Report from the front lines of near zero

Report from the front lines of near zero

April 2009

“Net-zero” is no longer a cheesy internet provider but the holy grail of the society’s environmental infrastructure. Real or imaginary, it inspirers engineers, entrepreneurs, and builders to create buildings that need no fossil fuels what so ever to run on. They are looking to low entropy solutions for an increasingly high entropy civilization. Some may even suggest that the embodied energy of the building components should be net-zero. That gets a little complicated so let’s just think about the energy a building uses.

This month’s newsletter edition is a report about my findings of living on solar electricity for a while. I used to think that is was neat to use just the energy from the sun, and I have to admit that I’d brag about it. I would say that it was no big deal, implying that it was a big deal. Now I just think it’s no big deal. The computer I am writing on and the one you are reading this on are a big deal right? Not really, they just do what they need to do. Same with the lights, stereo, the fridge and all that yummy food inside. It’s just stuff (but I do appreciate my wife’s cooking). So the real story is how that stuff is used.

Another group of engineers is busy creating stuff we want but their goal seems to be to satisfy our instant gratification at the expense of our energy savvy. If you want to live near net zero you are in a pitched battle with these engineers and there devious plot of instant on, cheap components, push button color display programmable universe. They put their smart chips in everything. We submit to their electronic dreams. When you want net-zero waking up from this dream is at first a little surprising. Your goal is to use no more energy than you produce, but every which way you look stuff just wants more energy. Worse, at first you can’t see it. You need to develop energy vision, kind of like the guy in the Matrix, but without all the drama. To be net-zero is a training in seeing where energy goes.

Clearly heating your house, your water, and dinner are a challenge. I use wood and propane. This makes me near zero instead of net-zero. Everything else is electricity. Cfl’s saved the day in not just letting me live off the grid but also to enjoy it with good efficient Light! Computers, TVs, printers, tools, and all those damn little black cubes in the wall are itching to eat up my hard earned solar power. I learned early in the game that if it plugs in don’t trust it, confirm it really switches off. If not then put in a switch. Because it was early in the game for me to know this my house has switched plugs for all the electronics. Just to make it even easier to save energy I have a lot of individual ways to light the house, no big fans, pumps, electronic controls, etc. I also use these switches, and make sure the house’s power inverter is off when we go to bed, because even 20 watts on all the time is a lot. This is easier than I thought.

Ok, it is not really that easy. We use energy for everything. Flush your toilet? That water is pumped in at some point, cleaned up at a plant, sent to your toilet, discharged to a sewage plant where it is cleared, pumped a lot more, aerated, filtered, etc… a lot of energy. In fact the book Natural Capitalism mentions that water pumping uses 10% of the entire world’s electricity. What’s that about? Your furnace says 90% efficient, but the motor that pushes the air around and the other motor that takes the combustion air outside is only 50% as efficient as it could be. Statistics are showing that many people actually use more energy with an efficient furnace because they keep the house warmer. I just inspected a house where the owner rightfully updated her furnace to a 90+Afue and 14 seer ac unit. There was even mastic added to the ducts. Sadly, she will see little energy reduction from the ac because it is 1/3 oversized and cools the house faster than it can remove the humidity. A new energy star refrigerator is rated against only like sized models, not the most efficient, and LG even found a way to cheat the testing (they are not the only ones), but regardless, perhaps the refrigerator is sitting across from the west facing window and has sun on it for three hours. These little energy faux pas are everywhere.

Now put on your energy seeking goggles and find them. A kill-a-watt meter might help, a TED for the whole house. Don’t buy stuff and just plug it in forever, look at the label to see what this stuff wants in return. Ignore how much you owe the power company for a moment and look at the kwhrs. That number means a lot. 100kw a person a month is a good start. Just to brag, my wife and I use about 30kw a month each (not including propane) and I can still watch Netflix, play video games, and write newsletters. I have a friend who recently cut her energy use for her whole family by two thirds. I am sorry that near net-zero may seem so boring, but it works. If you need more convincing I can ship the truck load of coal to your house that you use each month. Come to think of it, that’s what the power company is doing already, only even less efficiently. Join the low entropy revolution.

Please pass this newsletter to others if you liked it and to help support my shameless self promotional efforts. Be well and stay tuned for next month’s Sustainable Line on “’Dude, tune your windows’ and other simple stuff to make a better building”

What is sustainable building

This is something I wrote a little while ago but am posting it because I still like it:

What is sustainable?

