Why It Matters

No matter how well we do with controlling pollution from transportation and electric generation, our kids will be in real trouble unless we deal with the pollution from heating.

Half a billion tons of CO2….

That’s how much pollution America’s 5.51 million oil-heated homes will emit over the next 10 years.

And that’s just from oil…

Heating’s Status Quo: Oil and Natural Gas

Today, the most significant trend in heating is to replace oil with natural gas. That’s better for the climate, right?

The truth about gas

Natural gas CO2 levels are lower than oil, but when you include the methane emissions from natural gas, the total greenhouse gas profile of natural gas is worse than oil and even coal.

Climate impact compared

reduce your contribution to climate change “For most Americans living in the northern United States, heating produces more household carbon emissions than any other activity. Out of the 20 tons of carbon that the average American emits each year, five to 10 tons can be from heating.″

Carbon footprint compared

 

Home energy use is mostly heat and hot water even as far south as VA

How clean can we heat with today’s technology?

sustainable heating scale It depends on the kind of house, the legacy heating system, and your location.

Learn more

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.