case of the winter house blahs

Every so often I peruse websites with “green lists”, hoping to find some outside-the-box thinking on how to help the old house I live in be as efficient as I can make it. As a renter, I can let my landlord know our furnace and windows aren’t the most efficient, but at the end of the day I don’t make the call if they are replaced or not. And on top of wanting to live in a greener space, I also really would love my share of the gas bill to not be more than I am making a month.

Everywhere I look I find recommendations to buy CFLs, turn off the water when I brush my teeth, and my favorite, “turn the thermostat down to 68 degrees in the winter” (ours is currently set at 63 degrees and I am fine in a sweater).  I’m looking for a new round of ideas, and ready to kick it up a notch. In winter the main source of energy use in our home is by far the heater. Here are a few really simple things I have been doing, and if you have more suggestions please share.

Clean your furnace filter. I have no clue why I waited so long to do this, but I recently contacted my landlord to ask how often we should be changing the furnace filter. The good news? We have an eco-friendly filter, and don’t need to purchase a new one. The bad news? We are supposed to be cleaning it every month, which has happened two times in the past 15 months I have lived here. Cleaning your filter increases the efficiency of your furnace (especially if it is a million years old, like ours) and is quick and easy to do.

Get in your shower already! A pet peeve of mine is when people turn on their showers and walk away. I get it, it’s unpleasant to enter a freezing cold shower in the dead of winter, but your shower might be warming up faster than you think. Our (very old) shower has piping hot water within seconds, so I always jump right in. If your shower really takes a long time to warm up consider purchasing a shower head valve ($30 or less usually). These allow the water to heat up while not wasting tons of water in the process.

Turn your water heater down. When I first moved in I would always have to turn the cold water on along with the hot water when I was doing dishes to avoid scalding my hands. I quickly learned I could not burn myself and save a ton of energy by turning our water heater down. I’ve since turned our water heater down many times, in small increments, to test where the temperature should be. If the maximum hotness you can make your shower or sink is more than enough try turning yours down a smidge. This will not affect the amount of water at all, just the temperature of the very hot water stored in the tank. If you are going to be away from your house on a vacation, consider turning the hot water tank way down. No use in paying to heat water for a week or more if you are not going to be using it.

Weatherize your windows. Last year I was so inspired by volunteering with the Community Energy Project that I decided to help my friends weatherize their windows, too. So far this year I’ve weatherized seven sets of windows between my house and friends’ and I’ve discovered the secret weapon: the hairdryer. After you blast a hairdryer over the clear window covering I swear you cannot tell that it’s on at all. And it’s strangely fun. For double coverage use rope caulk to cover any gaps on older windows (ours leak pretty bad) prior to covering. A word of advice, try the 3M kit– although it works, I was pretty disappointed with the Frost King kit.

Leave your oven open. Baking something delicious? Leave your oven open when you are done instead of letting the hot air inside go to waste.

Air dry your clothes. I always think of letting clothes air dry as a summer time event, but have you noticed how dry your skin gets in your house in the winter? The air is so dry inside I’ve found that my air drying clothes dry almost as fast as clothes left out on a sunny day.

Bonus points: Reclaim your dryer heat. For safety reasons, they say this one only works for electric dryers (ours is gas so I can’t participate). Instead of letting all that lovely heat float away outside, put it back in your house.

screen saver vs. sleep

Quick quiz: What should you do with your computer when heading out to lunch?

This question proved to be a hot topic at my old place of employment. Turn it off, leave it on, put it on screen saver mode, put it to sleep?

The answer, in short, put it to sleep, but if you’re leaving for longer, turn it off.

I’ve heard time and time again from multiple people and sources that screen savers can actually use more energy (such as some of the neat graphic ones). Even if you don’t have a fancy screen saver, putting your computer to sleep is still better if you’re just ducking out for lunch or a meeting. I found this website which I like because it compares the amount of electricity each of these options take. Turns out a screen saver doesn’t actually save any energy.

While looking up some other info, I found some really good info on the Energy Star page.  Another source I found claims leaving a computer on for 24 hours is equivalent to leaving a light bulb on for one day. Yikes!

Long story short:
1) Laptops use less power than desktop computers
2) Skip the screen saver and go straight to sleep if leaving briefly
3) Turn your computer off if leaving for longer
4) Always turn off that computer at night!

Nuclear power plant vs. exisiting homes upgrades

A few weeks ago I scored a free pass and was granted permission to check out a couple lectures at the Ecovative (green building) conference. I wanted to share this example from the first speaker, Rob Moody, a Green Building Education Consultant.