The “green” building movement is maturing quickly and has created a tremendous amount of dialog. People of many disciplines and backgrounds are engaging with what green building means.
With this in mind, it seems good to go back to some basic principles, before jumping into what sometimes may seem like the latest craze.
Buildings consume resources. Human, space, material, energy, and financial. By examining how each of these play in a building we can create buildings that become the legacy of how we live in the future.
Human energy is at the center of any project. We spend a great deal of our time building, maintaining, and paying for what we live and work in. At best, all this effort results in a quality of life that is both good and sustainable. Our buildings need to reflect both our personal needs and the needs of a changing planet.
We begin by choosing a place to put a building or reflecting on the space a existing building is on. By relating to the environment surrounding the structure we have a unique opportunity for the building to be in sync with its surroundings.
The physical structure of a building both encompasses the idea of the space, and the reality of a safe, functional and comfortable form. Working with sustainablity in mind, size is often the first consideration. As the project become more defined, the quality and quantity of the applied materials take precedent. An enormous amount of information about building practices and material are now available. Often in conflict with either larger principles or design constraints, the design of a space and materials usage is a dynamic, complex relationship.
The reality of a modern building is that it is not a static form. It takes energy and other resources to run. Along with the inherent energy of the structure, operating it for years to come is a central concern in sustainable building. Lighting alone can use 50% of a buildings energy. Heating, cooling, and appliances all create a substantial, often invisible energy demand. Too often we rely on technology to help solve these problems. By stepping back and looking at how to first use passive approaches, we can greatly improve comfort and productivity. Then, by applying appropriate technologies, we can reduce energy and water consumption to the point where sustainability or “green” building truly means something.
Money. What else can be said, it is the bottom line. The best way to effectively save money is through good design. A well conceived project will use resources efficiently and provide a building that is both easy to maintain and affordable to run.

Your house sucks (outside air at least)

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter about the current state of green building. I will try to spare you from too much cheerleading about how great the green building movement is. Nor will I overly promote my consulting company Baosol and how useful our services are. I will send you these newsletters in the spirit of entertainment, accuracy, and importance. Just a word of warning though, I find science to be very entertaining as I’ll start with a building science story.

Ok, here’s the awful truth, your house really does suck. It sucks so bad that an entire small industry has developed based on this fact. An Energy Rater, as many of you know, has the enviable task of finding the little holes in your house that let all that lovely expensive conditioned air escape, and all that fresh damp, cold and hot air come in. Why does the Energy Rater have such an enviable job? Because you pay a lot of money for heating and cooling, you add a lot of green house gases to our eggshell thin atmosphere (sorry global warming deniers), and you are not comfortable. Rarely do such vastly important issues come together. An Energy Rater can help resolve those issues.

Here is the entertaining part for me; building science. My personal story about why your home sucks begins in the year 1994. New to Colorado, I go looking for a job. On the job board is “sheet metal installer $6.50/hr to start”. Ok, I can live on that. So they hire me and I enter the vast world of HVAC. Really, all I did was install all that shiny tin you have in your basement. Our weapon of choice was “duct” tape. Now “duct” tape’s name is a brilliant marketing strategy because it should never be used on duct work, but back then always was. This is not the science part yet, by the way. It did not take a scientist to figure out that cheese cloth and glue were not going to last long in a hot/cold dry space, under pressure, for very long. All those ducts I slipped together, and in the proud company’s tradition of neatly wrapping the seams with “duct” tape, ending at the top where you can’t see it, have now failed. This means lots of air spewing into floor cavities, attics, and crawlspaces. By the way, we never even used “duct” tape for the returning air, we just used the drywall and floor joist to do the work. “Big deal”, says the HVAC industry, “the air is still in the building.”

