Sustainable Heating Articles

by Jeff Rubin | March 24, 2021

Sustainable Heating Articles

How sustainable Heating can effect home energy use pie chart

Webinar: How Clean Can We Heat?

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 Northeast Wood Heat Region

The Northeast Wood Heat Region is a community of local governments, nonprofits, and private companies united in solidarity against climate change. It is a distributed system of renewable … Read more

A wood pellet furnace price calculation should include the price of the fuel

Wood pellet furnace price guide

The systems are more expensive to buy, but a pellet furnace will save you tens of thousands of dollars because the fuel is so much cheaper (not to … Read more

The green energy opportunity hidden in your home

Home heating is your biggest opportunity to take direct action to reduce climate change. Let’s figure it out together. Next video: https://www.sustainableheating.org/intro-to-sustainable-heating/ Video Transcript: When you add up all … Read more

The Secret Green Energy

If you’re concerned about climate change (and you should be), switching to sustainable heating is the best way to take direct action and make an immediate impact. Video … Read more

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.