Home heating turns out to be a huge impact environmentally, heating a 2000sq foot home in the Seattle area can commonly range from $500-1700/year and 7000-17000lbs of CO2 annually. Needless to say modest improvements in efficiency can have major impacts.
While there’s huge, expensive projects you can undertake to cut these factors, there’s two simple things we did which cut our impact roughly by a quarter.
Below is a picture of our “new” (1980s) home gas use (we’re the blue line). In October things started to cool off here and you’ll notice we were running at the same gas use of an “efficient” neighbor, but since then we did just the two improvements below and now use 26% less natural gas than an “efficient” neighbor.
