Sustainable Heating Workshop

Sustainable Heating Workshop

The Climate Effects of Heating Our Homes and Businesses

The best kept secret in green energy isn’t what you think. It’s technology that’s been proven in the field for 30 years. It can reduce your carbon footprint twice as much is a Prius, and three times more than switching to solar. So why is it still a secret?!

A marketing professional for 30 years, and an admitted home-heating geek, Jeff Rubin is fired up about clean heating. His workshop “The Climate Effects of Heating Our Homes and Businesses” explores the synergy between heating, climate change, the carbon economy, sustainable forestry, and the behavioral science behind adopting new, disruptive green energy technologies.

This workshop is chock-full of surprising data-points and practical tips about how we can all pay it forward simply by understanding a few home heating basics. By the end of the presentation the audience will own a new understanding of the three clean-tech heating options can supercharge our fight against climate change.

Jeff Rubin, is the founder of Sustainable Heating Outreach & Education, Inc. an advocacy 501(c)(3) dedicated to mitigating climate change through consumer and industry education.

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.