The Northeast Wood Heat Region

by Jeff Rubin | November 6, 2019

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 energy based on the manufacture of heating fuel from waste wood, short supply lines, and new, automated, clean heating technology. Just as Community Supported Agriculture supports a local polyculture of food systems, the Northeast Wood Heat Region represents an opportunity for Community Supported Forests to replace the centralized monoculture of fossil fuel heating.

 

For a printable version please send a request using the form below.

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.