Staff

Staff

Erica Dana, Social Media Director

Erica Dana is a writer, technophile, gardener, and passionate advocate for the green future and sustainable living. She was an early adopter of internet technologies and uses her tech-native social media literacy to spread the word about biomass, solar, and emerging technologies. She tells everyone she meets about her pellet boiler.

Ms. Dana works at Vermont Technical College and has two grown daughters. She volunteers with Resistbot and has a long history of working with animal rescue organizations and community youth programming.

Jeffrey Rubin, Founder/Executive Director

Prior to founding Sustainable Heating Outreach & Education, Jeff Rubin was CEO and Creative Director of APM Advertising. Apparel Promotion Management (APM) grew organically from Rubin’s family roots in New York City’s Garment District. The company began by creating ads and brochures for fashion companies and over 30 years it grew to serve clients in the financial services, real estate, and heating industries.

Mr. Rubin holds a HVAC certification with an additional endorsement in wood heating from the North American Heating and Air Conditioning Wholesalers Association, and has held Real Estate licenses in the states of New York and Vermont.

Through his combined backgrounds in marketing/communications, real estate/contracting, behavioral science, and heating technology, Mr. Rubin has a unique perspective on the challenge of simplifying the complex, disruptive, and climate critical issues inherent in clean heating.

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.