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Energy Reporters

MPBN RADIO  CALL-IN PROGRAM
Recorded Friday August 29, 2008

(the following transcript has been edited for the print format)

Keith Shortall:  First, let’s meet our guest, Dan Thayer, who’s president of Thayer Corporation in Auburn, a licensed professional engineer, and certified energy manager who’s been working in the biz for more than twenty-eight years, and he’s served on a variety of state and national and international organizations developing codes and standards for energy efficiency and indoor quality.
            Also with us is Heather Rae, a CleanTech Energy consultant who serves as project manager for Maine Home Performance.  And to be clear, though, she is speaking today not for Maine Home Performance, her opinions are her own.  Heather is also a contributor to cleantechblog.com, and in the interest of full disclosure, she’s also the wife of David Morse, MPBN’s vice president of marketing communications and government affairs, and I’m sure you do not speak for him either. 
            Thank you to both of you for coming in today.  It’s an interesting subject, we’ll get to it in a moment. Let’s also say, the opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of MPBN, and we do not endorse any of the advice offered by our guests. 
            If you’re a purveyor of goods or services, please call us another day, we’re looking to talk to regular folks who are looking for advice on a subject that really, Heather Rae, is a complicated one, very involved, and has kind of been a bit forced upon us here as the winter is coming.  What’s the first thing, as a home owner with the impending winter and limited resources, you would do to get through this winter?

Heather Rae:  I think first you’d have to look at what it is you’re aiming to do.  Because often people will mingle the issues of electricity consumption and heating issues, and most of us in Maine are heating with some kind of fossil fuel, carbon-based fuel, that includes wood, and that’s a whole separate issue than looking at your electric consumption.  So on the electric side, there are many, many things you can do that are low cost or no-cost, do-it-yourself tips, like replacing your lightbulbs with compact flourescents.

KS:  And we’re going to get into that a little bit later in the program.  Essentially, though, there are two things going on, one is you’re heating your house with something, and then you’re also trying to keep that heat in.

HR:  Yeah, yeah, I mean my first recommendation is that somebody who’s a professional, trained, come in and take a look at what’s going on in the home, everything that’s going on in the home, because there are a lot of things that come to bear on your energy consumption, like moisture, and it’s a wet state, as we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks.  And indoor air quality is also an enormous issue here, we’re locked inside in these really cold winters, and so you need to be looking at, maybe looking at ventilation.  So I’d have someone come in who really understands all of the things that come into play when you’re talking about tightening up a home.

KS:  So, is it an energy audit, or is this a -?

HR:  Well, I’m steering away from the term audit, because it smacks of the IRS coming in and sort of sifting through your business.  The other terms that I use are assessment, or an evaluation, just to get away from this idea that all you’re looking at is energy and that it’s simply a question of someone looking at it and then you’re done, because you’re really not done, all you’ve done is looked at it.

KS:  Dan, I can imagine, I can hear people out there saying, look, I don’t have a lot of money.  If I paid someone to come in and look at my house, what they’re going to tell me is wow, your house really needs a lot of work, and I could have used the money I spent on that professional assessment to buy oil or something instead.  Is having someone come and take a look really viable for everybody?

Dan Thayer:  I don’t think it’s viable for everybody.  Of course you can always start looking at a lot of the issues yourself.  It’s many of the things that we look at every single day, they’re in front of us, the opportunity is there but we need to put them, cast then in the proper light as to what significance do they have relative to the overall cost of operation.  So electrical is part of it, the consumption of the fossil fuel is part of it, and certainly we have to remember that, not to create an unintended consequence by creating a moisture problem in the home or an indoor quality problem.
            But a lot of the things that we can do for ourselves are very simple. Things such as, you can take twelve or thirteen months of energy bills and graph your consumption, and take a look at the profile and see if you can explain why, that certain months are higher than others, and you may find, oh gosh, you know that dehumidifier that we run for a couple of months really costs a lot of money.  Or you can do the same thing with your fuel cost, especially if you’re on a regular delivery cycle.  It’s not a total indicator of what’s going on, but you can start to look for patterns, and once you have some patterns established, I’m a big fan of getting, not just in the household or other, a business or home, getting people involved, the people who live and use the space, there needs to be a buy-in level, and if you don’t include them in the investigation part, it’s tough to get them to incorporate different usage patterns and lifestyles.  So these are some things that cost relatively little money to do, and have a very dramatic impact.

