The green energy opportunity hidden in your home

by Jeff Rubin | January 7, 2019

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 the computers, and appliance and lights in your home, how much greenhouse gas pollution do you think they’re responsible for?

Across the US the biggest home energy use is space heating.

Now of course that’s going to be a bigger percentage in the north in a smaller percentage in the south. This graph represents a typical home in New England.

The problem is that heating is complicated, every home is different, and most of us are stuck with the heating system we’ve got. The thing is home heating is by far our biggest opportunity to take direct, individual action on reducing climate change… If we can figure it out… So let’s figure it out Together.

Our goal is to simplify home heating so anyone can have a clear understanding of the heating system they’ve got, and there options for heating clean and green. Whether you can take a big action, or a small action, or just be aware of how heating fits into our new green energy economy, everyone has an opportunity to do something really consequential… To help our generation pay it forward, and keep faith with our kids generation.

Both on Sustainable Heating.org, and in these videos we’re going to cover all the different kinds of heating technologies, and the different kinds of homes. So let’s start with the kind of home that’s our biggest opportunity…

The one heating opportunity that stands out above all the others. It’s the kind of home that has a central heating system that’s currently running on an oil or gas boiler or furnace.

Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Look around your house. If you have forced hot air ducts, or baseboard radiators, or radiant floors you have a central heating system. And if your fueling that system with oil or gas you have an in enormous opportunity to impact climate change, and save on your heating costs.

What is it? What is that one HEATING technology that allows us to take ownership of our carbon footprint like nothing else? How much could we really save? I think you will be surprised. We break that down for you in the next video.

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.