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.

Your house may not be your biggest contributer to globalwarming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a niftycarbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbonfootprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction). Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don’s calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.

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.

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.

It would be easy to think that the 2007 Energy Bill, signed by President Bush at the end of last year, was all about automotive fuel economy. The legislation that requires fleetwide average fuel economy for cars and light trucks to reach 35 miles per gallon by 2030 has generated a lot of buzz. On the negative side, the lack of strong support for renewable fuels such as wind and solar has generated some buzz as well. I cannot find anything in the Bill about renewing solar and conservation tax credits for homes, and that is a big, big omission. But there is a lot in the bill that is positive for residential buildings—not enough to tackle problems like our addiction to fossil fuel and the specter of climate change, but certainly a step in the right direction.

Here are some home energy highlights, thanks to a summary of the bill by the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit coalition of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders.

Appliance energy efficiency. The bill establishes new external power supply efficiency standards, based on the standards of California and other states; updates and creates new appliance efficiency standards and test procedures and provides for a regular review of those procedures; updates boiler efficiency standards and creates an electricity use standard for furnace fans; creates regional, climate-specific standards for furnaces, air conditioners, and heat pumps; requires DOE to include consideration of energy consumed while in standby mode for appliances already addressed by efficiency standards in their active mode; and directs the Federal Trade Commission  to require energy labels for televisions, personal computer monitors, cable and set top boxes, and digital video recorders.

Building efficiency. The 2007 Energy Bill directs DOE to set standards for manufactured housing that are at least as stringent as the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) national model code. There are also lots of provisions to increase the energy and water efficiency of government buildings and to create green building demonstration projects. The latter’s effect on housing? The government’s purchasing power moves whole industries—in this case it moves the building industry in the right direction.

Lighting. The Energy Bill directs DOE to set performance standards for general-service lightbulbs to achieve a 25%–­30% savings compared to incandescent bulbs by 2012–14. The bill also directs DOE to establish Bright Tomorrow Lighting prizes for the development of solid-state lighting.

Green jobs. The Energy Bill authorizes a Department of Labor energy efficiency and renewable energy worker training program, and establishes within the Office of Solar Energy Technologies a grant program to create and strengthen solar-industry workforce training and internship programs for installation, operation, and maintenance of solar-energy devices.

The bill also supports the recommendations offered by a group from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including that of Home Energy Magazine Technical Editor Steve Greenberg, for greening the capitol complex, a set of buildings in Washington, D.C., including the Capitol, office buildings, and the capitol complex power plant. No mention is made of hot air energy recovery efforts from the chambers where Congress does its business.

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.