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The Green Building Curmudgeon
Subscribe to our RSS feed!What's Going On With Home Performance?
I’ve been involved, if somewhat peripherally, with the Home Performance industry for quite a while. I was one of the original group working on Home Performance with Energy Star in Atlanta quite a few years ago. As I learned more about this evolving field, I felt that it was both important and necessary, and thought that it had potential to be a profitable business model. I had concerns that the program was being managed by building science types (read: geeks) who were focused on collecting reams of data from performance testing and using this to sell improvements to homeowners. Fairly quickly, I determined that unless it moved from a technical to a sales focus, it wasn’t going to go anywhere.
Diabetes and Green Building
I barely know who Paula Deen is, although from what I can tell, she seems to be quite the marketer of traditional southern cooking as well as herself. (I may be a little jealous of her self-promotion skills). Her latest big news is that after years of eating and promoting heavy, butter-laden food, she has gone public with her Type-2 diabetes, a condition she has had for three years. She only went public with her illness after she signed an endorsement deal with Novo Nordisk, a diabetes drug. This seems to me to be about the most self-serving act possible. She spends years making millions marketing unhealthy food to her fans, then figures out how to make more money by helping sell them the medication they need to not get sick or die from what she sold them before.
Energy Efficient Landscaping for Cooling Down.
On cold winter days, a ray of sun streaming into your house can be most welcome - a free source of heat. But what about in the summer, when those rays of sun and other, less-evident solar heat, seep into our already too-hot houses and become a costly nuisance? Well, what happens is that you lose money. But using landscaping (namely by planting trees) to shade your home can be a great way to lower energy costs.
Is Your Insulation Working? Find Out with an Energy Audit.
Winter's coming. It's already heating season. So how do you save money on heating costs? You've got to own your heat. Simple as that. You've paid for all that warm air already, so it doesn't make much sense to waste it now.
A simple enough premise - it's the application that gets complicated. We (and most building science experts) strongly recommend air sealing and insulation as high priority measures to make your home use less energy, make you more comfortable, and make the planet happy.
Upgrade Your Refrigerator, Save Money Twice.
One of the biggest energy guzzlers in your home (besides, most likely, your thermal envelope, which lets expensive conditioned air escape through air leaks and poorly insulated walls) is the refrigerator. Upgrading it, believe it or not, can save you a bundle of money in the long run, as long as you don't simply put your old fridge down in the basement and plug it back in. Now, before you balk at the high upfront cost of replacing your fridge, let us explain why we (admittedly, energy-efficiency/penny-pinching geeks) think it's a good idea:
Everything You Need to Know About the Home Star Retrofit Act of 2010.
Pending in the Senate is a bill called the Home Star Retrofit Act of 2010, or simply Home Star for short. Sometimes referred to as Cash for Caulkers in street slang, the bill would provide a series of financial incentives for homeowners to increase the energy efficiency of their homes through substantive, effective improvements to their homes that save homeowners money, reduce our country’s carbon emissions, help to mitigate climate change, and put tens of thousands of Americans back to work.
