Computation doesn’t come naturally to me. Nor does basic physics. Yes, that’s right, I’m not a math or science person (although eons ago I did manage to successfully complete advanced calculus). But in order to do my job well, which includes tracking and analyzing household energy use to determine the impact of home performance upgrades, I needed to relearn some basic math and energy science. Now I can talk Btus/square feet with the best of them!
But what about the average homeowner who just wants to know how much she’s spending each month on energy? Does she need to know what a Btu is, or be a Microsoft Excel junkie, or actually read her utility bills (perish the thought!)? The answer is no, thanks to sophisticated online platforms that do all the work for you, and let you compare your usage against that of comparable homes. Whether you are an energy geek or an energy dummy, there is an energy tracking tool that is right for you. Here are a few I’ve found helpful.
MyEnergy is a free tool that was designed precisely with the average homeowner. To set up your account you need to enter basic information about your home, including your utility account information. MyEnergy will then retrieve your energy usage (and water if you have an online water account, which I don’t) and display it on your personal dashboard. The dashboard also automatically compares your usage to nearby homes.
Another cool feature of MyEnergy is that it allows you to form and join energy groups. There is a group for most states as well as some more local groups. If you live in Newton, MA you can join the Newton Eco-Project group, a community group working to helping Newton residents make their homes more comfortable, energy efficient and affordable. MyEnergy also provide tips to help you reduce your usage, which you may find helpful especially if you’re an energy conservation newbie.
My electricity use dashboard
Your electricity provider may also offer free tracking tools. Nstar, which is my provider, is currently offering a smart energy pilot program. Participating homes receive a counter-top display as well as access to an online dashboard. The counter-top home screen highlights daily use, comparing the current day’s usage to the previous day. The online dashboard displays monthly, weekly and daily use. It also compares your home’s usage against similar homes that are also part of the pilot. Nstar requires that all participating homes be subject to time-of-day pricing, which means that you are charged two different rates: a lower rate for usage during off-peak hours, and a higher rate for usage during peak hours (In the winter peak hours are weekdays from 4-9pm. In the summer peak hours are 1-5pm). Sound interesting? Click here to sign up.
Wegowise is on online platform designed for multi-family property owners, but it also works great single-family homeowners who tend more towards the geek-side of energy awareness. Similar to MyEnergy, Wegowise will retrieve your usage data directly from your utility providers and display it on a personalized dashboard. Wegowise also supports information sharing, but it does so a little bit differently than MyEnergy: the sharing is done one-to-one between account holders rather than in groups. In addition, Wegowise offers more sophisticated analytical tools than MyEnergy does. For example, it can calculate your energy use/square foot as well as your energy use/bedroom. The growing geek in me loves Wegowise because it allows me to drill down into the nuances of energy usage. It isn’t for everyone, though, in part because it costs $5/month if you want to share your data and/or if you want to track more than one property.
Are you using one of these tools? Is there another tool you are using? Please share your experience!
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The flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was a huge wake-up call: the effects of climate change were at hand and we would need to redesign and rebuild our vulnerable communities accordingly. White House photo by Paul Morse
At the annual Building Energy Conference earlier this month, Alex Wilson gave a terrific talk on a new framework for sustainable design and green building he calls “resilience”. Wilson first began to formulate this framework (which he initially termed “passive survivability”) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since then, resilience–or the ability of buildings and communities remain habitable in the event and aftermath of a natural disaster–has only come to seem more urgent (Does anyone need to be reminded that 2011 was a record breaking year for extreme weather?).
But what does resilience have to do with sustainability? What does green have to do with emergency planning? Actually, quite a lot it turns out. Most if not all of the strategies that allow buildings to support life in the event that basic services are disrupted are also strategies that enhance the durability and resource efficiency of buildings–two constitutive ingredients of a “green” or “sustainable” building.
Consider, for example, what happens during the winter in a cold climate when the power goes out. Even homes that are moderately well-insulated can quickly become uncomfortably cold. If you have a generator, then you’re set for a couple of days perhaps. But what if the power stays off for longer? And let’s say the outage was caused by a blizzard that made the roads impassable. After a certain point your fuel will run out, you’ll get really cold–and, oh yeah, your pipes will be at risk of freezing.
So what are some strategies for avoiding a situation like this? There are several (Wilson wrote a great series of blog posts on resilient building strategies for a wide range of emergency situations), but the most fundamental is to air seal and insulate really, really well. Which–as it turns out–is the first principle of energy efficient construction.
