Energy Efficient Home

Energy Efficient Lightbulbs

2007-09-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

We have officially switched over from incandescent to fluorescent. It took a while, but now 90% of the lightbulbs in our house are incandescent. The only lightbulbs that remain incandescent are a few recessed lights. We have not found a decent fluorescent dimming flood light bulb. As soon as we do, w will switch.
This is pretty exciting. We can't wait to see how much money we save in electricity this winter.

Push Reel Mowers

2007-08-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I had a friend who had a push reel lawn mower. I used to tease him about how long it took to mow his lawn. It seemed he would mow the same spot over and over again and it would take him days to complete his 100 square foot patch of weeds.
Guess what! Modern reel mowers are easy to push! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. People who think they are hard to push usually haven't seen or touched a reel mower in 20 years.
In the ongoing effort to go green, we recently switched from a gas powered lawn mower to the push reel lawn mower. It does a great job. The brand we bought is Great States. It is easy to find on the web and available at most hardware stores.
We also have switched from a gas powered weed wacker to a hand powered weed cutter. I'm not so sure about this one yet. It is a little harder to deal with. But I am going to give it a chance.

Today is Earth Day: Tread Lightly

2007-04-22T04:39:00.000-07:00

Today is Earth Day.
Today we are going to tread lightly. Many people are going to avoid travel by car, use less electricity and, generally, be better citizens of the Earth. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that every day. You know, live simpler. But that just isn't reality. Most people have to use a car to get to work and lots of electricity has to be used to produce all of the goods we are now acustomed to using. I mean, we all can definitely try to use less and be more energy efficient, which would help a lot. My family is definitely trying to do that, but the fact is that, we are not ready to toss away all of the things we use that makes our lives much easier.
Today I am going to make a list of all of the things, within my control, that I can do to be a better citizen of the Earth. It will be fun. I will call it my Earth Day resolution. Hopefully, my Earth Day resolution list will be a little stickier then my New Year's resoultion list. Anyway, enjoy Earth Day.
By the way, MSN.com published an article worth reading this morning. Check it out:
Global Warning: The World's Endangered Destinations

Footprint Quiz

2007-04-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

Have you ever taken the footprint quiz. I just did and found out that I, roughly, take up 18 biological acres. Apparently, that's a lot. It seems there are only 4.5 biological acres per person on this planet. The quiz results stated that if everyone on the planet did the same as me we would need 3.9 planets to exist. This is a very scary thought because I think I do a halfway decent job at conserving energy, using public transportation, walking, eating right, etc. Our energy usage has certainly dropped a lot in the past year. We are trying to be more energy efficient with our appliances, etc.
You can find the footprint quiz at earthday.net.
Hopefully, you won't be as surprised as I was. Hopefully, you are already taking steps toward being more Earth friendly.
The quiz really opened my eyes. There is alot of very simple things we can do to be more symbiotic with the Earth.

Carpool

How hard is it to carpool? There has to be someone in your town that works with you. I think you would be surprised, if you put a note on a bulletin board at work, to find out that there are a lot of people who want to carpool but just don't know who to ask.

Use public transportation

If public transportation is available to you, use it. Travel with the masses. It can be fun. When I lived in San Francisco, I used public transportation every day. You can meet or just watch a lot of very interesting people when you use public transportation.

Eat less meat

Sure meat tastes good. I love it, too, but do you reallize how much land is needed to raise cattle and other animals. It's a lot. How about those rain forests, eh? How many acres of rain forest were destroyed so McDonalds could raise cattle cheaply? Try tofu. It's pretty good. If you're not cooking, you might not even be able to tell the difference between a tofu burger and a meat burger. Your body will thank you.

Eat Organic fruits and vegetables

One word. Pesticides. Pesticides are ruining our fresh water sources. That's not a good thing. Do you know that only 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water. Wow, huh?

Use less electricity

Turn off the lights when you're not home or not in a room for that matter. Change your light bulbs to compact fluorescent light bulbs. Compact fluorescent light bulbs use 80% less electricity. That translates to a lot of green. Buy energy-efficient appliances. Energy-efficient appliances use less electricity and less water. This will save you money.

