What Have we Done Already? (part 2: Adjusting the Heat)

According to wikipedia, a typical American home uses 44% of its energy for space heating. For our house approximately 50% of our gas usage goes towards space heating. That represents about $350 a year.

We have done a few things to save on our heating bill. First, we have installed a programmable thermostat, we have closed the heating vents in those rooms we don't use, and we close curtains/shutters at night to keep the heat in.

The programmable thermostat is a simple device that replaces your regular thermostat. It allows you to program when you want the house to be at particular temperatures.


The one we bought at the home megamart has different settings each day and 4 time blocks per day. During the day time block when we're at work, we have it set to 60F (~16C). In the evening around 6pm or so when we come home from work, it warms up to a more comfortable 67F (~19C). Later in the evening, we have it set to go back down to 62F (17C) for sleeping. Finally, we have it set to 67F (~19C) again for a half hour in the morning when Margaret gets up for work.

The second thing we have done is close the heating vents in those rooms we don't use, like the guest bedroom. This means those rooms become rather cold, but there is nothing in there that would have a problem with the temperature. (Yes, we do open them up again when people come to stay!) It also means that the heater doesn't have to work as hard to heat up the rest of the house to the set temperature.

Finally, we close the drapes/curtains/shutters at night. This helps keep the warmth in the house. A large percentage of the heat escapes the house via the windows rather than through the walls.

Together, these things have saved us roughly 8% or so on our gas bill in the winter months, and nothing in the summer of course. That represents about 30 therms of gas, 360 lbs of CO2, and $42 for all of 2007. The thermostat itself cost us $50, so it has paid for itself in 2 winters.

Things we still need to do:

• Insulate the ductwork where-ever we can. The US Department of Energy estimates that as much as 20 to 40% of heat generated by a heater could be dissipated in the duct work and never reaches its final destination. That should probably be a cheap fix -- imagine using duct tape for what it was actually intended for!
• Get a new high-efficiency gas furnace. The furnace we have right now looks like it is from the 80's. It has service labels on it from before 1996, so know it is at the very least 12 years old, but it looks much older than that. A furnace's efficiency is measured with an annual fuel-utilization-efficiency (AFUE) rating. Furnaces from the 80's typically have ratings around 65%, which means that 65% of the energy in the burning natural gas is used to heat your home. The other part is waste that is heating up the air above the chimney pipe outside your home. Today's furnaces by US law have to have at least 78% efficiency, but many are even more efficient than that, with some even at 97% efficiency. A new furnace has the potential to save us $114 a year on the heating bill, not to mention saving 82 therms of gas or 984 pounds of CO2.
• If we really get intrepid, we can install heating "zones" in the house. That is, we install various thermostats that control the opening or closing of vents to regulate which parts of the house get heated at which times. That helps efficiency by only heating those parts of the house where we are located. For example, we could put the rest of the house at 50F and our bedroom at 62F when we are sleeping. I am not sure how much a system like that might cost though...
  

What Have we Done Already? (part 1: CF bulbs)

Okay, as I said in an earlier posting, I said I would be listing the few things we have done already to be more green. In this posting: Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

CF light bulbs use about 1/4 of the energy of regular incandescent bulbs.

So, a few years ago, I replaced all the bulbs in our house (and outside sockets!) with compact fluorescent bulbs, except the ones on dimmers, 3-way switches, and touch lamps. The electricity portion of our utility bill went from $60 to $52 a month. That's a real savings of 13%. Yearly, that means $96 in our pockets. I spent $8 a bulb (approximately) and there were about 10 of those bulbs for a total of $80. That means these bulbs paid for themselves in less than a year! Woo hoo!

Since that time, some companies have started shipping 3-way and dimmable CF bulbs. We will buy some of those in the future for those lamps fixtures that need them, and I'll report back to you how the eletricity bill changes.

But Edwin, aren't the regular bulbs so much cheaper that CF isn't even worth it?

Well, a regular 100w incandescent bulb costs anywhere from $1.00 on special to $1.50, and the equivalent 23w CF bulb costs about $8, so it seems like it may be true. (A 23w CF bulb puts out about the same amount of light as a 100w regular bulb.)

