Archive
02.16.2009
Fresh
from last week's Better
Buildings by Design conference, which focused on energy efficiency,
I've been wanting to wrap up an unanswered question regarding the big
change we made in our house recently: we switched to a low-flow showerhead.
And I've been wondering how much we're saving.
As architects who are often encouraging our clients to incorporate green design strategies and sustainable products, we figured we should walk the walk on this one. When we did our house renovation in 2006, we tried out a few new things that were a bit of an experiment, but figured it would add to our first-hand knowledge of the products and systems that we could propose for others. When we recently started looking for cost savings in our personal budget, we figured it was time to change out the old water hog.
We were using a Jaclo showerhead that I actually "won" from a rep who came into our office one day about 2 years ago. It gave a great shower, with an adjustable head that went from pulse to mist and anything in between, spitting out water at the standard rate of 2.5 gallons per minute. We first switched to a 2.0 gpm showerhead, and we honestly didn't feel that much of a difference. Then we switched to a very low 1.5 gpm showerhead, and while we did sense a difference at this point, it was still a fine shower. We went with the 1.5 gpm water-efficient showerhead by Delta, with "H20kinetic Technology". Unlike the old low-flow showerheads, which used flow restrictors and were just a light spray, these new showerheads are much better - supposedly, the water droplets are bigger and the spray is denser. (Visit this page for more info and a snazzy video from Delta)
I told Karen I would make the switch but I wanted to know what it was saving us. So I actually timed our showers. For 2 weeks. (One week before the switch and one week after, just to be safe, of course.) It averaged out to a total of about 14 minutes a day. Switching from the 2.5 to 1.5 gpm showerhead saved us 14 gallons a day, or 5,110 gallons of water per year. When I looked at our water bill, I was surprised to see we use anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 gallons per month. (On average, Americans use 70 gallons of water each day. wow!) At the rate we are paying, the 5,110 gallons of water equals a dollar savings of about $44.50 per year.
But
that's only half the equation. The other savings is the energy used to
heat the water. I was stumped on this one until I found this on wikipedia
under "Water
Heating":
Thermodynamics
and economics Natural gas in the U.S. is measured
in CCF (100 cubic feet), which is converted to a standardized heat
content unit called the therm, equal to 100,000 British thermal
units. A BTU is the energy required to raise one pound of water
by one degree Fahrenheit. A U.S. gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds.
So, to raise a 40-gallon tank of 55 °F water up to 105 °F
would require 40 x 8.3 x (105 - 55) / 100,000 BTU, or approximately
0.17 CCF, at 100% efficiency. A 40,000 BTU (per hour) heater would
take 25 minutes to do this, at 100% efficiency. At $1 per therm,
the cost of the gas would be about 17 cents. |
We have our water heater set to 120 degrees, so if you plug in our numbers into this equation, it takes 29.69 therms (ccf) to raise 5,110 gallons of water from 50 to 120 degrees fahrenheit. We're currently paying $1.21 per them, so our annual savings is ... $36! Add this to the $44.50 we're saving in water cost, and the grand total is a savings of $80.50 per year.
So there you have it. Not a huge amount. But when Anna becomes a teenager, our savings will be a lot more.
02.09.2009
Karen's
employer, David Pill, has recently gotten a lot of (well-deserved) recognition
for his net-zero house he built recently in Charlotte. It is a beautifully
crafted, modern reinterpretation of the traditional farmhouse, powered
by a 10 kW wind turbine with a ground-source heat pump. It's also the
first LEED-Platinum house in Vermont.
The house was recently awarded the 2008 AIA Vermont Honor award in Sustainability and Design and was given Efficiency Vermont's 2008 Best of the Best award for houses 2,000 to 3,000 square feet. David is speaking at Efficiency Vermont's Better Buildings By Design conference this week.
You can read more about it in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Design New England magazine, which featured an impressive 8-page spread under the heading "A Renewable Life". Hopefully, all of this good press leads to more sustainable work in the near future.
02.05.2009
I
just found the new Jay
Peak website - it must have gone up sometime late last year, 'cause
it's a much improved site from what I remember last winter. It's pretty
slick, and everything about it makes me want to hit the slopes. There's
also a Jay Peak
blog where you can see the progress of their new "Hotel One"
that's under construction - right next door to the tram station, apparently.
Tomorrow, we're heading up there to do some skiing. We never get out as much as we'd like, but since we're both on 4-day workweeks now (yikes! I said it!) we're going to try to make the most of these Fridays. And we have coupons.
