Renew News

Skyonic has a cool idea. The type of idea I like. Take some sodium hydroxide, add some heat, and you can trap co2 by changing it into sodium bicarbonate (Baking Soda) and release hydrogen. Now the CO2 is in a solid form and it’s useful. All you need is some heat.

Now put this at an existing Coal Fired power plant, and in tests it’s trapping up to 90% of the CO2, and producing hydrogen using the waste heat of the plant. Better yet, you end up with products you can sell to pay for this (so it’s a profit venture) Super pure sodium bicarbonate and Hydrogen. As a bonus, it also removes most of the heavy metals from the plant emissions. The company is called Skyonic (an Austin based company), and they hope build a full sized plant to do just this in 2009. The process is not perfect, and not done, but heck, this is a direction I’ve not seen anyone go in before.

Now if they just had a publicly traded stock …

In my ever on-going house renovation I found myself up against Florida Building codes. They want a 1 inch foam layer on the outside of all new construction. This is to provide both an air barrier and insulation. It goes under whatever siding you are using. This usually provides a R2 to R3.5 insulation value to your house. Also these traditional materials can be mading using CFC or HCFC’s. Well no more. The Polyiso Corporation now makes a polyisocyanurate foam board that meets the 1 inch requirement that has a R7.1 to R8+ rating, and uses no Ozone depleting materials in it’s manufacture. It has a wider temperature range that it works in (-100F to +250F). It’s not cheap, but it’s twice the R value and it’s safer for the environment. I’m placing my order tomorrow (really I am). Depending on the manufacture (they are listed on the Polyiso web site) they make various version of this for roofs, walls, flat roofs, heck they even have vent channels in it to vent the air outward. Some versions also come with radiant heat barriers or OSB pre-attached to save time in construction.

Good for the environment, better insulation and made to be convenient for contractors to install and work with. What more could you ask for out of a green product but to provide more bang for the buck (this stuff should save more money than it’s increased price costs) and it’s designed for builders (wow, what a weird concept).

Yup, this is GReg again, with the house renovation project. Todays energy woe’s revolves around a Tankless water heater. For those of you who are not familiar with these, these things replace a normal hot water heater and heat the water as needed, so your system is not sitting there all day heating water that is not used. No matter how good a blanked is on your hot water heater, you’ll never do as well as a tankless/on-demand system.

The economics: up to 16% of your power/fuel bill (realistically more like 11%-13%) is spent on heating hot water.

Tankless systems can save up to 60% over a traditional system (45% seems more typical from what I’ve been reading) Depending on your current system this can translate into savings over a traditional hot water heater of about $12.50/month or $150/year. More if you hot water heater is more than about 12 years old and is filled with the build up that forms in those things. (Your tank is filled with crud, and your spending your money heating crud not water). The on-demand systems do not build up crud and have a lifespan of about 20 years. Tankless systems cost between $800 and $1500 depending on how much you want to run a the same time (even the small ones claim to support two showers at the same time). Add to that $200 to get it put in and you see a $3000 savings for a cost of $1000. Green profit in my pocket.

What’s more, since these things are tiny and can be mounted on the outside of your house, you can put them closer to where you water is used, instead of in your garage or basement. This means less time to wait to get the hot H20 to you, and less water wasted.

This is what I was talking about when I said Return On Investment items.

And it gets better. If you rush, you can get a $300 tax credit on putting one in, dropping the base cost to about $500 plus instillation. The credit ends on December 31.

Perfect huh?

Now for the problems…

There are two competing brands in the USA that make these things. The classic firm has been Rinnai and the new upstart is Bosh. A few friends have the Bosh system and love it. It has a great wall mounting system that makes it easy to put in, but we found a problem. It has a minimum heating energy output of 30,000 BTU. This means that the water going into the system needs to be no more than 70 degrees F or the system shuts itself off heating nothing. I’m in Florida, the ground water in the winter is 72 degrees. It goes back. The bummer part is it’s going back with a 10% restocking fee :(

The Rinnai’s minimum heating output is 15,000 BTU. Much better, it can handle up to about 90 degree input I figure. Once you get over 80 degrees the minimum flow per minute you need to run to keep it from turning off goes up, but that’s ok.