However, the cool part about these CF bulbs is that their lifespan is typically longer than those of regular incandescent bulbs. A CF bulb can last anywhere from 6 to 15 times as long as an incandescent bulb, depending on its usage pattern. So now multiply the cost of a regular bulb by 6 to calculate how much you have to spend on regular bulbs during the lifespan of a CF bulb, and now you see that the regular bulbs now cost anywhere from $6 to $9... But wait a sec, that's practically the same price as a CF bulb!

The question is, is that true? Do they really last longer. Well, I can tell you that of the 10 CF bulbs, I've had to replace 3 of them so far. They may have been faulty, and we may have switched them on and off too often or left them on for too short a time. The other ones are 5 years old now and are still working normally.

So, same price, but much less electricity usage and therefore money in our pockets. Sounds like a winner to me. Everyone should switch to CF bulbs where-ever possible.

More about CF bulbs:

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/greenpicks/94/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-cfls-but-were-afraid-to-ask.html
http://18seconds.org/18seconds/

Now the next step after CF bulbs is LED bulbs. However, they are much more expensive per usage hour than CF bulbs are, even factoring in that they use only 90% less energy than regular incandescent bulbs and 60% less energy than even CF bulbs and last 5 to 10 times longer than CF bulbs and about 30 to 150 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs.

Right now, the replacement for a regular 100w bulb still costs about $98. Multiply the cost of a regular bulb ($1.50) by 30 and you get $45. That means it is still cheaper to put in incandescents than LED bulbs, let alone the CF bulbs.

However, the prices are coming down. I think in a few years, it will reach the "tipping point" where it will be more economical to put in long lasting LEDs than to put in CF bulbs. That point just hasn't been reached yet.

Navy Showers

One thing I have started doing that costs us nothing is "navy showers".

Edwin, what do you mean by that exactly? Are you only taking showers on boats?

Haha, no, I don't mean that. What I mean is that I only turn the water while rinsing. Basically, I turn on the water at the beginning of the shower to get it nice and hot, then wet myself, and turn the water off again. Then, soap and shampoo up, then turn on the water again, rinse, turn it off again. (Lather, rinse, repeat until you're clean.)

A typical shower uses about 40 gallons (150 L) of fresh water from the tap, or if you are being especially luxurious, up to 60 or 70 gallons (225 to 260 L) of water. A navy shower can use as little as 3 gallons (11 L). I think I probably don't use that little. More like 5 to 10 gallons, especially in the winter when the initial hot water feels so good when it is cold in the house.

Why is This a Green Thing to Do?

Water must be pumped through pipes to get to your house. It is estimated that about 6% of all electricity used in California today is used to pump water. So, if you save water, you save electricity, and that's many tons of carbon not going into the air as a result of burning the coal necessary to generate the electricity to pump the water.

Also, water is scarce here in California. Saving water is just generally a good idea to make sure we all have enough of it.

In a typical house, about 18.5% of the fresh water is used by baths and showers. If you reduce your water consumption for showers to 1/4 of the original amount, this means you are saving almost 14% of your total water usage for the whole house. That doesn't sound like much, but it doesn't really cost you anything to do it, and it won't be the only thing we will be doing to reduce our water usage.

The savings don't stop there, though. Most of the water used in a shower is hot water that came from your boiler. Using less hot water means you will need less energy to heat up that water. Approximately 13% of the energy your home uses goes to water heating, typically done with natural gas, and a majority of that goes towards showers. If you reduce that by three quarters, that is 5 to 10% of your total gas bill saved right there.

Later, if we can afford it, we will put in tankless water heaters which will save even more on the gas bill. A dream would be to put in solar heating as well, but that sounds very expensive. We'll see.

So not bad, eh? Try it yourself and see.

I'll look closely at my next quarter's utility bill and see what affect I have had and report back later in another blog posting.

What does this blog title mean?