Cost to build a new nuclear power plant: $20 billion

-That money divided by the number of homes in North Carolina (where the presenter hails from) would equate to $5,000 per home
-This amount, $5,000, is double what the HEAL Arkansas program has to work with on homes (a program started by Bill Clinton that the presenter works on that uses their $2,500 to get 30% improvements of out homes (measured by utility bills or energy efficiency of home..?)
-If we took this $5,000 and spent it on exisiting homes, we could produce double the energy savings on the power plant
         2,000 megawatt savings from the plant
         4,000 megawatt savings from putting this money into homes
-In response to the economy and job situation: the power plant employs 1,000 people for the first 2-3 years, then 500 people after that; making upgrades to 5,000 homes with a variety of different projects would employ more people

I thought that was interesting.

Decoupling- not necessarily a tragedy

Breakups are hard, but I’m totally in favor of some tough love if it means splitting up the bond between utilities’ revenue streams and natural resource usage. Here is what I learned today:

-Our gas company sought out decoupling some years ago (when it was in their best interest, considering the economy). Decoupling, also referred to as a Conservation Tariff,  means instead of making money from throughput (more gas coming into my house, meaning we are needing and using more resources) now their main source of growth comes from installing new meters and gaining new customers.

-Prior to the decoupling, it was in our gas company’s interest (or any utility company not decoupled) to push products to consumers. Gas fireplaces, gas stoves, gas water heaters– they all mean households will be using more of their product. This move now a days would not be smart for the company– because they are not gaining any more revenue from additional gas usage it would be in their interests for customers to not use as much as their product.

-Utilities in 15 states are currently decoupled. At first I thought this meant 15 states had decided all gas utilities in said state would be decoupled, but it is not regulated yet. So for a utility to become decoupled they have to seek it and make the first move (which is not going to happen in this economy…)

-I support decoupling. If utilities make more money by encouraging consumers to use more energy/gas (which is not always the case, as if people use too much energy they need to build new plants which is a huge investment) then of course they are not going to be as supportive of conservation efforts and green things as many of us would hope they would be. Big utilities have a lot of push with the government, so having them against green things is not conducive to sustainability efforts. Thank you NW Natural for being one of the leading utilities to do the social/environmental right thing even if it slows down your growth in times like these.

-Apparently water usage drops 25% with tankless water heaters (probably because you don’t need to sit there with the water running forever while it heats up)

weatherization, parts II & III

A friend of mine had found himself in a cold spot: his bed resides in a nook with three windows on three walls. Two of these walls, across from each other, have windows that open by swinging out, and when they are latched shut you can feel the breeze commin’ right on in. Of course this is problematic, not only because the breeze/coldness leaking in creates discomfort, but also it’s probably not good to have all that condensation on the inside of the windows and definitely not good to crank your heat up to compensate for all the heat that’s being lost.  So my friend remembered my post about how I am a weatherization pro and called on my expertise. So here are the steps we took to transform his windows from cold to covered:

1) We rope caulked all the big spaces in the windows that are characteristic of old Portland homes. It was pretty bad– you could definitely feel tons of air coming in. We went caulk-crazy and used a whole roll because some of the cracks were so large they needed two strings of caulk (use your imagination to think of all the dirty jokes this evoked– no, we will not be growing up anytime soon). This stuff is super cheap, easy to put on, and comes off easy. It’s sort of a Play-Dough consistency that comes as a roll of strings.

2) After the rope caulk was in place, we promptly forgot to clean the windows and the window frames. Perhaps it was this laziness that lead to the failure of  the clear, double-sided invisible tape that came with the weatherization kit (see picture three). We attempted to frame the window with said tape, per the instructions, but this maneuver was aborted after two tries.

3) In the end we used masking tape and didn’t measure the windows so there was some guesstimating and haphazard cutting (we are both semi-impatient). But he’s a dude and kept insisting aesthetics be damned, he just wanted to be warm.

After the plastic was up we, there was a noticeable difference in room temperature. If we would have taken more time to line up the plastic, you wouldn’t be able to tell there was plastic covering the window at all, and if we wouldn’t have resorted to masking tape…well, you wouldn’t be able to see the tape part either.

I still would recommend the Community Energy Project’s weatherization kits– their main pros are that they look pretty nice and they use clear vinyl instead of this Saran wrap flimsy stuff we put up, meaning more insulation and less wrinkles. And they have free classes showing you how to use the kits ensuring your windows turn out pretty. With the CEP kit you have to commit to sticking tracking into the side of your windows, which stays up all year (good if you don’t mind and are planning on weatherizing every year).

And I almost forgot “part III”– as a reward for my efforts I got to take some of the scraps of plastic home which I used to cover the small windows in my closets that are sealed but thin therefore letting cold air through. My landlord would also approve because she warned me that due to all the condensation the window collects, the closets have to be watched closely for mold.  So triple win– my room is warmer, my closet won’t spawn a mold farm, and my jeans that are stored on a shelf right next to the window won’t be freezing cold in the mornings!