Heating and Cooling Our House: Needs and Wants

With respect to energy security, it seems to me that heating is the most important energy need. Yes, you need private transportation, but in a crunch, other less convenient modes (walking anyone?) will do. However, proper climate is essential for life. With prices high these last couple of years, I've heard anecdotes of people on fixed income who have to decide between heating or eating. They generally choose heating and go to food kitchens for eating. I am determined that my family and I will not have to face this dilemma.

This need for proper climate puts us all in a precarious situation. It doesn't presently ring many bells for most of us, but if a sudden disruption in oil occurred similar to Hurricane Katrina except on a larger scale (e.g. Saudi Arabia exports are shut down by terrorists), we'd all be affected, whether we used natural gas or heating oil for our main heating source. If you are limited financially in what you can do, I'd make sure, more than anything else, you can keep warm when it gets cold.

As we would put our survival first, I think the way a major shortfall in oil and/or natural gas would play out is that people would pay whatever it took to heat the house and worry about the consequences later. This would squeeze many people financially, but any human being would choose higher debt or even bankruptcy to dying from freezing.

A similar issue arises in health care, namely what are we willing to spend for life extension? In the case of health care, the problem is rather open-ended, and it makes it rather difficult to conceive of a health care policy that is prudent, for there is nothing that seems prudent about dying when the technology exists to let you live a little longer. But, I digress.

Maybe to keep the heat on the only requirement is to have a large woodpile for the fireplace. That gets you through one cold winter, but if the peak-oilers are even remotely right, it won't get you through many more. In his second book on peak-oil, Beyond Oil, Ken Deffeyes mentioned that one of his colleagues purchased an acre of land to insure a continuous supply. If the Middle East shuts down, as the North American natural gas production falls off (it is beyond peak production already), it seems deforestation becomes a possibility here. It seems unlikely now, but wood is presently the backup fuel of choice. As one precaution, I've been taking down the evergreens on our property and am replacing them with hardwoods, namely oak and maple indigenous to the area. This is simple enough to do, but we don't have an acre of land, and I definitely do not want to have wood replacing heating oil as the primary source of heating. Also, it's going to take 10-15 years before the home-grown supply will be useful to us. Let's call this tree selection as our insurance on our insurance.

What about cooling? Do we need cooling? That's easy. From a survival standpoint, almost certainly not, even in the tropical climates. With respect to cooling, especially in the higher latitudes, cooling is more a want than a need.

Back to heating. What do we need? In truth, just a small well-insulated seal-off room with a fireplace and a stack of wood. But it isn't really about what we need. It is more about what we want, and what we want is a stable, secure, low-maintenance climate system for our entire house. Wood is getting rejected because it is high-maintenance, and we don't have to long-term supply secured (i.e. we don't own an acre of forest). I'm rejecting our present use of heating oil, because of future supply reasons--even with a newer efficient boiler. Natural gas was not available to us at our house, and after looking into the future of natural gas, I'm glad about that. It gives me the excuse not to go that way. Propane is available, and we presently use it for cooking, but its supply also is subject to all the issues that natural gas is. The so-called green technologies are all that remain. Solar heating is an option, but we also want efficient cooling, and solar needs backup for those cloudy wintry days, and so we went with a geothermal heat-pump.

Heat pumps have come a long way, and the ground-loop ones are an excellent green technology. They aren't all that cheap to install, and (as we are finding) the electricity needed to run them is a factor one has to consider. In short, the ground-loop heat pump is giving us what we need and virtually everything we want.

The next couple of posts will describe how they work, what we purchased, and describe their installation and our initial experience with them. I'd have to say, overall, it has worked great.

Here's a Great Idea I Haven't Implemented....Yet

Our largest use of fossil fuels was for home heating. The legacy system in our house when we bought it, was oil. With no insulation in the house, we went through a lot of oil! When we moved to our present house in 2000, the price was just over $1/gallon. Last year it was $3.50.

When deciding what to do going forward, we had already purchased a new efficient boiler. This was done by our builder in the early part of our renovation to our house, and when it happened, I was not thinking hard about long-term energy use and the best way to go about it. Some thoughts had crossed my mind regarding solar heating, but with solar, you still need a backup source, for the sun isn't shining all the time, and given the efficiency boost, I was thinking more about the great improvement the new system was going to give instead of dumping the entire technology. With time, we could then implement solar systems to reduce our use of oil. That was plan anyway.

That all changed earlier this year when the decision was made to try to get off of the oil entirely, and in a later post, I'll explain why we went with a geothermal heatpump, but here I want to discuss something we haven't done as yet: the solar wall. Check out this website: www.solarwall.com

The solar wall is brilliant. In its simplest description, it is a black piece of metal, put on a sun-facing side of the building, and it has holes in it to suck in the air heated near the surface of the metal, for the surface becomes hot by exposure to the sun's rays. If you are looking for an inexpensive method of seriously reducing you heating bills, it is worth looking into purchasing a solar wall system.

A really ingenious system is the PV/solarwall "co-gen" unit. Here you put a solar wall in tandem with photovoltaics, so you get power and heat at the same time. The combination is especially powerful, for the PVs are less efficient the hotter they get, and the solar wall can help with that problem by taking the heat away from the PVs, and as the PVs are dark, they are already the right color and produce a lot of heat by themselves. According to the website, payback times can be cut by as much as two-thirds by having the combined unit. I believe this, although it should be pointed out that the main cost of the combined system would be the PV part, and you'd probably get a better return dollar for dollar by just installing the solar wall.

A great critique of solar power is the book The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World by Howard C. Hayden. You can get a copy of this book on Amazon.com. I don't buy all of his arguments, and he definitely has a nuclear bias, but the book is well argued and worth reading.

One of his criticisms of solar-generated electricity is that the efficiency of the solar cells is low (20% or less), and that it isn't likely to increase, due to the inherent physics of converting sunlight into electricity via the photoelectric effect. Technically, Hayden is correct, for there are good physical limits, and so far, all panels that get great efficiency, say 30% or better, all use elements that will probably remain expensive, and none get the 50% or more efficiency one would like.

But this criticism of power conversion is true of most methods of producing electricity or any kind of work (the internal combustion engine is one of the worst!). The problem is that it is easy to convert work to heat, but harder to convert heat back to work. The work-around for all efficient power units is to use the heat for other processes. For example you can use the heat to boil water to make steam that then gets turned into work by turning turbines. The most efficient power plants do that. The solarwall with the PV tie does something similar. It uses both the heat and power, and it is a great piece of engineering.

If your budget is limited, and you really want to do something to reduce your reliance on fossil fuels, definitely check out the solar wall. A properly planned system will save you money and significantly reduce your use of either heating oil or natural gas.