Use less oil

This will also save you money. All you have to do is turn the heat down a few degrees. Put on a sweater. If you are not home, turn it down a few more. I'm not saying to turn it off. You don't want your pipes to freeze in the winter, but turn the heat down a little.

Anyway, there are lots more we can do. I am going to try to at least do what I just ranted about for the last half hour.

Enjoy Earth Day.
Turn your heat down.

Celebrate Earth Day with an Organic Tomato

2007-04-11T03:48:00.000-07:00

How can an organic tomato help save the earth? Well, certified organic tomatoes come from farms where fruits and vegetables are grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilizers. This means that you get a tomato that's free of chemical residues and the earth benefits from fewer toxic synthetic chemicals entering into the environment. Here a five reasons to choose organic:

cleaner soil and water

ecosystem protection

support for biodiversity

reduction of health risks

keeps small farming communities prosperous

At our house, we have a small organic garden where we grow tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, green beans, herbs, pumpkins and blueberries. It is very satisfying to know that your kids can go to the garden and pick a blueberry or tomato from the garden and not have to worry about pestisides.

So, enjoy your organic tomatoes while celebrating Earth Day this year.

51 Ways to Save Energy: The Global Warning Guide

2007-04-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

It seems everyone is talking about ways to combat global warning. TIME magazine recently wrote an article listing 51 ways we can save the environment. The article lists some small steps everyone can take and is well worth reading if you are interested in the subject of environmental change. Below are a few of the 51 that made the list and a link to the full aricle.

1. Turn food into fuel

Use biofuel rather than oil. There are some pros and cons to producing and using biofuel. Ethanol is a good alternative to petrolium based fuel but has its drawbacks. In some cases, ethanol is being produced by coal fired plants. Researchers are working hard to find better alternative fuels.

2. Get the blueprints for a green house

Building an energy efficient home from the ground up is a much easier task then retrofitting your old home to be more efficient. When building a new home, you can do things such as insulate with recycled non-toxic materials, use non-toxic paints, seal up gaps in construction and use sustainable building materials. Don't fret if you can not afford to build a new home from the ground up. There are many things you can do to help save the environment. Read on.

3. Change your lightbulbs (Use compact fluorescent lightbulbs)

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs cost about twice as much as conventional incandescent lightbulbs but use about 20% of energy and last twice as long. This is one easy step we all can take and it will not cost much money. We have replaced most of our incandescent lightbulbs with compact flourescent lightbulbs and have seen significant savings.

There are many other things we can all do to help save the environment. Read the full article to find out what you can do.

Solar Energy, Solar Power

2007-03-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

Maine and the federal government provide fairly generous rebates for families who choose to install solar panels as a way to reduce their consumption of traditional sources of electricity or heat. You can learn more about the rebates at Efficiency Maine.

We decided to find out what it would take to use solar energy to power and possibly heat our home. We have a south facing home which gets lots of sun all day. We contacted a company in Maine that installs solar panels and integrates the power produced by the panels into your existing electrical panels.

We learned that there are two thing we can do:

We can use solar panels to produce electricity. The cost of installing the solar panels for electrical power is pretty steep and may not be the most efficient use of solar panels for a home in Maine. Because Maine has long winters and the sun is low during the winter months, we probably would achieve much, in terms of savings.
We can use solar panels to produce hot water. The use of solar panels to produce hot water turns out to be a much more efficient use of solar energy. We learned that using solar panels to produce our hot water would save us about 250 gallons of oil per year. That is about $500 per year at today's curren price per gallon.

We are still considering both options, but the latter option makes the most sense for now. Although we really want to do what it takes to reduce our footprint on the Earth, we are realistic and unfortunately have a pretty limited budget. Anyway, the quote we received is below. Hopefully, this will help someone who is considering installing solar panels.

