Yeah Alaska! Yeah Brazil! Yeah California?

The people of Juneau saved electricity in a hurry– when electricity
went to 55 cents per kilowatt-hour

In Juneau, Alaska, an avalanche on April 16th downed transmission lines and cut off the city from it’s cheap source of hydroelectric power; electricity prices jumped by 500%. Alan Meier-a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Home Energy Magazine’s Senior Executive Editor, and an expert in how to cut energy use in a hurry-was called in to help. Within a few weeks the city reduced its electricity use by 30%. Remember that we reduced our electricity use in California by 15% in response to Enron and other power companies manipulating the power markets in 2001? Alaska reduced its electricity use by twice as much and did it in a hurry.

How did the Alaskan’s do it? They lowered their thermostats. They bought out all the CFLs from the hardware stores and you bet they turned out the lights when they left the room-wouldn’t you if electricity cost 55 cents per kilowatt hour? They took shorter showers and used cold water to wash their clothes. The city ran out of clothespins since so many people were hanging out there clothes to dry (anecdotal evidence suggests it takes two days to dry jeans).

The people of Juneau bought power strips in record numbers, so that they could really turn off power to all those devices that still use power when they are supposed to be off, like TVs and stereos, microwave ovens and cell phone chargers. And there was a lot of talk from city leaders, on the radio, and among neighbors and classmates about the best ways to save.

(Note: You generally use more energy when you wash your dishes by hand rather than washing full loads in a dishwasher-not everything they did helped.)

We may not face rolling blackouts in California this summer, but we probably will in the near future. There will be other natural disasters like Juneau’s that spike the price of electricity or natural gas. How will we save energy in a hurry? And here’s a bigger question: How will we keep saving energy after the crisis is over?

The Juneau transmission lines should be up and running by June 8. Will the people who were used to cheap electricity fall back into old habits when prices decrease? Brazil faced a similar crisis in 2001 when severe drought shut down hydroelectric plants all over the country. They cut their electricity use by 20%, and they haven’t changed their consumptions habits very much since the drought subsided.

We are still dependent on a diminishing store of fossil fuels mostly located in politically turbulent parts of the world where even the hint of conflict raises oil prices. For Californians, Alaskans, Brazilians, and everyone else, it might be best if we permanently changed our energy use habits and considered every day an emergency that calls for conservation.

These 5 folks are full of bright ideas. Image Source: PiccoloNamek

ACI trains home performance professionals through national and regional conferences and through the Web. Last week I participated in my eighth ACI national conference. The annual conference is where I go to network; learn about all aspects of home performance; recruit authors for Home Energy Magazine; and best of all, be inspired.

Here are a few of the people that I ran into last week who inspire me:

Don Fugler does research through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He developed the Garbage Bag Air Flow Test. He rides his bike to work year round in Ottawa, and wears suspenders. He has a dry sense of humor and has toppled any lingering stereotype I had about Canadians. He told a crowded room at the ACI meetings in Pittsburgh that the way we live in our houses, the way we use our cars, and the way we travel in the air contribute about equally to our carbon footprints. The way we eat contributes a lot also. A pound of beef is responsible for a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases released. I don’t know if Don is a vegetarian, but I think he probably is.

Jim LaRue is a sort-of-retired home performance contractor from Cleveland, Ohio. He designed a really efficient and healthy house for a group of nuns in Ohio and wrote about it for Home Energy. He has also written for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and for the magazine a Greening Your Home series of articles. I don’t know anyone who has worked harder to create healthy, efficient, and affordable housing in Cleveland. He’s retired but so far no one has noticed.

Linda Wigington has been with ACI since its beginning and is now the manager of program design and development. At the ACI Summit on global climate change held at the Pacific Energy Center in San Francisco last summer, which she was instrumental in bringing about, she talked about how she lived one whole winter in her home outside of Pittsburgh while never raising her thermostat above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She is passionate about finding ways (mostly not involving such personal discomfort) to drastically reduce the energy use in existing homes to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Kate and Paul Raymer, founders of Hayoka Solutions, a green building and green building advocacy organization, announced the Starting from Home Challenge at the ACI meetings, an annual contest for post secondary school students around the country to create 70%–90% energy savings in existing homes with real people living in them. Hayoka is a Lakota Indian word describing someone who causes others to see things in a completely new way. Paul is an expert in healthy home ventilation. Don’t get him started on attached garages. “Why would anyone park their car in their house?” Paul often wonders.

