Housing

that saves energy

Ways to save energy in your current housing:

·         The greatest energy use in most homes in this country is for heating and cooling. Therefore, unless you already have a super-insulated house, it’s likely that the best way to save energy is to increase the insulation in your home. The attic or ceiling will make somewhat more difference than the walls because heat rises, but beefing up your wall insulation helps too and so does the insulation under the floor. You also need to weather-strip any leaky doors or windows, and consider replacing any windows that leak a lot of heat. If you need to redo your roof, choose the lightest feasible color (or reflective silver) to keep heat out in summer.

·         Turn your thermostat to lower temperatures in winter and higher ones in summer; it won’t hurt to dress a little more warmly so a lower winter temperature will still be comfortable. Use fans rather than an air conditioner in summer—they use one-tenth the energy.

·         Plant, or preserve, trees and vines on the south and west sides of your house for summer shade. Be sure to choose deciduous ones so they’ll drop their leaves to let more sunshine in during the winter. For more tips on landscaping to save energy, check out Landscaping that Saves Energy and Dollars by Ruth Foster from the Roane County library.

·         If you heat with wood, consider getting a woodstove with a catalytic converter; this will increase the amount of heat you get of your wood and also reduce creosote buildup in the stovepipe (which can be a fire hazard) as well as reducing air pollution. Using well-seasoned firewood also helps with all these objectives.

·         Turn your water heater down to a reasonable temperature; after heating and cooling, water heaters use the most power in the home.

·         Turn lights off when you leave a room and train your kids to do the same. Also, switch all bulbs not on dimmer switches to compact florescent light bulbs (soon the even more efficient LED bulbs will be available). Old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs waste most of the energy as heat.

·         When you need new appliances, look at the EPA energy labels and choose the ones with an Energy Star rating. Usually they’ll cost you less in the long run.

·         Turn off appliances and equipment you aren’t using.

·         Look at your electric and gas bills each month, and try to find ways to lower them, compared to last month or the same time last year.

If you are building a new home, you have the opportunity to make choices that will save a great deal of energy throughout the life of the home.

·         Consider choosing a site close to other housing, which doesn’t require ripping up trees or streams, etc.

·         Choose a site where you will be able to face the longest side of your house toward the south, or southeast, or at least southwest. Then put most of your windows on that side. Windows to the north should be minimized as they have no solar gain in winter; windows on the west can have too much solar gain in summer. Small, high-efficiency windows are best for these locations. Plan on a long overhang—between two and a half and three feet for our latitude—on the south side of your roof. This will allow the low winter sun to come deeply into your house, while screening out the summer sun, which is much higher in the southern sky.

·         Choose a site where you will have shade from trees or buildings or hills in the summer afternoons (to the west) but open to the south and east. You can also plant arbors or trees to the southwest, so that they will be relatively open when you want the sun in winter, but leafy in summer when you want shade.

·         Consider collecting rainwater from your roof as a backup water supply. Also consider a composting toilet so you don’t waste lots of water for flushing, lots of good land for a septic system, and the nutrients in composted waste which could be supplying flowerbeds and trees. With this system, you could also reuse the “grey-water” from showers, sinks and the washing machine, for watering gardens and lawns.

·         Consider installing a solar water heater, or a system that uses the heat from your chimney or stovepipe to heat water in winter. You could back this up with a small “demand” water heater powered by gas or electricity.

·         Consider purchasing solar panels. West Virginia now has net metering, which means you can be hooked to the grid and not need a lot of batteries. Instead, your meter runs backwards when you are producing more power than you’re using (summer) and then you can use grid power when there isn’t enough sunshine to supply the amount you use (winter).

·         Here is a list of books on building an energy-efficient home, along with brief descriptions. Most came from the Kanawha Library in Charleston but some came from the Spencer library. If you never get to Charleston, you can always ask for them on Interlibrary Loan through the library here.

·         Here is a list of local suppliers of lumber, including rough-cut. Some consider wood a resource that should be conserved; but it is renewable, and abundant locally.

·         If you want to discuss ideas for ways to make your planned home more energy-efficient, and want to talk to people who have already done this, here is a list of local people who have already built homes with some of these innovations, or are planning them, or in the construction process. You can go visit and see these homes for yourself, but in all cases you must call first to arrange the visit.

This page created by Mary Wildfire. It will be updated periodically. You can contact me at mwildfire@hotmail.com . Please do send me messages if you have ideas for additions, corrections, or any other input.