KS:  And we’re going to be talking about alternative forms of heating your house and insulation.  What about, we can’t go too far into the program without talking about insulation because it’s always brought up.  Is there, can we say too much about insulation, or can you over insulate?  I mean, how do you start really figuring out, okay, I really should pay attention to this.

HR:  I just want to say, what Dan said was excellent.  I mean it really is just about getting to know your home and understanding what’s going on within it.  Part of that is air flow, and what I’ve been learning recently is that air flow is probably more important than the R-value, the thermal resistance, of insulation.  And that’s pretty easy for someone to do in their own home.

KS:  When you say air flow, you mean where the cold air is coming in?

HR:  Yeah, the breezes coming in.

KS:  Why my carpet goes up in the air when I -

HR:  Curtains are blowing and, you know, and there are issues of convective air around windows, but you can lick your hand and go around your house and find out what’s going on.

DT:  There’s a lot of neat ways to do that, you know, just to go a little further with what Heather was saying.  You know, if you look at the typical heat loss in a home in the state of Maine, we find that the component that is related to the infiltration, or the air leakage, is typically anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of the overall leakage.  Now, if you listen to the media, the first place that manufacturers like to see you focus is adding more insulation to your attic.  Well, when you look at the impact of adding another twelve inches of insulation to an attic, it’s the rate of diminishing returns, where sometimes the infiltration component has much more, a larger impact. 
            For example, if you tighten up with weather stripping and caulking and maybe even adding some thermal shades, or just tightening up the airflow, you might be able to reduce your infiltration by twenty, by fifty percent, reduce the infiltration fifty percent.  Well that is, that can be twenty to twenty-five percent of your overall impact on the house, whereas if you’re just adding attic insulation, and let’s say you reduce your loss up through the ceilings by fifty percent, you may have only impacted your total loss by five percent.
            It’s really difficult to be a consumer today, because we’re bombarded with so many different point of view, and most of them are promulgated by people selling stuff and they want you to listen to their view of the world, and it’s difficult to be a consumer.  You have to be, you have to take a very broad look at things.  And some of the low-cost ways of looking for infiltration is what we call the toilet-tissue test.  Just take the thinnest strip of tissue that you can make, a one inch strip, and go around, you know, have it be one inch wide by four inches long, and just hang it in front of, you know, let it sit in front of the windowsill or around the door.  You’d be amazed.  Or sometimes we use, in the trade we use something called a smoke pencil or there’s a variety of little -

KS:  I’ve heard incense works well, if you can, you know.

HR:  Stand the smell.

DT:  Smoke trails, years ago we used to use matches. 

HR:  There’s actually something, it’s called a wizard stick, and you can get it at toy stores.  And yeah, it’s a little pla y toy that makes smoke, and you can actually use that in an energy assessment.

KS:  So then, say you were down on the floor in the kitchen, on the ell of your drafty old farmhouse, and you see that there is some sort of, this is where the smoke is blowing at.  How then do you know, okay, this is where the air is coming in, because it could be in some place in the foundation somewhere that’s, you know, who knows where that is.

DT:  I find it amazing that people, especially people in Main, are pretty savvy about being good detectives, that start tracing it back to, you know, eliminate the things that are obvious and start tracing it back and narrowing it down, and maybe you don’t find the exact cause, there’s always the aha syndrome, that we call it, that it’s almost never one cause, it’s usually a multitude of little things that add up.  But you can start to arrive at patterns, and it doesn’t take a professional to do this.

HR:  I would note though, that I am renovating an 1880 home, it’s pretty typical for Maine, and it’s got the ell.  And it’s balloon frame, and there, if I hadn’t had a professional come in and actually do the evaluation, I never would have known that the air flow was coming between the floors and where it was originating.  So while I do agree with you that there’s a lot that people can do on their own, and I do think there’s a level of understanding by the average homeowner – and I can look back on things that I’ve done, thinking that I had it all down, like removing some batts, fiberglass batts, was probably a really good idea, but what I did subsequent to that was not a very good idea.  And it would only have taken a professional to tell me how to go about air sealing and insulating properly, and where that infiltration was happening.  I wouldn’t have known without the testing. 

KS:  We’re going to take a few calls here, with our guests Dan Thayer and Heather Rae, they’re energy experts, if you will, consultants, engineers.  And we are beginning to get some calls come in, and so we’re going to try to take a call now from Jerry from South Addison, who has a question I believe on hot water.  Jerry, are you there?

Jerry:  This is Jerry, in South Addison.

