Green Is The Way

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We spend a lot of time and money making our homes more energy efficient. Whether adding insulation, upgrading windows, replacing incandescent light bulbs, or replacing appliances, our efforts to use less energy save us money and help the environment. But what about where we live?

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What is the measure of the time between slipping on a peel and hitting the pavement?

One bananosecond.

What is the ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter?

Eskimo pi.

What is the metric equivalent of 1,000 aches?

1 megahurtz.

What is the metric equivalent of 2,000 mockingbirds?

2 kilomockingbirds.

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The two parents have their backs to the camera, ten feet away. The father is standing, and the mother crouching, both looking into what looks like a tangled pile of debris, but which (we are told by the photo caption) is a vehicle in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The body of their daughter, killed by the tsunami, is trapped inside. I can only imagine the grief on their faces and in their hearts.

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Natural gas has been in the news a lot recently.

On the economics side, we are seeing a fascinating divergence of petroleum and natural gas prices. For decades, oil and gas prices have tracked pretty closely — natural gas prices rising and falling as international political events boosted or depressed oil prices. Today, for the first time, as oil prices are surging, natural gas prices are still falling. In the last few weeks, natural gas prices have fallen to historic lows, compared with oil.

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Over the past two weeks I’ve written about two relatively obscure passive solar heating strategies: isolated gain using sunspaces; and indirect gain using a Trombe walls. This week I’ll cover a far more common and cost-effective approach: direct-gain.

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I think it’s safe to say that nobody likes to burn oil. Maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but we go straight from talking about the cold weather we’ve been having to how much oil we’ve been burning (for myself, it’s in our Buderus oil-fired boiler that we heat with, along with cordwood in the house and a pellet stove in the adjoining garage apartment). Whether it’s because of financial or planetary concerns, everyone seems to wince when they talk about how many gallons of oil or gas they’ve been through.

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Over the past two weeks I’ve written about two relatively obscure passive solar heating strategies: isolated gain using sunspaces; and indirect gain using a Trombe walls. This week I’ll cover a far more common and cost-effective approach: direct-gain.

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I’ve always gotten a lot of questions from friends, neighbors, and casual acquaintances about energy issues, and those questions picked up dramatically when I started writing this column two-and-a-half years ago. Beginning with this week, I’m going to devote an occasional column to answering some of these questions. (Feel free to e-mail questions to me, mentioning Energy Solutions in the subject line: alex@buildinggreen.com.)

What’s the greenest option for heating my home?

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Way back in the late 1970s, I worked for the New Mexico Solar Energy Association in Santa Fe. I ran the Workshop Program, leading a crew of three or four like-mined idealists teaching mostly low-income New Mexicans about solar energy through hands-on construction workshops. We primarily built attached solar greenhouses, or sunspaces — structures that provide not only passive solar heat to the adjoining house, but also a place to grow seedlings or house plants.

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Last week I wrote about sunspaces and how they can be used to deliver passive solar heat to our homes. Another option for passive solar heating is the Trombe wall, or thermal storage wall.