Turn off the lights, turn down the thermostat, and take shorter showers.

Remembering to turn off the lights is easy and it saves a lot of energy.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

We live in a world of gadgets and stuff. When it comes to saving energy, we look to high-efficiency light bulbs or dishwashers. Or we use the advanced weatherstripping to seal our windows or add insulation in our attics. And hopefully we’ll look at fuel-economy ratings when shopping for our next car.

Those are important things to be doing—and we should continue paying attention with all of our purchases. But we should also recognize that behavior is a big part of our overall energy consumption.

The fact is, you can build two identical homes, right next to each other—with the same insulation levels, the same windows, the same appliances, and the same lighting—and the energy bills for those homes can differ by a factor of two, because they are operated differently.

Operating houses in a more energy-efficient manner

So how can homeowners modify the energy performance of their homes? There are lots of ways—many of them so obvious one might be tempted not to even list them. But we sometimes overlook the obvious.

A few shopping ideas for the holiday season.

A Yuba cargo bike with precious cargo.
Photo Credit: Yuba

I’m not a big shopper. I don’t even particularly like getting presents. Our society is just too much about consumption. Nonetheless, as I’ve done on occasion in the past, I’m providing below some Christmas shopping ideas.

1. LED light bulb

Every time I turn around, it seems, I see another LED light bulb. Among the screw-in replacement lamps, there are many good products—but also some that aren’t so good. Look for products from a reputable manufacturer (a company that’s been around for a while), and select a product that carries an Energy Star label. The most common problem with LED lamps is failure due to poor heat management; I’ve had products fail after less than a year.

Open-web, parallel-chord joists with solid-wood diagonal struts for use as superinsulated roof rafters.

Open Joist Triforce rafters being installed on our house. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

Last week I wrote about an innovative foundation insulation material, Foamglas, that we used in our new house in Dummerston. This week I’ll talk about the open-web rafters we’re using to achieve a superinsulated roof.

First, a little background. To create highly insulated roofs there are several approaches:

When the insulation is installed in the attic floor (creating an unheated attic), it’s easy to obtain very high R-values inexpensively—it’s cheap, that is, as long as you don’t count the cost of the lost living space by creating an unheated attic. Basically, you just dump in a lot of loose-fill cellulose or fiberglass on the attic floor, filling the joist cavity and more.

I’ve heard of as much as two feet of cellulose insulation being installed in this manner, achieving about R-80. To make room for a lot of insulation at the roof eaves, it’s usually necessary to install “raised-heel” trusses for the roof framing (so that the insulation thickness at the edges is not significantly compromised.

Using Foamglas instead of polystyrene to insulate beneath our basement slab and on the foundation walls.

Eli Gould cutting Foamglas for use under our basement slab. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

In my role with Environmental Building News and our GreenSpec Product Database, I get plenty of opportunity to research and write about innovative building products. That’s one of the really fun aspects of my job.

On occasion I also get an opportunity to try out new or little-known materials. In the construction of our new home in Dummerston, Vermont—actually the rebuilding of a 200-year Cape—I’ve had opportunity to get some real experience with lots of products. One of these is a cellular glass insulation material known as Foamglas (check out Foamglas in GreenSpec).

Why we need a product like Foamglas

I’ve written often about the problems with extruded polystyrene from an environmental and health perspective. Relative to performance, extruded polystyrene (XPS) is a great product. It is water-resistant so can be used below-grade; it has high compressive strength so can be used beneath a concrete slab floor; it insulates very well (R-5 per inch); and it’s inexpensive. These properties make XPS the nearly universal choice for sub-slab and exterior foundation insulation today.

The Greenbuild conference, as usual, was the place to find out about innovations in green building products.

Agepan THD wood-fiber insulative sheathing is now being sold by the Small Planet Workshop. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Small Planet Workshop

I attended the Greenbuild Conference and related meetings in San Francisco last week. This is the largest conference and trade show in the green building field, and it is increasingly becoming the national event where large manufacturers roll out new building products.

Described below are a few product highlights from the trade show that caught my eye as I wandered around. I only got through about a quarter of the trade show.

Wood-fiber insulation from Germany

In Europe it is becoming increasingly common to use high-permeability wood fiber sheathing as an exterior insulation material, and at least one such material was on display at the conference. The Small Planet Workshop in Olympia, Washington, is now distributing the German product Agepan THD. These 2"-thick panels insulate to R-5.7 (R-2.3 per inch) and have a high perm rating of 18—meaning that water vapor can pass through it fairly easily.

