Energy and waste
People waste energy because it's cheap. People waste as much of it as they can afford to waste. Look at a typical oven. To cook a pizza in it, you have to preheat the oven. This involves heating up all the metal on the inside of the oven, all the air in the oven, etc. The oven is probably 50-100 times the volume of the pizza. Then it's constantly wasting that heat (the exterior surface will feel warm due to shoddy insulation). Then after the pizza's cooked and you take it out, all that heat that went into heating up the oven itself is vented and wasted. If the oven were smaller and the interior of it were tiled with a strong insulator, you could probably cook a pizza with less than half as much energy.
Look at the stove. Boil some water. While you're doing it, a large fraction of the heat from the burner is bypassing the water and going straight to the air. The sides and top of the pot are losing heat too. If the pot had a very conductive bottom, insulated sides, and an insulated lid, it would surely waste a lot less energy and boil your water faster.
Look at your refrigerator. Until you open it, every joule of energy that it's using is a result of inadequate insulation. They idle in the hundreds of watts.
Look at your windows. When it's -10 outside, they're constantly hemmorrhaging energy in the form of heat that was produced with your electricity. The interior of the window may have frozen condensation on it, while most of your room is kept at room temperature by a steady stream of wasted electricity. In that case you're losing hundreds of watts of energy per square meter of window. Windows are an extremely wasteful luxury if you intend to have any climate controls indoors. Even double-pane windows are crap compared to some fiberglass insulation. The smaller the windows, the better.
Look at the insulation in your walls. It's not very thick. If you didn't have huge windows bypassing everything, then your heating bill would be inversely proportional to the thickness of your insulation. If your house was insulated properly, heating cost would be nearly zero (body heat and incidental electicity use, properly contained by insulation, would suffice to maintain room temperature inside, in any cold climate). If you had even more insulation than that, you could use excess indoor heat as a power source for a generator that uses indoors as the hot reservoir and outdoors as the cold reservoir. A couple feet of foam would suffice.
10 Comments
gwiz665Let's throw money at it!!
KevlarHear, hear. I just bought a home a few weeks back and my first order of business was to order a free energy audit.
Of course, in the hopes I'll in turn throw money at them to bolster the insulation and replace the windows, et al...
And actually, they've been throwing free lightbulbs and services at me since then.
jwrayOh yeah, that reminds me. Incandescent bulbs for ordinary household lighting should be banned. They're actually more costly over their lifetime due to power consumption, despite energy being really cheap. If you have to power-cycle a light frequently, get LED instead of fluorescent.
jwrayRetrofitting existing houses' in-wall insulation might be so expensive that it's not worth it as long as power is so cheap, but there are many good forms of insulation so cheap that there is no reason not to put a couple feet of it in every new house (and if the double paned windows were small enough, they could support a vacuum between the panes, which would reduce the conductivity of the window by a metric fuckton).
But in-wall insulation isn't the problem as long as you have big fat windows on your old house. Just seal off those windows with a layer of clear plastic that leaves an inch or two of air between the window and the plastic. It reduces the heating bill by half, in my experience, and costs a pittance. It pays for itself in a week.
peggedbeamy house was built in 1956, its in fantastic condition and i have been slowly updating to make it more energy efficient. one thing i have yet to replace, because they are so fucking expensive and my house has so many of them, is the windows. when i had the inspection done the dude even told me not to open them because they are so old he thought the panes would crumble if handled too roughly. where i live its not uncommon for it to be 106F + in the summer and currently its 10F right now and dropping. so... we experience a bit of extremes and my energy bills are always high. (though much much lower than any apartment i ever lived in)
tell me more about this plastic. i think the plan i had originally was to slowly replace a window or two at time with solar windows. but theyre horribly expensive and i decided i dont really like how dark they look from the outside. kind of an eyesore. especially on a yellow house.
for my birthday a few years ago my stepdad came over and installed some insulation in the attic, which is great. and i bought a new AC and furnace with all kinds of extra fancy filters after i found out my asthmatic son is also allergic to everything in existence. that seems to have cut my energy bills by about a 1/4 and seriously reduced the amount of trouble he has with his asthma which has also saved me money on medicine. i dont even want to think about what kind of grossities were hanging out in a 50+ year old AC unit.
i also discovered some awesomeness last winter. i put electric blankets underneath the fitted sheet on all of our beds in the winter. turn them on about 5 minutes before we lay down and the bed is toasty warm when you get in. and most of the fall and winter you can shut the heater off at night. our blankets have timers on them, so they stay on for about 30 minutes. the bed stays warm all night and the hot air isnt blowing into the house all night making us all stuffy nosed and dry in the morning.
jwrayYou can get huge sheets of clear plastic from hardware stores like home depot. They're advertized specifically for insulating windows. Whatever air there is between the window and the plane of the wall will be sealed off by the plastic, preventing convection. Air is a pretty good insulator when its flow is blocked. They usually come with a roll of clear double-sided tape.
peggedbeado they look good?
will they withstand hail? or all the things rowdy fucking children and can do to and around windows?
spoco2OK, yes, being energy efficient is great, and my wife and I are currently hunting for a house to buy and renovate, with the idea to make it as energy efficient as possible. BUT... you've gone a bit overboard on some of your ideas.