But a homeowner or public official doesn’t have to care about energy efficiency, or even “believe” in climate change, to appreciate the value of superinsulation as protection against power outages during a cold snap. A major reason why Wilson is so keen to develop and promote the concept of resilience is that you don’t need to have drunk the kool-aid to see its appeal. You just have to want to make sure your home and your community will be able to withstand a life-threatening emergency.
Wilson, who is as ardent an environmentalist as they come, is betting that he can move sustainable design and green building along farther if he leaves the environment (or at least the environmental argument) out of it. This is somewhat ironic and disheartening but, I think, realistic. As maddening as climate change deniers are, they are the symptom of the underlying disease of complacency. We have been fiddling (and shopping) while Rome burns.
Map of Wildfires in the Southwest in 2011. Image credit: NOAA
If there’s a silver lining to the fact that we are now feeling the effects of climate change, perhaps this is it: we will stop fiddling around. At least I hope so. Was the damage caused last year by Hurricane Irene, wildfires in the Southwest, etc. severe enough to jolt us out of our complacency? The cynic in me is not convinced that it was. Or, perhaps better, the cynic in me doesn’t think that any amount of extreme weather will ever be enough–unless it literally hits home.
But another part of me thinks that resilience can generate broad public support for “green” building standards and techniques. And, in any case, what’s the alternative to developing and promoting ideas, like resilience, that motivate people to address the environmental crises we are facing? We have to give people self-interested reasons to do the right thing–even if we wish they would do it simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Resilience is just such a reason, although it’s not the only one. So I’m not going to listen to my cynical side. And next time I have to convince someone why adding insulation is a good idea, I’ll be able to say something like this: remember the ice storm of 2008 when you lost power for over a week and temperatures inside your house dropped to around freezing? Well if you insulate, that shouldn’t happen again.
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Building Energy keynote experience. Image credit: Matthew Cavanugh Photgraphy
I spent the majority of last week attending Building Energy, an annual conference put on by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). NESEA is a driving force behind the advancement of sustainable energy and green building in the Northeast, and Building Energy attracts the best and brightest in the field. For three days building science geeks, energy policy wonks, design visionaries and sustainability thought leaders gather together to chart a course to better buildings and a better world. It’s an intense learning experience, especially for a relative neophyte like me.
Part of what makes it so intense is that the broader stakes are everywhere felt. Climate change. Unconventional fossil fuels. Extreme weather. Almost every session I attended and conversation I had was infused with a sense of urgency about the environmental challenges we are facing and the belief that time is running out, both in the building sector and more broadly, to find solutions.
Which isn’t to say that the mood was wholly or even primarily pessimistic. The conference highlighted breakthrough technologies, best practices and broader trends in design and construction that give cause for cautious optimism. For example, just six years ago, the Annual Energy Outlook projected that building sector energy use would climb 45% between 2005 and 2030. But earlier this year, Architecture 2030, a nonprofit group pushing for carbon neutrality in the building sector, announced that the rapid advance and widespread adoption of green building practices have dramatically changed that outlook. According to AEO 2011, the worst case scenario would be a 14% rise in energy use by 2030, while the best case scenario has energy use dropping by 9%. In other words, achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 is not just some crazy pipe dream cooked up by a bunch of fanatics.
On the other hand, there is also uncertainty about whether we, as a society, have the collective will to achieve this best case scenario and, more generally, to live within planetary means. What makes Building Energy intense–and why I like it so much–is that it doesn’t just showcase technical expertise. It also asks participants to confront seriously the barriers to creating a sustainable future.
There are of course as many different types of barriers–economic, political, social-cultural, technical–as there are proposals for surmounting them. In keeping with my interest in personal sustainability, I found myself repeatedly mulling the barrier of complacency and considering how we can better engage the unconverted.
The truth is that most people–almost everyone who lives in, works in, and visits the buildings we are striving to build and retrofit to high(er) performance standards–are unconverted. Of course, there are some conservation-minded folks who beat the modeled energy use of their buildings, and yes, they are inspiring. But most people–even some who invest in the highest performance design standards available–aren’t motivated to conserve.
This house consumed 1,959 kWh — that is, 36% of projected usage and two and a half times less than what the PV array produced. Have you ever known anyone to use so little electricity?
Paul Panish and Mike Duclos, of DEAP Energy Group, provided a striking illustration of this problem in their comparative case study of two single-family homes built to extremely stringent energy standards whose actual energy use varied sevenfold. Yes you read that correctly: one house ended up using 7-times more energy than the other (You can learn more about this case study on Green Building Advisor).
How did this happen? Well, the same way it happens in “standard” homes. One family left their lights on all the time while the other family didn’t. One family plugged in lots of electronic gadgets while the other family didn’t. One family set their heat at 60 and the other ran an electric space heater in one of their bedrooms. And so on.
