360Chestnut's Home Energy Efficiency Blog

This post was originally featured on Greener Everyday Consulting.
At the annual Building Energy Conference last year, Alex Wilson gave a terrific talk on a new framework for sustainable design and green building he calls “resilience”.  Wilson first began to formulate this framework (which he initially termed “passive survivability”) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Since then, resilience–or the ability of buildings and communities remain habitable in the event and aftermath of a natural disaster–has only come to seem more urgent (Does anyone need to be reminded that 2011 was a record breaking year for extreme weather?).


The flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was a huge wake-up call: the effects of climate change were at hand and we would need to redesign and rebuild our vulnerable communities accordingly. White House photo by Paul Morse

But what does resilience have to do with sustainability?  What does green have to do with emergency planning? Actually, quite a lot it turns out.  Most if not all of the strategies that allow buildings to support life in the event that basic services are disrupted are also strategies that enhance the durability and resource efficiency of buildings–two constitutive ingredients of a “green” or “sustainable” building.

This article was originally featured on Energy Tariff Experts.
If you are one of the fortunate people in MA served by a natural gas utility, you probably saved a bundle this winter compared with your neighbors who burn oil, propane, or the truly unfortunate who heat with electric baseboard heaters. If you are like most people, you get your bill, it sits in a pile for a week or two, and then you pay it without scrutinizing it. If you pay online, you almost certainly don't read your bill. You may not realize it, but if you heat with natural gas you are participating in a deregulated marketplace. Lets walk through a residential NStar gas bill and see what all that stuff on the bill really means. NStar changed their bill format about two years ago to make the bill easier for the lay person to read. Luckily, they also kept the old bill format which is now printed on page two. Below, I've included a mildly redacted version of my gas bill.

For those who crave data, page 1 may leave you wanting more, but there are some great nuggets here. Note the "Bill Analysis" section on the middle part of the left. It lists the number of days, average daily gas use, and average  daily temperature for the current, previous, and year prior billing cycle. Many people compare usage from month to month or year to year without looking at the number of days in the billing period. If there is a difference in the length of the billing cycle, then you really can't make an accurate comparison unless you normalize the data to usage/day.

Ever wondered what types of vapors are coming to your home and what you can do to outbalance their effects? This handy infographic is here to help you stop vapor intrusions!

This post was originally featured on Boston Building Resources.

In recent years, some new options for countertops have become popular with homeowners and architects. These join tried-and-true countertop surfaces to make for a wide range of choices that vary by price, practical qualities, and environmental impact.

Frugal homeowners watching their pennies often concentrate on saving money inside their homes, but there are plenty of ways to reduce expenses while keeping the outside of your home looking nice. The following can help people save on lawn care and landscaping:

The Cambridge Solar Challenge is an alliance between Cambridge’s award-winning energy efficiency nonprofit, HEET, and the Boston-based energy efficiency and solar company, Next Step Living. The aim of the Challenge is to sign up 100 homeowners this summer to get solar electric panels installed on their roofs, through a 20% discount and extensive social marketing. Solar installations reduce strain on the power grid and create clean energy, while government incentives and innovative financing have made them an attractive investment.

With 100 new solar installations, Cambridge could generate a megawatt of clean energy annually. “That’s equivalent to planting 370,550 trees or removing 2,790 cars from the road for an entire year!” said Mayor Henrietta Davis. The program is supported by the City of Cambridge and the Mayor is sending a letter about the program to over 1,000 owners of homes determined to have the best solar potential.

This post was originally featured on Greener Everyday Consulting.
Last month, we featured a post arguing that it only makes sense to invest in a solar pv system after you have squeezed as much waste energy out of your home as you can. In most homes, squeezing out waste energy requires both behavior changes and efficiency upgrades. This is what I did at my home, with the result that my overall energy use dropped by about 50%.

The best candidates for exterior retrofits are homes with simple geometric forms. My home is anything but simple.

Could I eke out a bit more savings? Sure. There are a few light bulbs that still need to be changed out; I could be more consistent about hanging my clothes to dry; I could make my family sweat it out a bit more on hot and humid summer days.

On April 30th in Pennsylvania, more than 100,000 people called on Governor Corbett to halt the dirty drilling practice known as fracking.  Perhaps that should come as no surprise, since fracking has been nothing short of a rolling environmental disaster for the Keystone State.   See In the Shadow of the Marcellus Boom report by my colleagues at PennEnvironment.



Of course the fracking toll has been terrible elsewhere as well – contaminating drinking water, making nearby residents sick, releasing global warming pollution, and turning rural landscapes into industrial zones.  Here are just a few recent examples from around the country:

• In Ohio, a drilling operator intentionally dumped more than 250,000 gallons of fracking waste into the Mahoning River since last September.  This is the kind of thing that happens when Pennsylvania fracking generates more than 1.3 billion gallons of fracking
  wastewater, much of which has been exported to Ohio.

• In Colorado, a broken fracking well outside Windsor spewed 84,000 gallons of greenish contaminated liquid into the ground just 1,500 feet from nearby homes. This accident occurred less than a month after the company’s last spill, which left benzene levels in nearby soil 128 times higher than the state limit. This was on top of the approximately 340 drilling leaks and spills have contaminated Colorado groundwater in the past five years.

My husband Ed leaves a lot of the bill paying to me. So when I said we needed to install a pool pump timer, he paid attention, because he knew how cost conscious I am. Have we saved money? We certainly have, especially during the busy summer months, and I’m thrilled about it. There were several factors involved for us.

This post was originally featured on Greener Every Day Consulting.

Anyway… one of the problems that we will be addressing is missed opportunities in green building.  Homeowners typically get only a small handful of chances to dramatically improve the performance of their homes–say, when we put on a new roof or upgrade mechanicals or finish a basement.  But very few of us have the foresight to take full advantage of these, no matter how green-minded we may be.  In fact, some of us, present company included, have been known to squander an opportunity and even make it harder to improve performance in the future.