I could go on, and on, and on. These are just a few of the people who inspire me. I hope they inspire you as well. 

I don’t think there is one big solution to our energy problems and the environmental problems related to the use of fossil fuels–there are lots of little solutions that in the end add up to a big solution.One of those little solutions I have been reading a lot about lately is a Drain Water Heat Recovery Device (DWHR). It looks like part of something you would find hidden in the hills and hollows of Appalachia that makes moonshine, but a DWHR device is a simple copper coil that you put around your shower drain that recovers some of the heat from your shower water. Cold water is circulated through the coils, gets heated by the drain water, and then flows into your hot water tank, or into your shower and hot water tank.The device is simple, effective, and doesn’t require much (like, no) maintenance. Drain water heat recovery devices contribute to large energy savings in laundries and in multifamily buildings, but will also work very well in single-family homes–as long as there is room under the showers. My one-story house in Walnut Creek is not a good candidate for such a device.

The simple workings of a drain water heat recovery device.Credit: gfxstar.ca, Inventroment Energy Solutions.

Canadian researchers from Natural Resources Canada tested the effectiveness of several DWHR devices at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology.For an Ottawa household in which four people each take 12 minutes showers every day, a DWHR will save $150 a year in energy costs (at present, Canadian dollars are about equivalent to U.S. dollars). That’s about three times as much energy saved as the energy used to run an energy-efficient 20-cubic-foot refrigerator for a year. Over the 30-year lifetime of the DHWR, which costs about $800 including installation, the device will save the household close to $3,000.

The Canadian researchers created a Web-based Drain Water Heat Recovery-Energy Savings Calculator where building contractors, plumbers, and homeowners can go to estimate the cost effectiveness of several DWHR devices on the market. You just need to know the model of the device, the temperature of your shower water, estimated shower times, and so on. Right now it is set to work for Canadian locations. For U.S. homeowners, you have to pick a city in Canada. The calculator will be updated as newer technology is developed and tested.Here are some Web sites where you can find out more about DWHR devices that were submitted for testing at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology:

• Power Pipe www.renewability.com
• ECO-GFX www.gfxstar.ca
• Retherm www.retherm.com

If a million households in the United States installed DWHR devices, we’d save a collective $150 million in annual energy costs, or about the equivalent of 1.25-billion kWh of electricity–or a ginormous amount of carbon dioxide in air from the natural gas not burned and electricity not generated.

 

What do you think life will be like when gasoline costs $15 per gallon?

That’s the question asked of a group of scientists, sociologists, others, and myself who gathered at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy(ACEEE) Summer Study in 2006. (ACEEE has really great resources for consumers on its Web site, including energy efficiency ratings for cars and appliances.) The Summer Study is on my mind because every two years ACEEE hires Home Energy to come down to Asilomar State Beach and Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California to publish a daily newsletter at the meetings. I know, a tough assignment!

Besides traditional presentations and discussion, the last Summer Study on residential energy use had groups competing to heat water above 1400F using a pop bottle, some bubble wrap, aluminum foil, a test tube, and the partial sunshine of the Pacific Coast. And, as I described in my introduction, the Summer Study gathers experts in many fields to look to the future and try to imagine what life will be like when fossil fuels begin to run out. Many people (including me) think we have reached worldwide peak oil, and the downward trend in oil production will bring higher and higher prices at the pump, for heating oil, and for many things we use every day that are either made from fossil fuels or are transported to us using fossil fuels.

When gasoline hits $15 per gallon, I think we will all be driving less. As transportation costs rise higher and higher, I think we will be forced to buy food grown locally and products made locally. It will still make sense to import some things from other states and other countries, but that will be increasingly rare. And I don’t think we’ll be building big houses in the suburbs and exurbs much. It will cost too much to heat, cool, and power a 4,000 to 5,000 square foot house and also commute 100 miles a day to work, even if the driver makes good money.

While a few religious people will wait and hope for the end of the world, I think many more will look to their local faith communities, as well as their families and friends, for mutual support as energy and other resources become scarce and fear towards the future increases. (Didn’t churches invent the food bank?) I’m not sure that we’ll all be living in communes, but there will be more groups living in large homes, and more people living in apartments, condominiums, or small single-family homes in or near cities.

