Greener Home Heating

Home heating turns out to be an incredibly complex and regional issue – how much heating is needed, the practicality of heat pumps, and grid energy emissions vary significantly in the US. Not to forget your home variables – what services are available, ducting, current system efficiency, etc. Given that keep in mind there’s no one answer that works everywhere.

While home heating a complex and fairly mundane topic it deserves a lot of attention – some back of the napkin math suggests home heating and cooling in America is responsible for at least half a trillion pounds of CO2 annually.

We’re going to look at the three main categories of heating systems – electric resistive heaters, heat pumps, and gas furnaces.

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All About Home Battery Storage

What is Home Battery Storage?

Basically these are battery packs like used in EVs but for your home power. They can be used with or without solar, but the rebates only apply when used with solar.

Will Home Battery storage save me money?

It depends on your utility! For example if your utility charges time-of-use rates you can use the battery to run your house during high rate hours then charge the battery off-peak hours. Also if your utility doesn’t offer solar net metering it allows you to take full advantage of the solar power you generate.

But at least for major Western Washington utility users (PSE, Seattle City Light, and Tacoma Power) these aren’t a concern.

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Your Lawnmower Is Trying To Kill You

Okay yes the title is a bit of hyperbole, but gas powered lawn equipment isn’t just horrible for the environment, but also the health of the operator.

Gas powered lawn equipment differs from gas powered cars in a few major areas:

  • They lack the advanced emissions controls of a car
  • Some are two-stroke which are far dirtier
  • You’re standing right in the exhaust, rather than being in a cabin with filtered air

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Why You Should Replace Your Electric Hot Water Heater Now

Normally people tend to wait until hot water heater failure before replacing a hot water heater. But I’m going to argue if you have an electric hot water heater, you should do it now regardless of age.

If you have an electric hot water heater you know they’re expensive to run – estimates for a common household are about 5000kWh annually which means about $550/year for an average power cost. Electric heat pump water heaters however are about 4-5 times more efficient than a traditional unit. Continue reading

Understanding Power Use (Watts) and Power Cost (kWh)

Recently I upgraded my kitchen lighting from halogen to LED bulbs as the latter have become very inexpensive (especially with PSE instant rebates). But as always I was curious about the value of upgrading bulbs.

As you know lightbulbs show you power consumption in watts, but power bills are in kWh (kilowatt hours). Put simply if you took a 1000 watt device (1kW, like a blow dryer) and ran it for an hour, you’d use a kWh.

Now in the case of a blow dryer the high wattage isn’t much a concern since the time used each day is small (and I shave my head anyway…to save power of course…). But the kitchen lighting for instance had six 75 watt bulbs, which are often on for hours each day in our household. That means 450 watts (.45 kW) and we guessed 2-4 hours of use per day. So assuming 3 hours a day of use that’s 40.5kWh/mo (.45kWh * 3 hours/day * 30 days/mo). I pay 10.5¢/kWh for power so that means $4.25/mo to run the kitchen lights.

In the case of the kitchen I replaced the bulbs with 9.5 watt LEDs, so running for the same 3 hours a day for a month lighting the kitchen costs just 54¢.

Admittedly saving $45/year isn’t a huge deal, but for spending just $13 in new bulbs its not a shabby deal either – if someone offered to trade your $13 in cash in exchange for their $45 in cash, you’d take that offer every time! Even better next year that same person will give you another $45 for nothing!

Not to forget each kWh saved in PSE territory means about a pound of CO2 saved – over a year you’ll save 420lbs of CO2.

Perhaps more than anything the benefit of LEDs is helping to not make new power plants.

The 2017 Eco Friendly Cheapish Cleaning List

You’d think household cleaning products would be rigorously tested for safety, while in fact there’s little regulation of what’s in household cleaners. For example quaternary ammonium compounds are permitted which are known to cause asthma, or 2-butoxyethanol which can absorb through the skin and damage red blood cells.

On the flip side many “green” cleaners aren’t as green as they’d like you to think and many just do a terrible job of cleaning. While you can certainly spend lots of time reviewing EWG’s great site, reading reviews of efficacy, and testing things out – here’s what we’ve found works for us. Continue reading