In 1974, Ted Nelson wrote a very odd book entitled "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". It was a series of cartoonish drawings and rantings written by a guy who was ahead of his time. In a time where computers were large boxes that needed special rooms to house them, he envisioned a computer system where words in a document would link to other documents automatically, and that the system was chaotic, and the organization was definitely not hierarchical. At the time, people thought of him as a little eccentric.

He came up with this before the graphical UI was really out of the lab at Xerox, and before most people had even heard of the concept of a "personal computer".

His vision is pretty much now realized in a simplified form in the medium that you are viewing right now: the web. The concept he came up with was coined "hypertext" and "ht" in the "http" stands for "hypertext". (The other part is "transfer protocol".)

As part of his vision, he realized that when documents were related to each other, they were related in a myriad of complicated and uncategorizable ways. He wrote: "Everything is deeply intertwingled" to describe this idea, and with this coined the phrase "intertwingled".

Though Ted was talking mostly about documents and ideas in a computer system, his ideas could apply equally well to the natural environment of the earth.

Everything you see and touch and feel is connected to other things in ways that we can see and sometimes in ways that we don't see. (yet). This means that everything you do in the natural world has an effect on something else.

Burn fossil fuels and you change the climate.

Burn wood, and you are carbon neutral, but yet you still put nitrous oxides, complex carbohydrates and soot into the air, which are pollutants and have been linked with asthma.

Even if you are trying to be good and you manufacture a solar cell, you will possibly expose dangerous rare earth metals to the environment during the manufacturing process.

My friend Rich always says, "There's no 'get' without a 'give'."

The question is, which of these consequences is the least troublesome to the environment. Obviously, a solar cell only uses a very, very small amount of rare earth metals, and an even smaller amount is leaked accidentally by solar cell manufacturers. It probably has a very small affect on things, compared with the pollution caused by the mining of the coal you would need to burn to generate that electricity in the current, more traditional way.

So the idea here is not to eliminate your affect on the environment, but to eliminate as much of the bad affects you have on the environment as you can.

What is this blog?

In a nutshell, I'm going to journal the greening of our home in Redwood City, California.

Who are We?

We are a regular, middle-class couple that has been married for 3 years now. We have a 1700 square foot house in Redwood City, which is not very big. However, real estate costs a lot here in the Bay Area so we couldn't afford much more. We have no kids, but 2 4-month-old rambunctious kittens. (Although they have grown so fast, it is weird calling them kittens now.) Edwin (that's me!) works as a software engineer for a large, online Internet company that you have all heard of (no, not that one, the OTHER one), and my wife Margaret works in sales for a large mass storage company.

Why are we Doing This?

We are not particularly green right now, but we are figuring we should do what we can. There are two primary motivations for this:

1. Save money. I figure if you do it right, you increase efficiency. This saves us money in the long run. We may have to spend some money up-front though to get the higher efficiency. But, if it pays for itself in a reasonable amount of time, we will do it.
2. Be good to the environment. We are not particularly political, and being green to me is not really a political issue. I would classify us as fiscally somewhat conservative and socially somewhat liberal, so not your stereotypically California Democrat like you might expect for someone who is going to green their home. We are just two people who want to make sure that the earth is okay after we're gone. I'm a pretty logical person (which makes sense for a software engineer) and to me, the rhythms and cycles of nature are a good example of how a closed system like the earth can operate at 100% efficiency.

There are also a few secondary motivations, like health, comfort, and of course keeping up with the Jones'. ;-)

What are we Going to do?

At first, we want to do things that are not going to cost a lot. Later when we have saved up some money, we can spend it on more expensive things if they make sense and pay for themselves in the long run. What I mean by "make sense" is that we are not for example going to buy a new car just to get the better gas mileage when our current cars are perfectly serviceable right now. However, when it comes time to buy a new car, fuel economy will be a top priority. (That, and cool gadgets! Hey, I'm still a tech-head software guy after all. ;-)

Our goal is not to become green tomorrow, or even next week, but to slowly change our lifestyle in a permanent way to become more and more green as we go along.

What's Next?

In the next few posts, I'll document what we have done already before this blog was even started. Then, I'll write about new things we have done to become more green.

So stayed tuned for reports from your average family doing what they can to become more green.