Buses, subways, trains, and other forms of mass transportation will become much more popular, and large SUVs driven to the grocery store and soccer practices will become rare. I also predict… that hand cranks for windows, like I have on my 1997 Geo Prizm, will make a comeback! It will be harder to get parts for our complicated, automated machines and home appliances, and simple, tried and true technology will be in.

What do you think life will be like when gasoline costs $15 per gallon?

Don’t Sweat the Switch from Analog to Digital TV Broadcasting. The Government Will Rescue Your Old TV. Mostly.

What does this have to do with energy conservation? Read on.

Every old TV will be new again–for about $10.Photo credit: Human Productivity Lab,licensed through Creative Commons.When I was still new to the Bay Area, I lived in a one-room apartment near the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley. I was working at Black Oak Books and spent many a late night after work winding down by watching reruns of NewsRadio, about the best TV comedy series to come along in the 1990s. I miss Bill McNeal, the character played by the late comedian Phil Hartman. And I had a big crush on the Lisa Miller character, played by ER’s Maura Tierney. Now that I have cable, I can watch 3 PBS stations and the Discovery Channel, but back in the day, if I nailed my rabbit ear antenna high up on the wall and turned it just right, I could get NewsRadio, a lifesaver.

If you still have one of those old rabbit ear antennas, or have one on your roof, hold on to it.

As of February 17, 2009, when all the major TV broadcasters will begin to transmit using a digital signal, no one with an analog, rabbit-eared television set will be able to get anything without a digital-to-analog converter box. If you have a digital TV, or pay for cable or satellite TV service, you’re good– you don’t have to do anything. But if you have an old analog set, you’ll need to buy a converter box costing about $50.

But don’t fret, because your government has come to the rescue-with coupons worth $40.

Between January 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, all U.S. households will be able to request up to two coupons, worth $40 each, for the purchase of eligible digital-to-analog converter boxes. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is administering the coupon program, and has a list of eligible converter boxes as well as information about getting coupons.

The entry of perhaps millions of digital-to-analog TV converters could add yet another widely used electronic device to strain the U.S. power grid, add to carbon emissions, increase our dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels, and so on-you know the drill. But thanks to the efforts of folks at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, and other energy efficiency advocates, those converter boxes will run on as little energy as possible, especially during the 20 or so hours a day when no one is watching TV. The Department of Commerce has issued a ruling that eligible devices can use no more than two watts while in “sleep” mode, and that the devices will automatically go into sleep mode after four hours of inactivity. The four-hour delay will be set as the default mode at the factory, but users can adjust the delay time at home or disable the automatic switching to sleep mode.

So don’t throw away your old TV sets. You’ll be able to use them after February 17, 2009, but it will cost you about $10, plus the free coupon from the feds. And you’ll probably be burning a lot less electricity with your old TV and converter box than with one of those new monster plasma screen TVs.

December 28th, 2007 by Jim Gunshinan

Broke Your CFL? Don’t Panic!

The typical dose of mercury in a CFL is about the sizeof a pen tip 

(circled in red), and these doses have been getting smaller and smaller. 

(Photo provided by EPA.)

Australia has already begun to phase out the incandescent light bulb,

and the energy legislation recently signed by President Bush has

begun that process in the United States. Every time I turnaround,

it seems, someone is handing me a brand new

compact fluorescent light (CFL) to advance the cause of energy

efficiency and help save the planet. CFLs are becoming ubiquitous

in households all over California. We taught them in the pages of

Home Energy all the time. And that’s a goodthing, right?

Brandy Bridges, of Ellsworth, Maine may not think so. A cleaning

company quoted her a price of $2,000 to clean her house after

she broke a CFL.The benefits of CFLs are many–they use about75%

less energy than incandescents and last up to ten times longer.

Replacing a 75W incandescent with an 18W CFL will save you about $46

in electricity costs over the life of the bulb, and thatis at current

electricity prices, which no doubt will go up, making today’s CFLs an

even better deal. Energy Star CFLs (www.energystar.gov/cfls) won’t

flicker, give warmer light, and there area variety of them, from

the ubiquitous A-line bulb, to candelabras.

But, and it’s a big but, CFLs won’t give light without mercury.

The average CFL on the shelf at your local hardware store has about

4 mg of mercury in it. Mercury vapor is harmful to humans,and there

is enough mercury accumulated in some of the fish we eat

to make this Californian think twice about ordering salmon for dinner.

