roof decking or in attic
4. Low-E glazing on windows
5. Whole-house fan

This route is very cost-effective from a long-term standpoint; i.e. you’re not paying to condition the air, you just pay for the equipment and installation.
The other option is to actively cool the house, in which case you’d invest in the fundamentals (such as air sealing and insulation), then install a high SEER-rated AC unit (min. 16-18 SEER rating) designed to ACCA’s manuals J, S, D & T. If air handling equipment is located in the attic we would recommend encapsulating the attic with air-impermeable spray foam and bringing the attic into the building envelope. This prevents hot attic air (150˚F+) from infiltrating the duct system.

Easy Cooling Tips:

  • Keep your AC unit in the shade
  • Keep the coils clean
  • Install high efficiency lighting (it keeps house cooler)
  • Turn plug loads off
  • Stop the sun before it gets into your house – use external shading, overhangs, and deciduous trees
  • Low-E coating on windows

Duct Soup

by Shana Fong on July 7, 2010
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Leaking ducts can reduce the efficiency of your heating system by up to 20%. Ducts are a critical part of making your home energy efficient. If they’re leaking air – which they almost always do – or if they’re losing heat because they’re uninsulated, they’re contributing as much to global warming as they are to keeping you warm.

Energy Facts

  • You can save up to 10% of your heating or cooling costs by insulating and tightening up ducts.
  • Even if the air isn’t actually escaping from an uninsulated duct, you lose a lot of heat through its thin metal walls.
  • When the first air that comes out of the vent after you turn on the heater is chilly, and stays chilly for a long time, you know your ducts are uninsulated and you’re wasting energy.

Simple Ways to Save Energy
If your ducts aren’t insulated: Turn on your furnace and feel for air escaping around the duct joints. If you feel any (and you probably will), hire a certified contractor such as Recurve to seal them with mastic.
If your ducts are already insulated: It’s harder to find out if your ducts leak. You can expose the joints (where the ducts bend, for instance) to check – but it’s best to leave it to an expert.

  • Before you start examining your ducts, check to make sure the insulation isn’t asbestos (looks off-white, stiff, heavy cloth). If it is, stay away! It’s in your best interest to get it properly removed ASAP.

Excerpted from 30 Simple Energy Things You Can Do To Save The Earth, by The EarthWorks Group.

Lose 142 Pounds (of Carbon) a Week

by Shana Fong on May 21, 2010
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A while back, National Geographic put out a great guide with 10 steps to cutting the excess carbon out of your life.

Weight control and health tend to go hand in hand—and what’s true for our waistlines also holds true when it comes to the weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and the health of the planet. Excess pounds of carbon dioxide are raising the earth’s temperature and putting coastlines, not waistlines, at risk. Yet for a lot of people, the idea of going on a carbon diet to reduce pounds, much less tons, of the stuff seems airy when there’s nothing to hold onto.

Think of pounds of CO2 as inflated balloons: One pound of CO2 would fill a balloon about two and a half feet wide, and the amount of energy each of us uses every day, just to power our homes and drive our cars, would fill 47 of them. Imagine that for each member of your family 47 of those balloons are added to your home each day. In a week, a family of four would pack in 1,316 balloons, in a month 5,703, and in a year 68,432—enough to fill a building nine stories tall and 100 feet on each side. You wouldn’t be able to find your house in it. It’s no wonder we’re smothering our planet in greenhouse gases. The more balloons of CO2 in the air, the more heat they trap in our atmosphere. So here’s a 10-step carbon diet—a program to keep the greenhouse gas out of 142 balloons every week.

1. Wash your clothes in cold water instead of hot.
• • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 9 per week
Start with something easy. Washing machines produce over 500 pounds of CO2 a year when run on hot water. But your clothes will be just as clean and may even last longer when laundered in cold water.

2. Use a drying rack.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 14 per week
Dryers produce about 1,450 pounds of CO2 per year and the high heat damages fabric. So get more life out of your garments, lower your electric bill and spare the planet by drying at least half of your clothes on a rack or line. Plus, sunlight is the most effective stain-remover around.

3. Seal and weatherstrip your home.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 17 per week
This summer, sealing your home will ensure you don’t lose the cool air you’re paying for. Caulking and weatherstripping doors, windows and any cracks or openings in walls will save about 225 pounds of CO2 per season to run your AC. It pays off even more in the winter when you need to trap the heat; every year, you save 640 pounds of CO2 if you have natural gas heat and 470 pounds if you have electric heat.

4. Insulate.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 41 per week (natural gas heating), 30 per week (electric heat)
Insulating your home is a bit more demanding and best handled professionally. There are a number of insulating options better than fiberglass, which presents a breathing hazard from airborne glass particles and formaldehyde released during installation. Some green-building specialists claim that spray foam insulation is the most efficient and cost-effective variety, even though it’s usually composed of petroleum-based polyurethane. If you choose spray foam, consider a blend that includes soybean oil, such as BioBase501, to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. Another alternative, recycled denim insulation, uses a more eco-friendly material but isn’t as efficient an insulator as polyurethane foam.

5. Wrap your water heater and turn down the temperature.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 16 per week
Insulating your water heater with a simple DIY kit, available at most hardware stores for $20, will save you 300 pounds of CO2 annually. As water heaters can account for up to 13 percent of your utility bill, set the temperature to 120° F. Turning it down from 140° F will save 479 pounds of CO2 annually. If you’re really up for a renovation and it makes sense for your household needs, switch from a conventional water heater to an on-demand heater.

