Recent articles in USA Today and California’s Flex Your Power e-Newswire discussed the phenomenon known in energy efficiency circles as “take back” or the “Snackwell Effect” (see “Consumers Can Sabotage Energy-Saving Efforts,” and “The Snackwell Effect: Consumers Sabotage Energy-Saving Efforts“).

Stanley Jevons first described the take back effect in 1865, so this is nothing new. Jevons observed that new efficient steam engines decreased coal consumption, which led to a drop in coal prices. But the lower prices meant that more people could afford to use coal, and so coal consumption increased.
The “Snackwell Effect” takes it’s meaning from the habit of people on diets who eat lots of low-cal snacks that add up to many times the calories of a regular snack. The example given in both articles mentioned above is a West Virginia couple that bought an energy efficient washing machine to replace their old inefficient one. Their energy bills were no different after the conversion. Turns out they were doing more loads of laundry, even washing one piece of clothing in one load, because they were lulled into complacency by their energy efficient purchase.

I asked Jim McMahon, the head of the Energy Analysis Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), about the Snackwell Effect and appliance energy use. I recently heard him speak about the great efficiency gains made between the first energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil embargo in 1973, and today. Those gains are significant; refrigerators today use about half the energy on average than they did in the 1970s. “This effect [Snackwell Effect] has been studied for a long time, [it was] formerly called the rebound or take back effect,” he says. One 2001 study concluded that for every gain in energy efficiency, about 10% is taken back by an increase in energy use. Greater air conditioner efficiency, for example, may mean that people lower their thermostats, since they expect their energy bills to be lower, and this eats into the efficiency savings. “I think that there are a number of energy-using devices where consumers do not exhibit the Snackwell effect, such as refrigerators or televisions. In those cases, in my view, the usage behaviors are unrelated to the cost of energy, at least for most households in the United States,” says McMahon. He does admit that more study is needed in this area. A 10% take back effect is significant, but certainly not a barrier to serious energy efficiency improvements.

Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, a sociologist, studies human behavior and energy use for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). “The relationship between energy efficiency and energy consumption is not as straightforward as it may initially appear and as some people like to portray it. The trends show that: 1) residential energy consumption increased by roughly 57% between 1970 and 2005; and 2) residential energy consumption per capita increased by only 7%”.

According to Ehrhardt-Martinez, a bigger problem than the 10% of energy lost due to the take-back effect-or the Snackwell Effect-is the proliferation of energy using, albeit more efficient, devices in American homes; lifestyle choices, such as the dramatic increase in the size of homes while families got smaller; population increase; and the “invisible” energy, such as standby power or phantom loads, that is hidden from consumers. “However,” says Erhardt-Martinez “if we were able to combine efficiency improvements with better lifestyle choices (i.e. smaller, more energy efficient houses), smart purchasing behaviors, and improved information mechanisms that allowed consumer to actively manage their energy consumption, then we could have a much more dramatic impact on both household level consumption as well as state and national level consumption.”

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.

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.

Over the course of a week of working with concrete,this landscaping job produced only one bucketof wastewater. Credit: Ann Hutcheson-Wilcox

As a lifelong Catholic and former Catholic priest, I often find myself wishing that the Church would stick to what it knows best: the Sacraments. I wish the Pope would declare a 10-year moratorium on anyone with any authority in the Church saying anything at all about sexuality.

But sometimes the Vatican gets it right.

Polluting is a now a recognized social sin, along with another act that tends to wreck havoc on the environment, that is, contributing to the growing social and economic divide between rich and poor. The rich contribute inordinately to pollution and the poor suffer inordinately from it.

The Church has installed photovoltaics (PV) on the roofs of some Vatican buildings, and has recognized the scientific consensus that humans contribute to global warming. One of my teachers in the Divinity program at Notre Dame, Fr. Tim O’Meara, said that the Church responds quite slowly to crisis and change. “It spends twenty-five years denying the problem, twenty-five years quietly addressing it, and twenty-five years claiming that this is the way we’ve always done things.” So by historical standards, the Church is moving with lightning speed.

One of my coworkers at Home Energy told me that she viewed the new sin as another tool in the environmental education toolbox. Through her experience as an environmental organizer, policy analyst, and fundraiser, she has learned that individuals are motivated to take action on behalf of the environment due to personal belief or their own unique life experience. While working with contractors on her own home, she has often found it challenging to explain to people in the trades why she feels that it is her responsibility to go beyond business as usual. Last week’s announcement that “la contaminación ahora es un pecado” (pollution is now a sin) came just at the right time. The contractors she was working with to rebuild a retaining wall made primarily of reused concrete and found objects figured out how to avoid dumping any wastewater into her gutter, which empties directly into the local creek, a home for native rainbow trout. If pollution were not yet a sin, they may not have been as willing to consider the alternatives. Over the course of a week of working with concrete, they produced only one bucket of wastewater.

The new sins do present a challenge to the imagination of poets like myself. In Dante’s Divine Comedy there is no place in hell for unrepentant polluters. Now that the Vatican has named pollution a serious social sin, we may have to invent a punishment, and a metaphorical place in hell for polluters. Let’s see-tyrants, assassins, and warmongers swim in a river of boiling blood, and the wrathful tear each other to pieces with their teeth-maybe polluters will have to tread water in that twice-Texas-sized trash dump floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for all eternity, or at least until we decide how to clean it up.

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.

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!