So why would a family build to stringent standard and then use energy so extravagantly? Panish suspects that a perverse logic may be at work: precisely because the family invested so heavily in the envelope and mechanicals, they felt entitled to leave their lights on all day and all night.
This may be stating the obvious… but cultural norms are working against us here. Which is all the more reason why the green building community needs to get serious about behavior. We need to make it clear early on to our clients that their habits and choices count. And we need to make it much, much easier for them to properly operate and maintain their buildings (let them have manuals!). And, like Panish and Duclos we need to track performance. And if/when we discover that behavior is throwing things off, we need to advise our clients (how) to make changes.
But we can’t stop at behavior. We have to give people a reason to care in the first place. We all know that the moral argument for conservation hasn’t proven all that compelling. The question is what will?
I’m in the camp of those who believe that mainstreaming green building will require bald appeals to self-interest. Also at Building Energy, Alex Wilson presented his latest work on a new conceptual framework for green building: resilience, or the ability of buildings to maintain livable conditions in the event and aftermath of a disaster. Wilson recommends that the green building community move away from talking about “green” or even “sustainability” and instead focus on resilience in large part because he believes it will be more compelling to people, especially after the spate of extreme weather we suffered in 2011.
My next post will explore Wilson’s work on building resilience and consider whether this can (finally) puncture our complacency.
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I’ve long been a fan of Sarah Susanka, author of the Not So Big House series of books and champion of designing homes “for the way we really live.” If you haven’t heard of Susanka, this is her claim in a nutshell: homes should be livable, beautiful, comfortable, and a lot smaller than the McMansions that have sprouted likes weeds across the suburban landscape.
As you may have guessed, this last bit was what first attracted me to the Not So Big House. I’ve written elsewhere (for example here and here) about the environmental burden posed by the upward trend in American home size over the past half century, so I don’t want to belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that home size is a huge driver of residential energy use, and that in order for the residential sector to be part of the solution to the environmental challenges we face, we need to be building smaller, a lot smaller.
But sustainability probably isn’t what attracts most people to Susanka’s books. I would venture that what most people find appealing is the emphasis on livability. Which isn’t to say Susanka is silent on sustainability. She often touches on the environmental benefits of her approach, but what’s front and center is the experience of occupying smaller, more comfortable, functional and thoughtfully designed homes.
In some respects, the Not So Big House is a very simple and intuitive idea. Just consider where you spend your time at home. Where do you eat? Hang out? Entertain? Most people I know, myself included, rarely use their formal rooms. Perhaps the dining room is called into service a handful of times each year for holidays. Perhaps the living room is called into service during large parties (and we all know how often we host large parties). But for everyday living, and even regular entertaining, most people use their comfortable and informal spaces. What Susanka is saying to me (and others like me) is this: Next time you buy or build don’t invest in space that you’ll rarely use. Invest in design details and high quality finishes that will transform all of the house and not just a few select rooms into your home.
She’s convinced a lot of people, including me, that a Not So Big House is a better house. But I’ve started to wonder: is it also, as I initially thought, a more sustainable house? Last week, I received an email newsletter from Susanka announcing the opening of a Not So Big Showhouse in Libertyville, Illinois. While I was impressed by the space plan and design details, I was disappointed by the overall size of the home, which at 2450 square feet is actually larger than the average new American home built in 2010.
I don’t know the myriad factors that informed the overall dimensions of Susanka’s latest showhouse. There are surely constraints and concerns that are not apparent from the outside. But I do know that the message “smaller is better” gets lost if the showhouse isn’t actually smaller. Not to mention that show house will use more energy than it otherwise would have.
Which brings me back to the point I decided not to belabor earlier: the bigger you build a house, the more energy it will use. Unless of course you build the bigger house to higher energy performance standards than you would have if you had built it smaller. But this would never happen, except perhaps in Wonderland.
So what is the right size, not just for livability but sustainability? Well… fortunately there are some proposed answers to this question out there. In fact, there is currently a very lively discussion happening on green building advisor among folks who would like to pin some hard and fast numbers onto the ideal of building smaller (as part of a broader discussion of what makes for a “Pretty Good House”). The numbers proposed, and hotly debated, are 1000-1500-1750-1875 square feet for 1, 2, 3, and 4 occupants respectively. Whatever you think of those particular numbers (I suspect many homeowners would think them too small), it’s really good put them out there and debate them, even if consensus proves elusive.