Since I’m about to mod this thing (I’ll explain this later) for comfort and to improve it’s cost savings even more, i need this lower energy out put level.

By the way, I’m installing this directly below the master bath. No more waiting for hot water to run across the house.

Let me introduce you to me and my project. I am GReg and I am in the processes of doing a massive renovation to a 1940’s house in north Florida. I am going to cover the energy saving issues I have tackled during this interesting trip through a lot of seemingly bogus information.

I am what you might call a wallet environmentalist. I am interested in the environment, but I think that conservation should not only save the green on the planet, but the green in my pocket. Heck, if you are spending less on fuel you should see the results. Interestingly this is not how most green building stuff is marketed, and for that matter it’s very hard to find out how things compare and the ROI (Return on Investment) for any given product. It seems like they don’t think the economics of environmentalism matters.

Here is my approach. There are a lot of things you can do that will pay for themselves at a better rate than your home loan rate. If there is a net gain in savings over what you are paying to the bank, then this is where you should start, and there are tons of these, but the people marketing these things are not pushing these points, and in many ways, this may be because of the way they look at the market. I’m sure I’ll rant about this more later.

The project of this week is dealing with insulation of my house. The house is fairly complex, it has the 1940’s bit you see (above) with 6″ roof beams that limit how much attic insulation i can use and the new bits with 10″ roof beams. The new part has modern house wrap under it providing a great air barrier, the old part has 67 year old tar paper. Things I can do for one part does not apply to the other in every case. It’s like having two houses to deal with.

Now lets look at the project and some lessons learned.

1. insulation companies want to sell you the most expensive stuff they can, at this point it’s foam. It’s great, but not for all things
2. Your insulation needs vary due to geographic location more than I thought
3. This information about how it effects your home is hard to find

Let me show you what I mean by location. I am located in north florida. We are more interested in cooling than heating since that is the big cost. But all parts of the house are not heated evenly by the sun. The roof of course gets the brunt of the heat but for the walls, it’s the West and south west of a house is the part that causes the most energy to be used in cooling. I always thought the south would be, but apparently I was wrong.

With even minimal eves, in the heat of the summer the sun is almost directly overhead in Florida, the north and south walls get very little heat during most of the day they tend to stay in shadow and what they do get is at such an oblique angle it’s effect is minimual, the roof gets it but not those north and south walls walls. The only walls that get it is the east in the morning and the west at night, and they effect cooling costs very differently. In the morning your house is cool from the night, and the air is cooler. The heat that the house absorbs from the east is cheap to cool since moving something that is hot (air) from a house (that is fairly cool) to the outside (that is also fairly cool) is not that expensive and does not use that much energy. At the end of the day this is not the case. The outdoor temperature is very hot, so any additional heat is moved from the house to where it is extremely hot, and that takes more energy a lot more energy.

Is this true for all of the country? Nope, Go north, and not even that far north from Florida and during the summers the roof and the south walls get heated as well as the east and west. Reverse rolls for the southern hemisphere.

Knowing this what can I do?

1. Block the sun on the west side of my house is easy since, there is a large pecan tree and a large stand of bamboo that are doing this already for me. In short I’m going to try to never let the sun hit the house.
2. Build a porch on the west side of the house. Interestingly enough, old houses in central Florida have two story porches on the west side of the house to do just this. The porches cover the whole west side of the house, and their long roofs keep the sun from ever hitting the walls of the indoor living area
3. Use awnings
4. Tint the west windows
5. Spend your limited insulation money here.

Fortuantly my addition is on the west, so it’s easier for me to add insulation here.

More on Different kinds of insulation soon.

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Gotta pay the bills:

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