Jeff RubinJeff Rubin When Board members and facility managers need to satisfy a mandate for affordability and climate-responsible heating, consider these three solutions. Thank you to the pros at Froling Energy … Read more
Smart Heating is part of the universe of Smart-Home connected devices. In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about smart heating, from how it works … Read more
This Green Heating guide outlines how our individual actions, choices, and investments can have the biggest climate impact. Knowledge is power, so we’ll help you compare your most … Read more
On April 21, 2021 we had a great discussion on Zoom about the pros and cons of our affordable heating options and their surprising climate implications. Here is … Read more
The media today is loaded with talk of green energy. Some of it is good, and some of it confused. Clean electric generation and transportation are well understood, … Read more
The problem of climate is so large and complex that it’s easy to become overwhelmed. The past decade has seen great strides in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from … Read more
Heating clean doesn’t have to be complicated, but it’s probably not what you think. This free eBook is chock full of surprising data points and the thoughtful insights … Read more
Course Title: A Tactical Guide to Heating Technology for Improved Climate Impacts This course is for climate advocates who need to be certain that their advocacy is grounded in … Read more
The following article by Jeff Rubin appeared in the Green Energy Times. You may know that heat pump (HP) technology has come to domestic hot water heaters (DHWs). … Read more
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.