If you have just read the paragraph above you should be sensing a bit of discomfort in my tone. If you haven’t, go back and read it before we proceed with our story. Back then the HVAC industry made stuff up. They said, “Don’t worry, all that conditioned air you paid for is still in the building, but since a couple of rooms may be a little uncomfortable we’ll just put in larger equipment to make up for it.” So the energy issue gets worse. I don’t know if they didn’t know or didn’t care about the science of how air moves. What was not talked about was pressure. Commercial HVAC designers, to be fair, understand pressure like their life depends on it, well maybe just their jobs. What they know is that if you put air in one place it pushes air somewhere else, but even more important is if you take air from one place it will be replaced with air from somewhere else. Trouble starts when that somewhere else is not where you intended it to be. So your house has all these negative and positive areas of air pressure. Your inevitably leaky supply and return duct work wants to push and grab air from where ever it can. An interesting fact is that a big place that air gets into your home is the connection between the foundation and the wall on top of it. This is unfortunately also where your negative pressured, unsealed return air is. So every time you want to be a little warmer, a little cooler, or just move some air around you are sucking in outside air like a vacuum cleaner. Got holes in the house somewhere else? In a pressurized room this is a great place for all that lovely conditioned air to escape. A little depressing really.

Solution: seal duct work using mastic, and a “hard” ducted return air, and seal your house. The nice folks who do those whole house blower door tests also can perform a duct leak test. Though fixing what they find is often not quite so easy. Now, for the folks who like the fresh air, myself included, would depend on this leaky air, and then complain about the bill. The new building mantra goes as follows: “Build tight, ventilate right”. No top 40 song potential but you get the idea. Control the air that comes into your home with a heat recovery ventilator or HRV. Hey, you can even filter that air too.

If you got this far in the first of Baosol’s Sustainable Line newsletter you may be interested in what else makes your house suck. Your hot water heater’s flue, your furnace flue, your bath fan and your kitchen fan. Get a sealed combustion furnace and hot water heater, use that HRV to make up for that lost ventilation air. The leeward side of your home is letting all your heat out while the windward side is feeding cold air. And let’s not forget all that moisture that comes into your home too, it may not make it to your living space but sit in the wall instead.

If you are building new, consider not using a furnace. Hydraulic heating in your walls, floor and ceiling are great, and if you build tight with some good r-value you may need little or no air conditioning. Want to talk about payback? You’re more comfortable and the money you spend up front is recovered in your lowered bills. What’s next? A plug and play solar thermal heating system, nice work.

Now your house doesn’t suck.

Just for fun, check out the website seeimgreen.com and add your pin and principles to the world map.

Be well and stay tuned for the next edition of Baosol’s The Sustainable Line, as I will “Report from the front lines of near zero”.

Andrew Michler

2009 will be the new "green" year (really)

2009 will the New “Green” Year (really)

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is nice to have some good news considering all the turmoil as of late. A new year and the economic shift that we are going through provides us with a unique opportunity to reevaluate how we live our lives. Because I come from the building world, I see an extraordinary amount of reevaluation and evolution in our living and built environments. As a refocus on infrastructure is in the works, our homes and businesses will be at the forefront of this change. At the center of our relationship with the built environment is a new understanding of how we use energy, and how our health and well being is effected.

Each of us has a stake in the success of the “green” building movement because of our dependence on buildings. Of course you don’t need to know everything about being “green” (I don’t at least) but you can take the right steps. Many people I have talked to have felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information out there. It is important to follow a path that focuses on results, and leaves open the varied ways to get there. I am starting a newsletter that will be available at baosol.com/connect, to write about new thinking in sustainable building (hint: it’s not just about light bulbs and solar panels), and to add a little more fuel to the fire of the sustainable movement. The first edition will be about why your house “sucks” (outside air at least).

I started to do sustainable building consulting because of the need for the larger population to have access to clear, reliable, and appropriate information. Buildings are the places in which we spend a majority of our time, and they have a profound effect on the greater environment. In this spirit I have developed the Seven Steps to a Sustainable Building (7sustainable_steps.pdf) which is available at my web site baosol.com.

These steps were born out of the hundreds of conversations I have had over the past years about "green" building, the classes and conferences I have attended, and most importantly the last 14+ years I have lived with my wife in a near-zero energy home (before the “near-zero” vernacular was invented). We have personally experienced how doable this really is, and realize the potential for many others to do the same. Over the next few months each of the steps will be expanded, and how they are interrelated will be explored. The Seven Steps are intended to help you clarify what sustainable building and living really is about. When we look at our environmental impact, for instance, all those green materials don’t hold a candle to energy efficiency. Interdependent design will likely dominate our thinking on how to build and thrive in this new century.

Please take a moment to read and think about the Seven Steps and how you can engage with our new green year, and then pass it on to a friend. There is a lot to celebrate and a lot to do, best of all we can do it together (and I’ll stop using parentheses). Keep in touch and Happy New Year!

-Andrew Michler

Baosol Sustainable Building Consulting