Jeff Rubin talks Pellet Boilers in The Green Energy Times

Jeff Rubin talks Pellet Boilers in The Green Energy Times

Sending a big thank you to The Green Energy Times for covering this important green heating topic! Market awareness for pellet boilers and furnaces will be a critical part of solving our climate crisis.

Find the full text here, and check out these related articles on the health effects and climate effects of heating with wood.

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About the Author

Jeffrey Rubin is a writer and educator on home heating and climate change. He is founder of Sustainable Heating Outreach & Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping homeowners make climate-smart heating choices.

 

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.