02.03.2009
Bruno's
getting pretty big these days. He's just over 7 months old, but he's already
a fairly large dog. We actually think he's a good size right now... the
problem is, he has about 5 more months of growing to do. Today, he went
to the vet and we put him on the scales. He weighed in at 51 pounds. ...which
means that the dog is now bigger than the daughter.
01.13.2009
LEED
is changing in 2009. The popular system for rating green buildings - and
registering green building professionals - is undergoing an overhaul this
year. The most noticeable change is the creation of three separate levels
of LEED Accreditation. Tier I is for Green Associates, kind of a "LEED-lite",
Tier II comes in 5 flavors specific to various fields, and Tier III (not
shown below) is for LEED Fellows - those who are at the top in the field.
Other changes include the institution of a continuing-education requirement
and (of course), more fees.
With over 60,000 LEED Accredited Professionals nationwide, I understand why the USGBC is making these changes, and I suppose that since the program has grown so much recently, it's inevitable that it become more complicated. It seems as if their initial goal was to pull people in and establish LEED as the standard for green building rating systems. They have definitely done that, so now they're going to raise the bar and work to transform the building industry even further. It's going to be a bit harder for all of us, but I do hope they succeed.
Info on the LEED system can be found on the USGBC website here, and a FAQ on the changes can be found here. And this is a chart I put together for my office that is a summary of the changes in store:
01.11.2009
This
website has been online since early 2001, and we've been blogging since
2003. Most of the previous posts were hidden, not easily accessible from
this homepage, but I've reestablished a link (at the bottom of the page)
that allows you to thumb thru the previous years rants and raves. Consider
this a gift to all of you who are now home alone, unemployed, with a wealth
of time suddenly at your disposal. Now you can go back and read what the
Busheys were blabbing about in 2004. (trust me, it's not anything important.)
Forecasting a difficult year ahead, we are trying to cut back on our expenses, and with this belt tightening comes a desire to take better advantage of those things we already have. (which may explain, perhaps, a renewed interest in this website?) One benefit we have at Prospect Parkway is the woods behind our house, and we're using them a lot more now that we're walking Bruno every day. He loves it back there, especially when he can run and play with his dog friends who live in the other houses bordering the woods. And with the new (used) xc skis I got for Christmas, I'm getting back into cross-country skiing again.
I was out there today with Bruno, skiing the loop for about an hour, and it struck me that I forgot just how much I missed it. Cross country skiing, that is. I love downhill, but it's nice to be able to just walk out your back door, strap on your skis, and ski off into the woods. It's very Vermont. There's a small network of trails out there, and it's a real backcountry course: hills to climb; bridges over streams that aren't much more than 2x8s propped over the frozen water; and trees to ski between, step over, or duck under. It reminds me of the times we went cross-country skiing on the Luneau's farm when I was a kid. Every Sunday afternoon we would go skiing across the fields and through the woods, dealing with the occasional natural hazard along the course, like the inconveniently located sapling, growing right in the middle of a short steep uphill. Each year it got a little bigger, making it more difficult to get by.
The other resource we have available is the golf course at the top of the hill. We're fortunate that the Burlington Country Club allows the neighbors access to their 18-hole course for cross-country skiing, and many people use it for this, as well as for bringing their dogs for a run. Maybe next time I'll bring Bruno up there and ski the course with him. For now, though, I'm going to stick with the obstacle course that is right out our back door.
01.10.2009
Happy
New Year. Or at least, we hope it will be. The last part of 2008 turned
gloomy all of a sudden, when Vermont suddenly caught up to the rest of
the nation and the economic recession hit the state quite abruptly around
late October. Now, we're all bracing for a tough year ahead. Normally,
Vermont is a little insulated from the national economic swings. The lows
and the highs tend to be moderated here for some reason, but this time
around, we're all suffering. (Needless to say, we're cutting off Bruno's
doggie daycare
visits. That's one expense that's easily expendable.)
For Christmas this year, we made what might be our last big purchase for a while - Karen and I bought each other a new digital SLR camera. Our old one - an aging Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot - was fine for taking pictures in bright sunlight, but it never produced good results indoors. The shots were either washed our with flash or blurry from any little bit of motion. For our new camera, we went for the Canon Rebel XS digital SLR, a 10.1 megapixel camera with an image-stabilizing lens that Canon just released this year. It's their new entry-level digital SLR, so the price - at under $500 - is geared towards first-time digital SLR users like us, but it produces much better images than any point-and-shoot can.
We've only used it a few times, but we're already seeing some good results: portraits with effectively blurred backgrounds, high-resolution close-ups, and quick action shots. Here's some samples...
Continue on to the next page for more.