An easy-to-use online Fuel Cost Calculators lets you compare different fuels in terms of today’s energy costs.

BuildingGreen's online Fuel Cost Calculator—shown here with current Vermont costs for heating oil and electricity and assumptions on how those energy sources are used. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: BuildingGreen, Inc.

If there’s one thing that we can predict with certainty about fuel costs, it’s that they fluctuate a lot. That wasn’t always the case. The price of electricity, natural gas, propane, and heating oil were remarkably stable for decades—up until the 1970s.

Since then, prices of most fuels have gyrated wildly, driven by political unrest in some parts of the world, periods of greater or lower demand driven by periods of strong economic growth or contraction, resource limitations (real or perceived), and the situation in China and other parts of this increasingly connected world.

With regulated energy sources (particularly electricity), there is often less volatility, because regulators have to approve changes in pricing.

What does this mean for you as you compare one heating option to another or try to figure out whether to buy a pellet stove this winter? How does oil compare with propane or electricity as a heating source? Those sound like simple enough questions, but it’s actually fairly complicated.

Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the vulnerability of our dependence on automobiles; we need to become a lot more resilient.

Gas line in Woodbridge, New Jersey on November 1st. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: AP

By now we’ve all seen the photos of houses buried in sand along the Jersey Shore, burned-out homes in Queens, and submerged subway stations in Manhattan. Those spectacular images were in the first wave of news from Superstorm Sandy last week.

The secondary, lingering effects might not be as dramatic, but they are nonetheless highly significant. And they demonstrate, ever so clearly, our need for greater resilience. As of late-afternoon Sunday, November 4th, there were still 1.8 million customers without power, the vast majority of them in New York and New Jersey. That’s down from 8.5 million without power at the peak, but it still includes almost a quarter of New Jersey. In some places outages may last for weeks.

One of the cleanest and most efficient ways to burn wood is provided by high-mass masonry heaters.

A Tulikivi masonry heater made of soapstone with an integral bake oven and bench.
Photo Credit: Tulikivi

Over the past two weeks I’ve written about wood stoves and pellet heating. This week I’ll focus on another way to burn wood cleanly and efficiently: using a masonry heater.

A masonry heater, also called a masonry stove or Russian fireplace, is a wood-fired heating system that is fired intermittently at very high temperature to heat up the large quantity of thermal mass, which then radiates heat into the home. The heater has a circuitous path through which the flue gasses flow. Here, the heat is transferred to the stone, brick or other masonry elements of the heater.

Key benefits of masonry heaters

From an environmental standpoint, masonry heaters burn fuel very rapidly at a high temperature. This results in very complete combustion with little pollution generated. Except when first starting the fire, there should be no visible smoke.

What to like and what not to like about pellet stoves and pellet boilers.

Our Quadrafire pellet stove, which we can operate even during a power outage. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

We have a sort-of love-hate relationship with our pellet stove. My wife leans more toward the latter, while I see the benefits outweighing the negatives. In this column I’ll outline the primary advantages and disadvantages of pellet heating.

Advantages of wood pellet heating

Regional fuel. The fuel is—or can be—local or regional in origin. At a minimum it’s not fuel that’s coming from places where they don’t like us—like the Middle East. When I’m buying pellets, the source is a significant consideration. I’m willing to pay slightly more to have my pellets come from nearby plants in Jaffrey, New Hampshire or Rutland, Vermont.

Carbon-neutral. The life-cycle of wood pellet production and use can—and should—be close to carbon-neutral. With natural gas, propane, or heating oil we’re taking carbon that was sequestered underground millions of years ago and releasing that as a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere (where it contributes to global warming). When we burn wood pellets we’re still releasing about the same amount of stored carbon into the atmosphere, but that carbon was sequestered in the wood fiber over just a few decades, and if we’re managing our woodlands properly (replacing harvested trees with new ones) the entire life cycle results in almost no net carbon emissions.

Understanding wood stoves and wood heat so that you can educate your clients.

Vermont Castings Encore-NC wood stove with an EPA emissions rating of 0.7 grams per hour. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Vermont Castings

I’ve been heating primarily with wood since I bought our house 31 years ago, though there were a few years following our installation of an oil boiler when wood consumption dropped considerably.

Wood heat has a mixed record, though. It’s a renewable fuel and, assuming that new trees grow up to replace those cut for firewood, it is carbon-neutral, meaning that it doesn’t have a net contribution to global warming. But burning firewood produces a lot of air pollution; in fact, it’s usually our dirtiest fuel.

Fortunately, there’s a lot we can do to reduce the pollution generated by wood burning—and boost the efficiency.