The Solarize movement is strong in both the Shenandoah Valley and Charlottesville. The cost of Solar PV has dramatically dropped over the last few years and with this group buying power, the cost has never been lower.
So now a big decision needs to be made, do you sell your RECs or not. A Renewable Energy Certificate (RECs) is the environmental attributes of your green power that are sold separately from the electrons that makes up the electricity. RECs is essentially the selling of the creation of green power to another entity that is not actually using that power in order to give them credit for green power usage.
So why is this a big decision? It can make your cost of Solar PV lower as it now generates a small income while also providing you with clean power. However, the entity that is purchasing your RECs continue to rely on fossil fuels for their power source. So if you are converting your electric usage to clean energy for environmental reasons, it is a hard decision to make. It may make it affordable so you can install the solar array in the first place, but it does not reduce our national dependence on fossil fuels.
An infrared camera is a tool that can help identify water issues and air leakage in a building envelope. Specifically the device allows you to see radiation or temperature differential on a surface making it visible light. The camera image looks like it is glowing in areas that have a range of temperature.
I was able to test drive a Flir camera from Ivy Tools to perform an energy audit a couple of weeks ago. Using the camera and a blower door we were able to identify many locations of air leakage in the thermal envelope of the building. Sealing these leaks could cut energy usage by up to 30% for the homeowner. Some of the more advanced cameras allow for saving and viewing images.
For those hoping for a more technical definition: Thermal imaging cameras don’t actually see temperature. Instead, they capture the infrared (IR) energy transfer from an object to its environment and produce a real-time image in a color palette where hotter objects appear brighter and cooler objects appear darker. IR energy is generated by the vibration of atoms and molecules and behaves similarly to visible light where it can be reflected, refracted, absorbed and emitted. The more these atoms and molecules move, the higher the temperature of the object.
I am always looking for experts in the construction industry to discuss best practices. At Construct this year I met Andy McIntyre with Knauf Insulation. Our discussion went something like this:
Me: “Andy, great to finally meet you, I don’t have any use for your product.”
Andy: “Here are the many many reasons why you are wrong and should use my product on a regular basis.”
Ok, that is not exactly how the conversation went, but I am not stretching too much. Andy is an expert. I pretend to be an expert. We had a discussion, Andy gave me enough valuable information to reconsider my “expert” ideas about fiberglass insulation. I asked him to put in writing his reasons to continue our discussion. This is what he sent me. Let me know your thoughts:
“Not your father’s insulation: Today’s glass mineral wool insulation is a high performance, proven, sustainable product perfectly suited for green building. Today’s glass mineral wool products, in batt, blanket, or blown in form can achieve R 4.2 per inch, placing it as the highest performing non-foam material available. Glass wool insulation is comfortable to work with. Prior formulations with larger fibers and a Phenol formaldehyde binder (PF) had caused brashness in the product. In today’s products, PF has been replaced by bio based binders derived from corn.
Glass wool insulation is safe, and is no longer considered a possible carcinogen. No other building material has been as exhaustively tested as glass wool, aka fiberglass. It has been completely exonerated. Any claims otherwise are completely false, and misleading. Today’s glass wool is unsurpassed in sustainability. Featuring high post-consumer recycled content, today’s materials meet stringent Red List Free status, and have Environmental Product Declarations (EPD’s) available. Today’s glass wool products are comfortable to work with, offer proven high performance, and are sustainable.”
So, which insulation product on the market is the best for a high performance healthy house in your opinion?
Evangelical environmentalism is a movement in the church community that emphasizes biblical mandates to care for God’s creation called “creation care.” This movement is focused on reducing the impact that a particular congregation has on resources, indoor air quality, environmental quality, energy usage, water consumption, and resource depletion. The work done by creation care committees is a form of mission work for those that will be hardest hit by climate change in impoverished areas of the world as the church’s carbon footprint is diminished.
Park View Mennonite Church
We have been working hard at our Park View Mennonite Church to cut the energy usage through various strategies. We have added insulation in key locations, changed to programmable thermostats, and even hired the Natural Garden to push mow our grounds to cut fossil fuel usage. However the biggest impact on our energy usage has been from lighting changes.
We are in process of replacing traditional 4 bulb – 4′ long, 60 watt fluorescent tube lights with two 25 watt LED bulbs in existing fixtures. That is a huge 190 watt savings per fixture and the quality of light has been improved.
As resources are scarce in most places, they are also very limited in the church. So to keep this re-lamp process as affordable as possible we are keeping the existing fixtures. This involves removing the existing ballast and re-wiring the fixtures to convert to LED bulbs. This not only cuts our cost per fixture by 50%+ versus installing entirely new fixtures, it also reduces the amount of waste material produced by this process to almost nothing. So fixture by fixture we are slowly making a difference. To date we have now cut our lighting wattage by more than 5,000 watts.
One of the most environmentally sensitive things we can do in the building industry is to save an existing building and give it new life. This project allowed us to take that challenge and to save an existing building built in 1950.
The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Child and Family Services department needed more space. The building next door to their existing building was vacant and the perfect location, but it was not large enough to serve their needs. This is where the design started.
Working with Nielsen Builders and Engineering Solutions we were able to determine that the existing structure of the building would allow a second floor to be added to the structure. This second floor space made the building viable for the needs of the organization. Anytime you are working with an existing building there are trade-offs for the design. So some walls are not perfectly straight, the ceiling height on the first floor is lower than I would like, and the basement space is not really usable. On the other hand, we were able to accommodate the entire required program by adding the second floor keeping all the services side by side in downtown Harrisonburg.
Now that the work is almost complete, let us know what you think of the transformation.
A geothermal heat pump or ground source heat pump is a heating and cooling system that transfers heat to and from the ground through a loop to condition the air inside of your home or business.
A geothermal heat pump uses the mass of the earth to either transfer heat into the house from the ground or from the house as a heat sink into the ground. This is achieved through a ground loop that is either a well (vertical) or a trench (horizontal). The trench approach is less costly but requires a large area to work.
Typically the cost of a geothermal system is much higher than a traditional efficient heat pump, but the efficiency can dramatically reduce your monthly electric bills. A geothermal system can also be coupled with a solar thermal system, hot water heating system, or even a radiant floor system. The payback on a geothermal system can be long if your home or business does not require a great deal of mechanical heating and cooling. However the cost of these systems continue to drop. In many buildings that have a high latent load (schools for instance) geothermal is a great investment.
Do you have a geothermal system? Let us know in the comments below how you like it, lessons learned, or expand on our posts with useful information for others.
As resources are scarce in most places, they are also very limited in the church. So to keep this re-lamp process as affordable as possible we are keeping the existing fixtures. This involves removing the existing ballast and re-wiring the fixtures to convert to LED bulbs. This not only cuts our cost per fixture by 50%+ versus installing entirely new fixtures, it also reduces the amount of waste material produced by this process to almost nothing. So fixture by fixture we are slowly making a difference. To date we have now cut our lighting wattage by more than 5,000 watts.
