10 positive things to do for the environment

We've done a fair bit over the years. I never did drive much, and have nearly always worked from home or walked to nearby businesses. We have one car for four driving-age residents, but it only gets used a few times a week.

We replaced an ancient boiler and newish hot water tank with a modern high-efficiency boiler and insulated storage tank. Our heating system is hydronic, and the radiators work better than they ever have. The old boiler, designed to work with coal, was rated for something like 200,000 BTUs, and didn't have any pumps. The former coal bin made a great bicycle barn, until we renovated the basement. The wood-burning stove in the kitchen was replaced with one of them newfangled electric jobs, and we upgraded the fridge by a couple of decades, too. There's a new gas fireplace in the living room, which miraculously fits the opening perfectly and looks like a custom fabrication. We still have a ways to go with insulation and weatherproofing, but the biggest power users and polluters were taken care of first.

In the yard, most of the lawn has been ripped out and replaced with native shrubs and flowers. The grand plan involves restoring the herb gardens and berry patches, along with greatly expanded areas for food crops. The dog's doing a pretty good job at keeping the squirrels at bay, but they still eat way too many plums and grapes. Unfortunately, the neighbours think the rats-with-fluffy-tails are cute, and feed them all winter.

 

13. Use low-watt bulbs. They also are now made in both dimmable and 3-way, so they can be used just about everywhere. You'll appreciate their long-life, and notice the difference on your electric bill. Bart in SoCAL.

 

Yes, this is a pleasant surprise. Real change starts with the individual/family.
Program thermostat to keep temps low when not @ home or at night.

 

Depending on how low you set your temps overnight or when not at home that actually uses more energy than it saves

 

I am looking for affordable LED's, but the cost for a 15w LED is over $75 each.
Where can I get affordable LED's for my house?

 

How so?

 

Saving the environment is not necessarily about saving money. The two do seem to go together a lot of the time.

 

I've always wondered about this, since my system takes a good deal of time to heat up all the the water and subsequently heat the house.

Do you have any data or hypothetical that supports this? I've always recognized the possibility, as described above, but I always end up assuming that it can't possibly be more efficient to keep the system warm during the overnight and all day (system is only on ~4-9pm).

I reckon I could do empirical testing, but it would take a good deal of time to normalize the data, since my heating requirements vary wildly both with weather (wind) and spousal approval.. if someone had already done the heavy listing that would be nice.

 

I'd like to see a source for your lumens per watt comparison for CFL vs LED. Everything I've seen shows that these bulb types are closer than that in lumens per watt.

Lighting Efficiency Comparison

 

Ditto. With certainty, the total amount of energy that leaves your house, over a given period, is lower, so you need to input less energy into your house. So the physics seems pretty clear.

The question is the engineering. For heating, I've only ever heard of one plausible scenario, and that is if your system's efficiency changes if you demand a lot of energy from it. Typical case is a heat pump that brings up resistance heating if the interior temperature is more than (typically) two degrees below the turn-on point for the system. In that case, maybe you are better off continually inputting heat from the efficient source (the heat pump) than you are turning that source off, then using a source that's, what, about a third as efficient (resistance heat) to bring the house up to temperature.

So, possibly, for a heat pump with resistance heat as the secondary, yeah, you might waste energy that way. You'd have to do a detailed calculation to determine it.

Might be other heating systems whose efficiency rapidly deteriorates when stressed like that, but I don't know of any.

I have a ground-source heat pump, and, given the low heat conductivity of soil, it seems possible that this might happen with that type of system. If the limiting factor is soil conductivity, and you try to draw a lot of heat all at once, system efficiency might fall. But that's just a theoretical possibility, I've never seen that said outright. (And, the energy efficiency expert who installed my system put in a programmable thermostat, so it sure seems like he expected me to drop the temps at night.)

Now that I look it seems a little more complicated that that. Looks like some heat pump systems are designed to deal with setback without triggering resistance secondary heat. Well, for those, just ignore what I said. But maybe for an older system without that, you'd end up triggering the resistance heat.

For air conditioning, on the other hand, I have heard a good, physics-based argument that, at least in the humid South, you may not be coming ahead by opening your windows when you get a cooler day in the summer. That has to do with latent heat of evaporation of water. Your AC dries the house out. To do that, it effectively has to draw any absorbed moisture out of the interior of the house. Outside air is wet. You let outside air in, even on a cool-ish day, then what happens the next time you turn on the air is that it has to work to draw out all the moisture that you've now allowed the interior of the house to absorb.

Or is that one just an old wives' tale? Again, it would take a pretty detailed calculation to prove that one way or the other, but I can at least admit to a theoretical possibility that it may not save energy to open up the windows on those occasional cool summer days.

My take on it is that for anything other than heat pump with resistance secondary, you're always better off letting the house cool at night, until proven otherwise. For heat pump with resistance secondary, there's a reasonable argument that it might or might not save energy, I think.

 

I can think of how to measure it, but the estimates savings from a fairly deep setback are pretty modest -- I see 5 to 15% for an 8 hour setback, per the DOE, here.

Energy Savers: Thermostats and Control Systems

And d'oh, they explain the whole heat pump setback right there as well, that I just fumbled through in my last post.

Anyway, all you'd need to test this is wire an electric clock to your blower motor or circulator pump terminals. Older furnaces are almost all just on-off devices -- the consume a constant amount of fuel per minute when on. Fuel consumption is proportional to run time. In theory, all you'd need is two comparable nights, keep it warm on one, do setback plus warmup on the other, and compare the run times. But as you say you may not be able to see the difference from the random variation in weather in such.

