Although you could be forgiven for wondering if we even had a summer, it’s clear winter’s just around the corner. Here are some ideas to help you prepare:
For other, more pragmatic tips, see the CEA website.
Now that winter’s just around the corner, though you might be hard-pressed to believe it with how fickle Mother Nature’ been of late, you’re probably starting to dread the heating bills that accompany it. But just because it’s getting cold doesn’t mean you cannot take advantage of free energy from the sun.
For most of us, it’s probably too late to orient our homes so most windows are on the southern face, or plant deciduous trees on the same side of the house, and evergreens on the windward.1 But there are still plenty of ways to take advantage of this underused resourced, not the least of which is leaving your curtains open during the day, especially if you have modern, low-emissivity (“low-e”), insulated windows.
Another interesting way to use the sun is through solar thermal technologies. Although these systems typically garner less attention than photovoltaics, they can work quite well at our latitude, either as a space or water heater. Commercial systems such as these solar hot air panels are actually quite economical at approximately $1,500, but it’s also possible to build your own. There are a number of plans available online, of varying complexity, from soda cans & spray paint to sloping window-mounted affairs. With a one-square-yard device you could provide as much heat as an electric baseboard or portable heater.23
1. The deciduous trees shield the windows from intense solar exposure in the summer, but permit light to enter the home once the drop their leaves in fall. The conifers remain bushy year-round, acting as a windbreak and thereby reducing heat loss.
3. A simple but imperfect test to determine if a sheet of acrylic will let some of your captured sunshine escape is to see if a remote will work behind it. If the remote does not work, then the sheet blocks infrared, which is what you want.
It’s a little known fact that this winter will be the first in which Massachusetts requires home heating oil to include at least 2% biofuels, rising 1 percentage point each year until it reaches 5% in 2012. In 2009, that creates a 24 million gallon demand, and Baystate Biofuels is here to fill it.
The company has taken over the disused tanks at an old Western Telecom building in North Andover and it plans to utilize solar power Osgood Landing had previously installed on the site, and Baystate Biofuels will tap into excess steam from a nearby waste-to-energy incinerator to heat the tanks to lower the viscosity of the pure biodiesel.
Warm Home Cool Planet is checking on whether Baystate will be delivering to Cambridge this winter. In the meantime, check out the video above. More on this soon.
Between the extravagant claims for various forms of renewable energy, and figuring out ways to pay for energy-saving improvements and technologies in your home, we sometimes forget that major energy–and cost– savings can be realized simply by ensuring appliances and utilities in your home are operating or set at optimal temperatures.
A quick ‘temperature tour’ of your home to check the heating and cooling settings on your appliances. You can take a major step towards saving energy in approximately 20 minutes. Here’s where you’ll save the most:
Simple stuff, but that is where over 50% of energy savings will come from during the next decade.
From Canada comes the rather amazing story of Cansolair, a company that reuses soda cans to make solar panels. Once installed, this soda/solar unit can provide up to 30% of the heating for your house. All this in the cloudy, foggy Labrador region. All without adding another CO2 particle to the environment. Maybe Coke knew it was onto something when they introduced this new flavor last year.
Check out this video to see how it’s done.
Last week, we showed you how a local Cambridge organization (HEET–Home Energy Efficiency Team) ‘weatherizes’ a house for fellow Cambridge residents. Weatherizing a house involves making some basic non-structural changes to a house to reduce the energy needed for heating and cooling and save money on utilities. The homeowner supplies all the materials and HEET provides the knowledge and manpower needed to finish all energy efficiency improvements in a single day.
It’s a great community activity and a fantastic way to meet your fellow Cambridge residents while learning from skilled tradesmen how you can make your own home more energy efficient. And there is always a party to celebrate the completion of another successful Weatherization Barnraising.
The next HEET Weatherization Barnraising is scheduled for Sunday, March 1 between 12:30—5 pm at 120 Chestnut Street and 100 Henry Street, Cambridgeport.
The Work to be carried out on site includes:
The number of participants will be limited to assure that everyone has guidance and support from a skilled team leader. You can sign up today by contacting Steve Morr-Wineman at swineman@gis.net or 617-876-4753.
You may remember the scene from the 1985 movie Witness starring Harrison Ford. A group of Amish people converge on a neighbor’s property and assemble a barn in a single montage, a single day. A Cambridge-based co-op HEET (for Home Energy Efficiency Team) does weatherization work that’s less lofty, but arguably more important to the modern world. It’s a model for what can be done by harnessing the power of progressive community which emerged during the Obama campaign.
As Bob the Builder might say, ‘Can We Caulk it? Yes we can!’
Combining the materials purchased by the homeowner with free knowhow and labor from HEET, the team has weatherized several low-income homes in Cambridge, with the goal of performing a barn-raising per month. As they do so, they transfer the skills needed to make—and keep— a home more energy efficient to both homeowners and groups of new volunteers. The energy savings persist, putting cash in the pockets of Cambridge residents, which can be spent in the local economy in different ways—a Cambridge mini-stimulus.
HEET grew out of neighborhood organization called GreenPort. The purpose of both groups, according to co-founder Steve Morr-Wineman, is to bring neighbors together to respond to the environmental crisis. A recent project included weatherizing the Cambridgeport Public School, a pioneering public-private-volunteer collaboration with the savings going back to Cambridge’s tax-payers.
Daily KOS thinks the model needs to go national, and so does Warm Home Cool Planet.
Somerville, MA will soon hold their first weatherization barnraising and Watertown, Brookline, Lexington, Medford, Milton, Newton, Beverly, and Boston are thinking about starting their own groups. I think it would be a good idea for this idea to go nation-wide. In fact, a weatherization barnraising on the White House might be a very good way to kick-start that process.
Our hats off to the HEET team. You’re doing great work. Expect to hear from us soon.
If one does a Google search on ‘keeping warm in the winter,’ you’ll find dozens of articles from all over the world, with tips and advice on how to keep warm without breaking the bank. There’s a lot of overlap in these lists, but occasionally you find a unique idea or two. Many of these lists are aimed at the elderly, who have to balance warmth issues with other issues (avoiding slips and falls). You’ll also find a great deal of disagreement about the safety and utility of closing off vents in unused parts of a structure heated by a forced air furnace.
The tips are all common-sensical. But one thing we’ve noticed at Warm Home Cool Planet, if you pile up enough common sense, you frequently find you’ve created an uncommonly useful resource. We read through dozens of postings with the reality of Cambridge winter in mind.
Our Survey of Surveys found the following categories of suggestions:
The details of an interesting program to encourage energy efficiency in Utah just crossed our desk here at Warm Home Cool Planet.
The Energy Services Efficiency Program… eases the financial burden of making large changes that lower the energy load on the power grid, such as better insulation, more efficient air conditioning systems and improved swimming pool pumps.The rebates could pay more than $500 for improved attic insulation, $350 for a new air conditioning unit and up to $125 for a better swimming pool pump.
Warm Home Cool Planet supports this idea because it achieves two things. It ties the reduction of energy use in each house to specific improvements, and it helps the homeowner make the capital investment in what are becoming tough times for all. Looking at the photo below, it seem like the folks in Utah are getting with the program too:
Larry Morrison, also with Morrison Insulation, said when he learned about such rebates last year, he started alerting all of his customers to the possible benefits. He said it costs about 50 cents per square foot for a typical installation, while rebate programs would reimburse for 35 cents per square foot – as both the St. George and Questar programs do.
Built by volunteers in the Riverside Neighborhood of Cambridge twenty eight years ago, this old solar project just keeps on keeping on.