6. Run the dishwasher only when full.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 17 per week
Wait until you fill your dishwasher before turning it on and always set it to the energy saver mode.

7. Turn off your TV, DVD player, computer and cable box.
• • • • •
Burst balloons: 5 per week
Even while idling in “standby” mode, your home entertainment center and computer consume energy. Plug them into a power strip and turn it off after you shut down your electronics.

8. Clean your refrigerator.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Burst balloons: 15 per week
Take a look at the top of your fridge—cluttered much? Clear it off. Those piled-up plastic containers and cereal boxes can prevent your fridge from venting heat effectively. Then go for the more demanding project: Remove the grill at the base of the fridge (or turn the fridge around) to clean the coils.

9. Compost Your Food Scraps.
• • • • •
Burst balloons: 5 per week
Food waste stored in airless landfills is eaten by bacteria that release massive amounts of methane, a gas 21 times more heat-trapping than CO2. Composting ten pounds of food a week will keep five balloons out of the air.

10. Take the bus or ride your bike.
• • •
Burst balloons: 3 per week (bus), 12 per week (bike)
The average 12-mile commute to work produces roughly 12 pounds of CO2 (depending on your mileage, you produce one pound of CO2 for every mile driven). Even diesel buses are greener than cars when you factor in the number of passengers on board. Give the bus a shot once a week for a year. Or give your legs and heart a workout by commuting on a bike and save even more.

To sum it all up, after a year of these efforts, you’ll have kept over 7,000 balloons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. That’s about 3.5 tons of CO2 off the average carbon footprint.

Drafty House? New Windows May NOT be the Solution.

by Adam Winter on February 21, 2010
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We hear this question from homeowners all the time:

I think I need to replace my windows because I can always feel a cold draft when I am next to them. Are there any alternatives, since it’s such a pricey upgrade?

Surprising to many, replacement windows are not always the best solution to cold drafts – particularly for homeowners on a tight budget. So before running out to the local window retailer, be sure to consider other possible causes for drafts and their (often times) less expensive solutions.

Typically, the cold feeling you get when standing by a window is caused by a combination of radiant heat loss as your home’s heat is drawn directly through the glass, and air leaks that allow cold outside air to flow through your home. Swapping single-pane windows with double-pane replacements will help with radiant heat loss, but if your house isn’t well sealed and insulated, investing in costly new windows might not solve the problem.

Draftiness is usually the result of warm air rising and escaping into your attic through leaks in walls, ceilings and can lights. As the warm air escapes, it is replaced by cold air that flows in from poorly sealed crawlspaces and other low-lying areas. That’s when you feel the drafts.

Finding and sealing air leaks can have a huge impact on interior comfort. The average home leaks 100 percent of its heated air every hour. At Recurve, we prefer leakage rates closer to 35 percent, which seriously reduces drafts and energy waste.

In most homes, windows only account for a small fraction of the air that leaks out. And because replacement windows are such a big investment, it’s usually more cost-effective to tighten your home first by improving insulation and sealing air leaks– particularly in the attic and crawlspace. Your home will also feel warmer if you close your blinds or drapes at night to reduce the amount of radiant heat loss.

In any case, it’s best to begin with a professional audit of your home’s energy performance. By conducting a thorough inspection of the various elements that contribute to your home’s overall comfort and energy consumption – including insulation, heating and cooling systems, and duct systems – the auditor can help you figure out which improvements will give you the most bang for your buck. You might find that $2,000 worth of insulation and air sealing will have the same impact as a $20,000 window upgrade.

If you have enough money left in your remodeling budget, energy-efficient replacement windows can be a terrific option. We’ve seen impressive results from a line of fiberglass windows manufactured by Sunnyvale-based SeriousWindows. Their top-of-the line windows achieve an insulation rating of R-11, which is better than what many people have in their walls and ceilings.

Finally, no matter what home energy improvements you decide to make, be sure to take advantage of the tax credits and other incentives that are available for this kind of work. An experienced energy retrofit contractor will be able to tell which incentives are available in your area, and even help you with the necessary paperwork.

Insulation is sexy, says Obama

by Shana Fong on December 15, 2009
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“I know the idea may not be very glamorous, although I get really excited about it,” Mr. Obama said, “here’s what’s sexy about it: saving money.”

Mr. Obama said the current lack of efficiency in most homes and buildings is the equivalent of watching “$20 bills just, sort of, floating though the window up into the atmosphere.”

We couldn’t agree more, Mr. President. We believe in inner beauty!

Read the full article on ABCnews.com here.

Top 5 Green Tips for your Home

by Shana Fong on November 24, 2009
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1. Test your home’s energy IQ: Get an energy audit to determine the best roadmap to a healthy, comfortable and energy efficient home.

2. Unplug energy vampires: In the average home, 40% of all electricity is used to power home appliances while they’re turned off.

3. Insulate yourself against rising energy costs: Well-installed green insulation is the biggest bang-for-your-buck improvement you can make.

4. Get your ducts in order: In California, duct leakage accounts for a loss of 30% of heating and cooling energy.

5. Reduce, then produce: Before installing an expensive solar array, make your home a lean, efficient machine — then pay a lot less for your sun collectors.