Greensmoke

I checked out a few minutes of the new Planet Green channel yesterday, and I saw:

1) Someone supposedly teaching a family about how to reduce their carbon footprint take TWO MOTORCYCLES "out for a ride" after informing him that his motorcycle gets much better mileage than his gigantic truck or SUV or whatever else he was driving. First, TWO people can fit on ONE MOTORCYCLE! Second, if you want to save fuel, DON'T JUST GO FOR A RIDE!

2) A dick-swinging contest between a gas (or maybe diesel, don't know) truck and a hybrid truck. The two categories I saw were a speed competition around a rocky and hilly track, and an on-ramp pickup competition. Which one would I buy? NEITHER! And I wouldn't care how fast it goes on a rocky course either, nor how fast I can go from 0-60.

c) A "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"-esque blip about obscenely expensive handbags being available for rent. What?!

These people are just blowing green smoke up their asses. The remaining supplies of oil and gas need to be used to develop ways to make the energy industry sustainable, not "taking a ride" or "Look out! Big truck comin'" or making fashion statements. (For whatever reason, I can't find a video of that Ford ad. Maybe they removed all references to it. Or maybe it's a Chevy ad. But the customer says that line, and he's not a toddler.) How about a show where they teach us how to create a seasonal thermal store?

How about a steel plant that uses no fossil fuel? Or a glass plant that uses no fossil fuel? Apparently, the greenest glass making process still uses natural gas and oxygen to get the glass up to temperature. Without these plants, there will be no solar panel manufacturing process, and without that, all of the solar panels that will be installed over the next 20 years will eventually malfunction and stop producing electricity.

Speaking of unsustainable, our project to reduce the amount and cost of heating oil used is moving along. My wife sewed the first drape yesterday. A long, long way to go, but it's an encouraging start.

Drapes - first steps

We measured, marked, and 'membered everything for the thermal drapes in Coffee Jones' studio, which is a) the coldest place in the house, and 2) is out of sight, and so is an ideal test case. Coffee bought 12 yards of the insulating material, and a few other items, such as plastic rings, that we need for making the drapes. So far, we're in for about $30 of startup costs, and $640 in materials for the first window. That's a marginal cost of about $5.50/square foot of window. At a savings of 25 BTUs/square foot/hour (with a 40F temperature differential and $4.50/gallon heating fuel) that's a payback of 6844 hours, or 285 days. That sounds like about 3 years or so, considering that we use the heat for 7 months out of the year, and the temperature differential does not average 40 degrees.

We paid $6730 for heating oil this past season. We'll see how we do next season. Just as it was when I was growing up in New Hampshire chopping wood, there are two seasons: winter and getting ready for winter.

Oil bill

The heating oil truck pulled up early this morning, for the last time until September or October. I looked at our oil tanks the other day, and both were below half. So this will be at least $1000. We have radiant heat in the first and second floors of our house, on two separate zones, and we keep those thermostats at about 64 F all winter. On another zone, we have two spaces, a basement studio with a Thermolier blower and an uninsulated addition with baseboard heat around the outside walls. The thermostat for that zone is in the basement, near the thermostat. There is a staircase going down to the basement from the addition, with a door at the bottom of the stairs. We use the studio during the day, and keep that thermostat at64 during the day and 59 or 60 at night, and we keep the door closed, with the blower enabled. This combination makes it very cold in the uninsulated addition, which is the entry way and kids' playroom. Keeping the blower enabled keeps the thermostat warm enough so that we lose the minimum heat with this awful configuration.

This was our first winter in this house, and the users of the studio and playroom were cold and miserable, to the point where we bought a space heater for the studio to help my wife warm up when she's working. Even then, on the colder days, she would have to retreat to the main part of the house with her laptop. Here's our first step in improving our situation. A friend from work installed homemade thermal drapes last year, and forwarded us the link for the supplier. We have huge floor to ceiling plate glass windows and sliders in the studio and playroom and three rooms on the main floor. We will start with the studio as our test area, building insulated drapes for approximately 25 by 8 feet of glass. The frame on the studio slider is aluminum, with no thermal break, so heat just gets sucked out through the frame, in addition to the massive loss through the glass itself.

My wife says that it will cost us around $500 per room to make the drapes ourselves. For the studio, a rough calculation gives us an improvement from about 6000 BTUs per hour lost through the glass wall to 1000 BTUs per hour, given an external temperature of 20 F, and an internal temperature of 60 F. A gallon of diesel is about 140,000 BTUs, so the drape will save us one gallon of diesel for every 28 hours in those conditions. That's payback in just a couple of years. If we can do 1000 square feet of glass before next winter, we will be looking at over $10/day in savings for the entire winter. I'll tot up our actual gallons and dollars for this past winter, and post a more accurate estimate as we work through the project.