KS:  Okay, Jerry, go ahead, you’re on the air.  Okay, we’re having some technical difficulties with our calls for some reason, and we’ll start working on that.  Let’s continue on with our conversation.

HR:  We can talk about hot water. 

KS:  Okay.  Well one of the things I anticipate, we’re hearing a lot about tankless water heaters, for example.  What is a tankless water heater, and why does it save energy?

HR:  I’m going to punt over to the engineer.

DT:  Well you know, historically, go back long enough, tankless hot water heaters were a heat exchanger that was inside of the boiler and it produced our domestic hot water.  The difficulty with doing that is that the boiler has to sit at temperature for, throughout the year, to be available to generate hot water.  There are, since there’s virtually no storage capability in these small heat exchangers, every time that somebody turned a tap on for some water, it caused the boiler to cycle on.  Well, boilers like to run continuously, they’re most efficient when they’re run at a steady state.  And when they’re always warming up and cooling down, or being fired and cooling off, they’re less than efficient.  And so what a tankless hot water heater does, indirect fired hot water heater is another name, is it basically moves that heat exchanger outside of the boiler into a storage tank.
            So much like a zone that you would have on a hydronic heating system, this is, you create a separate zone for this hot water tank, and it includes anywhere from forty, sixty, eighty or more gallons of stored hot water, and the heat exchanger, so it minimizes the boiler cycling on and off, to make the boiler more efficient, there’s less standby losses, because with certain boilers you don’t have to keep them hot all the time to support the hot water, and it’ll easily save ten percent or more on the cost of heating that domestic hot water.  So for a couple of thousand dollars or less, it’s usually a fairly cost effective move for most folks.

KS:  That would pay you back in how -?

HR:  Well, again, we were talking about this earlier, when you want to do, estimate cost savings.  Every home’s unique, and to say, it would all depend.

KS:  If you have four teenagers, versus if you took one shower a week.

HR:  Right, and what you’re taking out.  I replaced an old electric hot water heater with an on-demand, instantaneous propane based heater, because the electric tank was on its last legs – I probably will never see payback on that investment.  But it’s an investment I wanted to make.

KS:  Let’s see if we can connect with Jerry again, we had a little technical problem there earlier. Okay, we’re still having problems, I’m not sure what that is.  Hopefully we’ll get that figured out. Anyway, we will not be deterred by that, we’ll continue on.
            Let’s go back a little bit to insulation, because we were talking about that before we went to hot water, although they are related.  We hear a lot also about wrapping your water pipes.  I assume that’s for more than just keeping them from bursting if your basement is cold, that actually will save energy.  Is that a cost effective thing to do?

HR:  Yes, wrapping the pipes definitely, the hot water pipes.  I’ve heard a lot of homeowners asking about wrapping the tank itself, and my first question is how old is the tank, and go look at the way it’s built, because a lot of these new tanks have the insulation already built into them.

DT:  Yeah, especially the older tanks, if they’re using fiberglass, eventually the insulating value of the fiberglass insulated hot water tanks tends to break down over a period of time, and the losses, the standby losses, as we call them, go up.  So any time we can keep unintended heat loss to a space minimized, it will translate into a savings in operating costs.

HR:  And there’s this whole house approach to looking at things.  Where those pipes are located also has a lot to do with what your savings might be.  If they’re inside of what we call the thermal boundary of the house, the habitable condition space, then your heat losses are probably less than if they were going through cold outdoors before reaching the shower or the bathroom.

KS:  And of course, a lot of the homes that we’re talking about are oil fired boilers, so they, you know, it’s the source of heat going up into the, whatever, the radiators or whatever they have, but it’s also heating your hot water.  How hard is it to retro fit and separate out that boiler to some other alternative form of heat?

DT:  Well, it really depends upon the age of the system and the type of heat distribution that they might have, whether it’s warm air or hot water.  But I hate to say, qualified, it depends, but we really have a multitude of different things we look at.  But generally speaking, a lot of things can be retro fit in parallel with the existing system, so it’s not an all or nothing proposition, that you can still, especially if you’ve got a system that’s not that old that you’d like to keep and maybe hedge against future energy costs, that you could keep that in place and yet add a new system in parallel to that that would be utilizing an alternative fuel.

KS:  We’re going to try, third time is the charm with Jerry here, and I hope he’s been patient with us and understanding out technical issue.  Let’s see if this works, can we try Jerry, Jerry, are you there?

Jerry:  Yes, three strikes and I’m out, right? 