Thankfully, there are ways to clean up a broken CFL thatdon’t involve

an overly frightened and/or greedy cleaning company

(www.epa.gov/CFLcleanup), and recycling centers are available, if not

yet ubiquitous (that word again!) (www.lamprecycle.org).

Even if the worst happens and you break a CFL bulb, the EPA estimates

that at most only 6.8% of the 4 mg of mercury will be released, or about

0.27 mg, since most of it is in the glass, electrodes, and in the phosphor

coating on the inside of the glass. Incinerating a bulb willpotentially

release more mercury vapor, if there are no pollution controls on the incinerator.

But even if the CFL released all of it’s mercury–according to Richard Benware,

a graduate student at Cornell who researched CFLs last summer for EPA’s

Energy Star program–it would still be a better choice than an incandescent,

because over its lifetime, the 15W CFL will have preventedthe release of 5.67 mg

of mercury from an average power plant.

Of course, recycling is best, and that is still a problem. Alan Meier,

Home Energy’s senior executive editor, admits to turning

part of his garage into a “temporary hazardous waste holding facility” to

hold his family’s used CFLs, since the nearest CFL recycling center is

13 miles away from his home in Berkeley, through “one of the worst traffic

jams in the United States.” There is help in finding those recycling centers,

near and far (www.earth911.org).

But we need to put the same effort used in making CFLs ubiquitous into making

disposing of them in a clean safe manner just as ubiquitously easy.

You know what I mean.

Bad news for housing may be good news for efficiency.

This house, built by students at the University ofMaryland, won second place in the Solar Decathlon, heldon the Mall in Washington DC in 2007. Photo by Amy E. Gardner.

The recent news about home prices has not been good. In the United States, home prices fell 4.5%this year in the third-quarter compared to in the third-quarter of 2006: the largest drop since the National Home Price Index began to measure home price averages in 1988. According to the Contra Costa Times, Solano County is among the worst hit in the nation. Foreclosure rates are quadrupling in some areas of California, and the drop in property tax revenue will increase next year’s budget deficit. This may lead to cutbacks in state services which usually means cutbacks in service to the people most in need of help during a housing crisis: middle- and low-income families.

Inflated home prices attracting speculation have brought us to the shadow side of the housing boom that occurred during the past several years. Get-rich-quick schemes involving buying a house and selling it for a profit a few years later had looked like sound economics, and the nation’s prosperity seemed to depend on housing prices going up forever.

Charlie Wilson, an economics graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, studies the housing industry. The Vancouver area underwent a housing boom over the last several years as well, and homeowners there have been retrofitting like crazy, hoping to add market value to their homes. Wilson found that in 2006 alone, almost half of homes built before 1946 underwent major retrofits–costing $15,000 or more. However, he found no correlation between the retrofits and home prices. Turns out it was the land the houses were built on that is valuable. Wilson did find that “renovations are most commonly motivated by personal desires, aesthetics and social norms [which] are basically irrelevant for energy efficiency.”

When my wife and I were looking to buy a home in Berkeley, we did notice a lot of houses with odd appendages that seemed to fit someone’s idea of aesthetics but not ours. Maybe one seller really believed that adding a second story with a sauna would add to the market value of their home, however, we were pretty sure most of these renovations were performed without the benefit of a permit. These added bumps and humps certainly don’t make the houses function more efficiently.

So if there ever needed to be a time when California’s, and the nation’s, builders, contractors and homeowners turned en-masse towards making homes more energy efficient, more affordable to build and live in, safer, healthier, and more comfortable, I think it is now–like, right now. Most energy efficiency improvements in existing homes pay for themselves within a few years. Replacing incandescent lights with compact fluorescents (CFLs), buying Energy Star appliances when you need to replace your old appliances, and sealing attics and adding attic insulation are economic no-brainers. If you have to replace your windows, replace them with energy efficient ones. If you have to replace your water heater, consider solar hot water or an on-demand water heater. Just make sure you insulate those hot water pipes. Then, when you’ve made your house as efficient as possible, think about adding photovoltaics (PV) to your roof. At least those PV panels will impress your neighbors.