In almost all cases here in Maine, the most economic (least expensive up front as well as fastest payback) of these is the solar domestic hot water system. The reasons for this are simple; first, domestic hot water is a year round load, so you can take advantage of the sun all year round; second, the typical existing systems for heating hot water are incredibly inefficient, so eliminating this load is ‘low hanging fruit’ in terms of energy savings. In your case this is particularly true because of the type of oil boiler that you have. As you no doubt know, your oil boiler stays hot all summer long, even though there is no heat demand, only to be available to produce hot water when you need it. This is an incredibly inefficient operating mode. If your household is typical, you probably consume between 200-250 gallons of oil each year in the non heating season. Of that 200 G of oil, only about 40 G is actually heating water, and the remaining 160+ is just heating the boiler, the chimney, the basement etc. Like I said, this is an inefficient way to heat water. So our goal, when designing a solar hot water system, is to be able to eliminate as much of this waste as possible. As you can see in the attached proposal, I’ve proposed a couple of different ways to do this (see attached).

The other good solar option for your home is a grid tied photovoltaic system (or solar electric system). These systems are typically somewhat more expensive to install than solar hot water systems but they have a very long life expectancy (25 years+) and require zero maintenance or action from the homeowner whatsoever. They simply produce clean, solar electricity whenever the sun is shining and feed it to the buildings load center. If there are loads in the house, the electricity will go to powering them. If not, it will go out backwards through your meter to power your neighbor’s house and you will get a credit for that electricity on your next electric bill. Please see http://www.energyworksllc.com/electricity.html for more information about these systems. I did not come up with a detailed proposal for a PV system because I didn’t actually get on your roof to get detailed measurements of just how many solar electric panels will fit in that space. By inspection, I think we could most likely fit 1.9 kW of solar electric system on your garage roof. Depending on how frugal you are with electricity, this should provide between 40 and 70 % of your electricity consumption per month. A system like that would cost roughly $16-18k installed and would be eligible for a $2k federal tax credit. If this is something that interests you, let me know and I will swing by again to get a detailed measurement of that roof and then I will send you a firm proposal for the PV system as well.

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs (CFL)

2007-03-22T03:31:00.000-07:00

It's funny.

Four years ago, when we moved into our house, we found that the previous owner had installed compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the house. One of our first priorties was to replace all of the fluorescent lighting with incandescent lighting. The fluorescent lights turned on slowly and had a strange feel to them. It felt like we never left the office. Do you know what I mean?

About two years ago we starting reading about global warming and the impact of humans on the Earth, and became a little more aware of the little things we can do to make a change. We have always tried to conserve energy by turning off the lights when not in a room or turning down the heat when we are not in the house, but after reading about the long term effects of global warming, we decided to make a bigger effort.

We learned that the compact fluorescent lights are much more energy efficient than the incandescent lights. They can save up to 80% in energy costs. If you have 100 light bulbs in your house, that could turn into real monetary and energy savings over the course of a year. We found an energy savings calculator that illustrates the savings.

Over the last year or so, we have been replacing our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. The compact fluorescents have come a long way. They no longer have that office, flickering, blue light feel. They are much "warmer", turn on immediately and, best of all, save us money and help save the environment.

Websites with information about building an energy-efficient home

2007-03-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of websites out there with information on how create an energy efficient home. Below are a list of a few of our favorites.

Renewable Energy Direct - Definitions of Renewable energy sources, CFL energy saving calculator.
Efficiency Maine - Information about how to get rebates and credits for creating an energy efficient home.
Energy Star - Energy efficent product information among other things.

Creating an Energy Efficient Home

2007-03-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle our challenges and successes in creating an energy efficient home. We live in Maine, which as you probably know, can get very cold in the winter.

We have been learning about what it takes to manage an energy efficient home for some time now and have taken some steps toward creating an energy efficient home, but we have a long way to go. For a while, we thought we would just buy some land and build a new energy efficient home from scratch but we weighed our options and decided we would make an effort to do what we can with our current home.

We think there are a lot of little things we can do to save energy, save money and, hopefully do our part to preserve the Earth for our children and grandchildren.

Each of our entries into this blog will highlight a step we have taken to create an energy efficient home. Feel free to post your comments and let us know what you have done. Thanks and enjoy.