Is the Not So Big House too big too be sustainable? I would say that as embodied in Susanka’s new showhouse it is. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on the Not So Big concept. On the contrary, I want to refine the concept–and, yes, try to attach some hard(er) and fast(er) numbers to it. The Not So Big House has an incredible amount of potential to help transform the residential landscape, so that our homes are more functional, more enjoyable and part of the solution to the environmental challenges we face. But we can’t realize this potential if we keep building homes that are As Big As the Average American Home.
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Two years ago I reported dramatic reductions in my home energy use on this blog. Between 2007 and 2009 I cut my gas usage by 34% and my electric usage by 55%. Needless to say I was pretty pleased with myself for this achievement and none too shy about spreading the news. I was also happy to share because I believed that my experience could serve as a model for others seeking to lower their energy bills and that my savings were replicable.
My message? That behavior change had incredible power to drive down energy usage. This wasn’t what I anticipated when I first began to work at reducing our home’s energy use: I had expected that efficiency upgrades (insulation, air sealing and better equipment) would have a much bigger impact on our energy use than conservation (things like turning lights off, adjusting thermostat settings, or washing our clothes in cold water). Of course, I was practicing and preaching the virtues of making sustainable choices all along, but I didn’t really think these would have a big impact. Boy was I surprised when I began to evaluate our savings in light of the actions we had taken!
By way of illustration, consider our summertime electricity use. Between June-September of 2006 we consumed just over 1200 KWH each month. Between June-September of 2011 we used 600 KWH each month: half of what we consumed 5 years prior.
Can you guess how we did it? Yes, we insulated our attic, which allowed or air handler to run more efficiently (just think how much 
harder an air handler has to work if it’s located in a 100 degree attic, as opposed to a 78 degree home). But, no, we didn’t install a more efficient HVAC system. And, no, we didn’t even seal our ductwork. Mostly we just turned the AC off and ran fans instead (except on the hottest days; even I’m not crazy enough to suffer through several days of 90+ degree heat without using central AC). So… we cut our summertime electric bill in half simply by flicking a switch–oh, and “investing” in fans, like this ceiling fan we put in our bedroom.
Pretty simple, right? Well, yes and no. Take another look at that chart. Do you notice that the trend line started to edge back up slightly after bottoming out in 2009? Although we used slightly less electricity in the summer of 2011 than in the summer of 2010, in both years we used more electricity that in the summer of 2009. At the same time, we’ve also been backsliding a little on gas usage, and our total energy use (in BTUs) was slightly higher in 2011 than in 2010.
What happened between 2009 and now? Not much, other than our two new entertainment systems. While these systems use more electricity than our old-school TV did, we don’t use them all that much and power them down completely when we aren’t using them (we keep vampire power to a minimum in our house). So they don’t account for much of the uptick.
I suspect that this uptick is mostly due to a loss of focus. We just aren’t paying as close attention to our energy consumption now that we’ve achieved such marked reductions. And we’re slipping back into some bad habits: we’re leaving lights on more; we’re more likely to bump up the thermostat when we’re chilly; we’re using our clothes dryer more.
So what does this mean? First, that the power of behavior cuts both ways. Just as behavior change can result in dramatic reductions in energy use, backsliding can easily erode those savings. It reminds me of lifestyle changes: who among us hasn’t achieved weight loss or exercise goals only to watch them slip away as bad habits return to roost?
Which leads right to my second point: behavior change sounds simple. After all, most of us know what’s required in order to lose weight, be stronger, or cut our energy bills. We may even be successful at achieving these goals in the short-term. Yet as time goes on, many of us fail to sustain our achievements and end up back where we started. In short, behavior change is much harder in practice than it is in theory.
Which leads to my third point: behavior change alone won’t get us where we need to go. We can’t just tell people to conserve and expect them to do so. We can’t even teach them how to conserve and expect them to do so. We need to do a lot of other things too like:
- design and engineer our infrastructure to facilitate conservation
- sett goals, create support systems (Weight Watchers for energy use?), provide rewards for success, and perhaps even penalize people for failure.
- reevaluate and aggressively realign our political and economic systems to prioritize the public good over corporate profits, and the welfare of future generations over short-term and myopic fixes to immediate problems.
Lacking a holistic vision, policy and strategy, behavior change is likely to fail in the long-term. We may succeed in the short-term but soon enough we’ll be back to consuming calories and carbon-based fuels we can no longer afford.
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Hi Rachael, I’ve been on this NStar pilot for almost a year now and I really like the information that portal presents. Just by getting real-time information like this has enabled us to reduce our consumption by 15%. Eric
Comment by Eric Bobby — May 14, 2012 @ 8:51 pm
Hi Eric, That’s terrific! Do you rely on the counter-top display for feedback as well, or mostly the web portal? Rachel
Comment by Rachel White — May 15, 2012 @ 9:26 pm