KS:  Hey, it worked, okay, great.  Go ahead with your question.

Jerry:  Okay, I’m retired and I’m on fixed income.  My domestic hot water comes on from an oil fired furnace, and I really get annoyed in the summer time when I hear that burner kick in.  So I thought of making a flat plate solar collector and using it to heat the water in a broken old twenty-gallon water heater that a friend gave me.  The heater part’s broken, but the tank’s okay.  And then I realized I’d have to put antifreeze in the collector during the winter, and that would mean using a heat exchanger to keep the water and the antifreeze from mixing, and things started to look complicated and expensive.  And I also figured it would take a huge solar collector to accomplish much during the middle of the Maine winter. 
            So what I’m planning to do now is put in an electric hot water heater, and put the old tank between the hot water heater and the well, and that will preheat the well water - I can put an old car or truck radiator on top of the wood stove and pump water through it.  Spring and fall, I’ll have to just rely on the electricity.  I’m assuming my system will bring the well water temperature, or the water temperature, halfway between the temperature that comes out of the well, and the temperature that I expect to get out of the electric water heater.  So my question is this, does this make sense?

HR:  It’s such a Maine approach. 

DT: Well, the first thing I’d caution you about, Jerry, is to get a professional to at least look at what you’ve done after the fact.  Whenever we start to use components for usage that they weren’t designed for, such as your auto radiator heating domestic hot water, you have to use a lot of caution and make sure there are proper relief valves, and that the system is safe.  So be safe first, Jerry.  After that, yeah, there is possibility of preheating your hot water using your less expensive BTUs that are generated from your wood stoves.  The devil is in the details.  To make it work right, you have to match the flow rates to the temperature gain and, but it’s not rocket science, it is something that you can work out substantially yourself, but I’d really encourage you to have a licensed plumber or boiler technician come and at least bless it before you turn it on.

KS:  And also, I mean that said, I can imagine, you know, this is sometimes where Maine ingenuity, not in the case of Jerry of course, but in some cases where Maine ingenuity can run headlong into disaster, where you’re trying to create a, especially with heat, and you can create a system that you think is going to work but may end up really endangering you.

HR:  I’m not an engineer, and I wouldn’t be able to put together what Jerry is putting together, and I don’t think most home owners would be able to either.  I think it’s, I met a man at the dump who’s creating his own air-to-air heat exchanger based on a recipe he had found on the web.  But, all the power to you, but for the rest of us, I have, in my situation of prep the home with this on demand heater, so that one day when it is financially viable for me to have a preheat with a solar thermal system, that’s what I will pursue, that’s where I’m headed.  And I would then bring in then someone who specializes in solar thermal, make sure it’s sized properly on the house.

Jerry:  Just to give you an idea of what a scrounge I am, I’ve got a flock of geese, and in order to automatically water the geese, I’ve got a toilet tank from the junkyard sitting inside the washtub, and when the geese drink, the float valve goes down and the rain barrel refills the goose feeder.

KS:  Wow, you’ve got everything covered there, Jerry.

Jerry:  Yeah, but not the heat.  So thank you very much for your comments.  

KS:  Thanks for calling in.  Let’s try another call, Hal from Hallowell has a question about humidity and its effect on heat.  Go ahead, Hall, are you with us?

Hal:  Yes, I am.  The question has to do with using a dehumidifier to create heat in the house.  Basically the idea is that this is like thermal cooling from evaporation, except in reverse because there’s a lot of latent heat in water vapor which is recovered when you condense that water. 

KS:  And so how, specifically how would you do, are you asking how would you do that, or is it feasible?

Hal:  No, it’s easy, all you do is buy a dehumidifier and run it, and you get more heat out of it than you put power in.  The question is what is the, whether or not it is economically feasible, whether the cost of running the compressor to basically to run the dehumidifier, which of course is essentially using electricity.

HR:  Are you using a residential type dehumidifier bought at a big box store or a commercial, because a commercial grade uses less electricity.

Hal:  No, just a regular residential one, because basically the electricity used to run the compressor is, well any inefficiency there is expressed as heat anyway, so all you’re doing is basically getting the power, you’re basically using an electric heater, except that in addition to the heat from the use of the electricity, you’re in addition gaining the heat from the condensation of the moisture in the air.