 

For your list:

You know that shipping bottled water is generally thought to be environmentally unsound. But the same argument applies to any water-based drinks that your family consumes. We got a filter to take the chloramines out of the tap water, bought a soda maker for when the kids want soda, otherwise we'll mix up from powdered drinks. Same logic applies to beer -- that's mostly water. Used to brew my own till I got allergic to the yeast.

Basically, any time you find yourself sipping any water-based beverage that came to you in a can or bottle, think about whether you could produce that at home with your own water rather than truck water around in bottles or cans. The water in the bottle is the same whether it's 100% water (bottled water) or only 99% water (soda).

We go for zero-effort gardening. If we can grow it and eat it and it doesn't take effort, we're coming ahead. The less effort the better. I guess I spend maybe two days a year on gardening.

We use "no-till" gardening. Our town gives away as much free leaf mulch as you want. Spread the mulch on the ground 4 to 6 inches thick or so, apply the tiniest amount of nitrogen-rich fertilizer (else the brown matter in the leaf much strips the nitrogen out of the soil and the plants blanch), and ... stick plants in the ground. No tilling.

Cane fruits (e.g, raspberry) are basically weeds -- you can't stop them from growing. Some fruit trees, notably pears, require nothing but an annual pruning to keep them in shape. I've got two pear trees. I'm trying filberts, got a couple of paw-paws, some plums, a few currants, some blueberries, some gooseberries. No spray, maybe stick a fertilizer stick in the ground once a year, prune the trees once a year. No problems. Trying a couple of apple trees -- been told they'll bear OK with no spraying. If not, well, I'm out the $60 I spent at Home Depot because I'm not going to spray them either.

Tomatoes, peppers, peas, squash, cucumbers, some types of beans -- all that stuff will grow here with essentially no effort on our part. Carrots are great if you have the soil -- nothing around here bothers them, you just pull them up and eat them.

If they survive you eat them, if not, no big deal. If you get bugs, well, you've got bugs. If you invested nothing in it, do you really have to care?

I imagine real gardeners sneer at our yields, but it works for us.

Nice bonus is that for much of the summer and fall, if the kids want a snack you can tell them to go outside and graze. And sometimes it works. And my kids can ID some edible berries in the wild from having foraged in the back yard.

This is a long-winded way of saying, it's really easy to grow some food. Not a whole lot, not every type, but some. You'll have people telling you to construct raised beds and double-dig your garden, carefully assess soil nutrients, and all of that. And I'm sure that'll work. But it also works just to smother the weeds with mulch and stick some plants in the ground.

 

OK here we go.

I live where I don't need to put a lot of heat into my home.

I have an unflued gas heater in my lounge room and no other room is heated.

I have R4.5 insulation in the ceiling and R3 in all external walls.

Passive solar design. When I built my home 20 years ago I had 3 huge north facing windows (southern Hemisphere, reverse your thinking) which are shaded in summer by a 1.2 metre veranda but are warmed by the sun in winter.

All heating appliances are natural gas rather than electric. That is stove, oven, water heater and room heater.

When the water heater is due for replacement I will install an evacuated tube solar heating system.

About to put 40, 60 watt/hour solar panels on the roof of my home which will fill the north face and provide 80 to 100% of my electricity. Mains connected so excess power goes to my neighbours.

Swimming pool isn't heated but I do need a more efficient pump (it is too big for the job). I might even take out the pool as it doesn't get a lot of use.

Evaporative home cooling. My ducted air conditioner is evaporative and thermostatically controlled. When I had dogs I left it on all summer, now I turn it off when I am not home. The very high volumes of air the system can move can cool the whole house in a few minutes once primed and running. A second benefit of evaporative is I can leave windows and doors open. Evaporative cooling uses much less energy than a refrigerated system

Reversible ceiling fans in bedrooms and living spaces to provide cooling when it isn't hot enough to use the air conditioner. Also to move warm air to floor level from ceiling height.

CFL, lighting and stick fluros under wall mounted cupboards in the kitchen. Even my range hood light and the lights in my pantry and fridge are fluro. Will consider LED soon.

High efficiency refrigerator. It has a water dispenser in the door too so I don't have to open the door to get a cold drink.

11 large native trees on my 1/4 acre block to reduce wind and provide shade. I do not water them.

Only water lawns at least 2 weeks after rain or the last watering. No, I don't have the best lawn on the street. I don't water lawns I don't use.

Water saving shower roses.

Low water consumption Bosch front loading washing machine. I use cold water to wash in, always.

Bosch low water consumption dish washer. I don't like washing dishes and only run the machine when full, maybe 2 or 3 times a week. I don't rinse dishes, I just scrape them off. That is when I miss the dogs.

I buy local when I can. I have a friend with sheep, I buy all my lamb from him (Professionally butchered). I seek out Australian and local labels and check for Australian and South Australian content. I don't like gardening.

I do not leave lights on outside when I am inside, to do so is just dumb.

The back of my yard is as close to wild as I can get it, that is, if a branch falls it is only moved for safety to keep it off used paths, anything that comes off the trees stays in the yard. I did give away about 200kg of fire wood when I removed a branch which was growing over my house. No matter how much I leave laying around it just seems to vanish after a time. I put lawn clippings back on my garden.

I used local rock from a local quarry for retaining walls. Cheeper and less transport cost than imported rock or manufactured walling. I won't use bush rocks in my garden.

 

I'm surprised there aren't more earth-sheltered buildings in Australia. That type of construction would seem ideal for the hot climate.

Pat, the pool would make an awesome greenhouse if you drained the water and put a clear roof on it.