The California Energy Commission asked the Davis Energy Group in Sacramento to evaluate new home construction in California a few years ago. The following excerpt from Home Energy Magazine tells you what they found.”The increasing architectural complexity of new homes requires greater vigilance on the part of framers, insulators, and drywall contractors to create a single thermal/pressure boundary between conditioned and unconditioned spaces. The more complex the design of the home, the more coordination is needed among the various members of the design team. Yet, mechanical contractors are rarely consulted regarding the integration of ducts and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) equipment into the house design. Contractors often lack both the knowledge and the time to implement house-as-a-system construction concepts. In addition, there is not an adequate infrastructure in place to provide contractors and installers with necessary training and certification.”House-as-a-system, or whole-house design, requires an integrated approach to water management. When I visited Japan, I went inside elegant buildings that were centuries old and made almost entirely of wood. Japan has a prolonged wet season, much like the northern coast of California. Because of this, the roofs of the Japanese houses I saw were designed to move moisture away from the structure. Inside, the buildings were well ventilated with the wood framing members exposed. Wood absorbs water during the wet season and dries during the dry season, allowing these healthy buildings to breathe in and out like other organisms.In previous centuries, building homes was a craft learned primarily through apprenticeship with a master builder who knew how to create a whole house that worked in the wet, dry, humid, hot, cold, and/or windy climate in which it was built. Today, however, the home building industry is fractured, with designers and general contractors and several trades doing their parts and not always talking to each other. In order to build a house that works, all the players need to know how what they do individually in a house effects what everyone else is doing as well. Plumbers have to respect air and moisture barriers, designers have to understand moisture dynamics, and HVAC contractors have to understand the pressure dynamics of the whole house; otherwise furnaces will backdraft, mold will form in walls, homes will have poor indoor air quality, they will cost a fortune to operate, be very uncomfortable, and fall down after a few years. In order to combat global warming and provide affordable housing to everyone who needs it, houses must be designed, built, and retrofitted to be energy efficient, healthy to live in, affordable, and made to last forever (or at least for a hundred years).Interested in being a part of the solution to global warming? Get a green collar job. In particular, I would recommend a career in home design and construction to anyone with the time and energy to get the right kind of education, training, and experience. There is plenty of work out there and that’s not changing anytime soon. Home Energy publishes a training guide for people in North America interested in learning the concepts and tools of whole building design and construction. For the latest list, go to http://www.homeenergy.org/contrainingguide/index.php.

In the Midwest and Northeast United States, homeowners are anticipating increased fuel oil costs this coming winter. Here in California, we don’t face their kind of extreme weather (in my freshman year at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, I woke up one morning in January to -250F weather with the prospect of a one mile walk to a math class–it took me several months to thaw). But heating costs are still a significant part of our budgets, especially for low-income families. And electricity costs are still at an all-time high across the country and are expected to keep rising.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (www.aceee.org) recently came out with a list of energy saving measures to help us prepare for winter.

1. Seal air leaks in ceilings/attic floors, at baseboards and electric outlets in exterior walls, and around exterior windows and doors.
2. Seal leaky air ducts at joints, starting at the furnace air handler, and insulate ducts that run through unheated basements or attics.
3. Hire a professional to tune up existing heating equipment, including changing air filters.
4. Turn off lights, and home office and entertainment equipment when not in use.
5. Install an ENERGY STAR-rated thermostat and program it to set back temperatures when you are asleep or away.
6. Insulate hot water pipes leading from your water heater, and install low-flow showerheads and faucet aerators.
7. Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.
8. Consider replacing an old refrigerator, clothes washer, or water heater.
9. Check your attic insulation and consider improving the R-value to R-38.
10. Invest in energy-efficient, right-sized heating equipment with the help of a good contractor.

Another great resource is the Home Energy Saver Web site (http://hes.lbl.gov), provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Home Energy Magazine’s host organization. At the site, you can input your zip code, plus some information about your house, and get back practical suggestions for things you can do to save water, energy, and money. Your local hardware store or big box home store will have all the tools and materials you need to do it yourself.

And I can recommend some Bay Area home performance contractors who will be able to do an energy audit of your home, make recommendations for upgrades, and contract with you to do the work you choose. The list is not exhaustive, but these contractors have been featured or will be featured in Home Energy, and they all do high quality work.

1. Advanced Home Energy (www.advancedhomeenergy.com)
2. Applied Home Performance (www.appliedhomeperformance.com)
3. Building Solutions (www.buildingsolutions.com)
4. Sustainable Spaces (www.sustainablespaces.com)

Hope this helps!