To suggest that everyone should have tiny windows is insane. Windows are brilliant for a large number of reasons:
* Free light
* Free solar heating when it's cold (including heating up a large mass like a brick wall to radiate heat inside the house)
* (most importantly for me) Removes the feeling that you're living inside a tiny box... large windows overlooking a garden or nice view can turn an otherwise normal room into a peaceful oasis.
Definitely do all you can to reduce heat loss from the house through them when it's cold, or heat entrance to the house when it's hot... but getting rid of windows is NOT the way to live. Not in any sane sense of having quality of life. And suggesting that people have sheets of plastic over their windows really is a little horrendous. That's utilitarianism taken to extreme. It may work, but your house will resemble a shanty town.
LED lights would be great to have except that there are NONE that are anywhere near to bright enough to replace even moderately bright incandescent bulbs at a pricepoint less than $100... so until they become a logical choice it's compact florescent for our house at present.
You haven't really even touched on passive heating/cooling, and you're very much only thinking of keeping a house warm when it's cold rather than cool when it's hot. I live in Melbourne Australia, today the temp is going to be 44C (111F), which is STINKING hot by anyone's measure. But it also gets down to single digit temps (40s F) in winter... so we have to have homes that can be good both ways.
One of the best ways to keep a house cool is to keep air moving through it. If you have vents/windows up high you can have them open to vent off hot air that rises, and window down low open to draw in cooler air from outside. This is one thing our current house lacks. It may have lots of windows we can open to let air through, but being that they are all about midpoint through the wall it is infuriating to have the house too hot and yet a change has come through and it's lovely outside but you can't coax the air through the house.
* Insulate as much as you can afford.
* Build the house (when you're doing so from new) such that it takes best advantage of the sun for the given times of year.
* Install Solar Panels for electricity
* Use an on demand gas hot water system (so you're not heating a large container of water and have it sit there), and even better have it be a backup to a solar hot water system
* Install Rain water tanks
* Use dual flush toilets (amazing that they are not common in the US)
* Use evaporation cooling over refrigerated
* Use as much passive heating/cooling as you can.
Crying foul of how inefficient things like stoves/fridges are is a little pointless, as other than getting the most energy efficient ones you can when buying, what can you really do about it?
Definitely think about energy and insulation and actual energy usage, but you don't have to live in a sealed, windowless box in order to live efficiently.
imstellar28 says...Top 100 Best Ways to Save The Environment
100. Live a 1st world lifestyle slightly more energy efficiently
...
9. Work and live only during daylight hours
8. Grow your own food / collect your own rainwater
7. Live in a house with no active heating/cooling
6. Live a 2nd world lifestyle
5. Live a 3rd world lifestyle
4. Live in the jungle
3. Have less kids
2. Have no kids
1. Kill yourself
jwrayThe amount of free light and solar heating that you get through windows is massively outweighed by the energy you lose through the windows, unless the outside is only slightly below room temperature, or their insulation is way above the standard of double-pane windows found in ordinary houses. When it's warmer that "free solar heating" is working against your AC.
Clear plastic doesn't interfere with your ability to look out a window. Neither does having a smaller window. You're probably looking at a computer or TV so much of the time that it doesn't matter. You could actually *go* outside instead of just looking. I don't know about you, but I don't get claustrophobic just because I can't see the sky or some trees for a few hours. If this stuff were actually done it could reduce residential electricity consumption by three fourths. That's well worth the sacrifice of not being able to see trees 24/7 except when you actually go outside.
LEDs are adequate unless you have cataracts or a strange aesthetic desire for extreme brightness at nighttime. I have one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Bright-XtraFlex2-Kindle-Version/dp/B000TXZIDM
If you set it on "Low" and shine it at a wall, the reflection of it is still plenty for reading a book. If you're concerned about lighting, put up some mirrors so you get more free light through your small windows.
Imstellar -- Just raise the price of fossil fuels / pollution / environmental destruction through taxing those things, and then the market will figure out how to get the best of both worlds.
Also, you're still using a computer aren't you? Pot kettle black?
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