Tags for this video have been changed from 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam' to 'Ted talks, solar roofs, solar windows, Ramez Naam, singularity university' - edited by Eklek

my 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.