About Us

About Us

Sustainable Heating is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating heating professionals and consumers to make climate-smart heating decisions that are practical and affordable.

We aren’t tethered to any particular technology or beholden to any industry. We are guided only by a single purpose: reducing heating pollution one home at a time by empowering a market-driven, grassroots, clean heat revolution.

Sustainable Heating education programs and earned media combine heating science with climate science to help people align their dollars with their values.

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.