DT: Well Hall, that’s a very perceptive approach, and you’re absolutely right.  In theory, there is slightly more heat available by running the dehumidifier than would an equivalent load, as an electric heater.  We call it the latent heater vaporization of the water, by condensing that water you’re able to catch a little bit more energy than just running it as a cooling device.  So, and you’re right, as long as the dehumidifier is inside the thermal envelope, all the energy that goes into it is eventually going to manifest as heat. 
            But frankly, I think there are probably, unless you have a humidity problem, there may be some better ways to go.  One other thing that you should balance is the perception of comfort and relative humidity.  NASA did a lot of studies back in the sixties, and they found out that the perceived comfort levels with a humidity level at fifty percent, for example, can be equivalent to a drop in the thermostat for a couple of degrees.  So, you know, if you dry the home living space too much, you’re going to feel a little bit cooler because the evaporation from your skin will be exacerbated.  And so I think maybe there would probably, in my mind there would probably be better ways to spend those precious dollars.  But you’re absolutely right, Hal, that this, in theory, will work.

Hal:  The question has to do, one would only run this of course from, dropping humidity from say seventy down to about forty percent, but no lower than that. 

KS:  So maybe during the spring and fall?

Hal:  Yeah, the idea is to use it only during the shoulder seasons when you wouldn’t necessarily want to run your boiler anyway, but basically just to take the higher humidity levels that one finds in the spring and fall out of the air and have it expressed as heat.  And the question is, given that a dehumidifier, say, runs around say five hundred watts or so, in its operation, and this thing running twenty four hours in theory produces, oh, say forty pints of water.  And each pint of water would be a certain amount of heat that would have been necessarily to have boiled the water in the first place, whether you essentially get twice as much heat just because you’re taking half the heat out of the water.

HR:  I’d like to see it modeled, you know, by one of the NASA-Lawrence Livermore, you know, to see what kind of heat gains you’re, if there’s another way to spend your money and time to get the same savings, energy savings, than running an electric device to -

DT: Well, you have us at a little bit of a loss, Hal, without our trustee calculators in front of us, but I think it would be fairly quick math to show that it’s a relatively small bonus, the condensing of that water out of the air, that’s a relatively small bonus compared to the cost of operation.

KS:  Sounds like you’ve got an experiment on your hands there, Hal, if you’re curious-

Hal:  Well, basically I was hoping you guys had already done the math.  I sort of have enough knowledge to do the math I think, but I’m not absolutely positive.

HR:  I think what I’d like to say is that, and when we talked about this earlier, Dan and I, is that we get questions like this all the time, and without the specifics on the variables for the inputs into the formulas, it’s very hard to say what the output will be.

KS: Fair enough.  Let’s go now to, we have someone on the line with some tips for us about saving electricity.  He is with the state, his name is Tim Vrabel, and he’s deputy director of state energy programs at the PUC.  Tim, welcome to the program.

Tim Vrabel:  Thank you very much, hi.

KS:  We were talking earlier about saving on, tips for saving on electricity.  Give me the top three things that you would recommend.

TV:  I think, people said look at their lighting, that was a good one, consider compact flourescents, you can easily save a dollar per fixture, per bulb per month, so that can add up.  I would, anything that produces heat, like a water heater, I would definitely take a look at and make sure it’s running efficiently, your temperature’s lower, you can save a lot of money in anything where you’ve got resistance heat.  And then I’d say your refrigerator.  It’s surprising, but a refrigerator can account for a substantial amount of your monthly usage, so keep the back of it clean if it’s an older one, and make sure the heat exchange is efficient and it’s running efficiently.  And if you can afford, if it’s going to be replaced, buy an Energy Star, the most efficient product on the market.

KS:  And Tim, explain to me something I’ve been reading about recently, it has an ominous sounding name – phantom load – this is what keeps your computer running even when you think it’s off.

TV:  That’s right, it’s interesting, a lot of the appliances we buy today are kept warm, and a lot of times at night when you’re walking upstairs and you turn around and look in your living room and the kitchen you’ll see all these lights on, and those are all, they all mean that there’s load being drawn somewhere.  In my own house we use a, it’s actually a power strip that is designed to turn other things off.  They’re very simple to purchase.  It’s a Smart Home power strip, and what this is, is you can, for example if you have a computer, you plug in your monitor, your printer, your modem, several other things, when I turn my computer off, it automatically turns off these other peripherals so they’re not drawing power, and I calculated at the end of the year it’s the same as turning off a 60W bulb, and in a year that can actually save me as much as six dollars a month.  So it pays for itself in less than a year, and if you look at, you know, you can look at five years, for example, that can be a very substantial savings, thirty, forty dollars a year easily.

KS:  So in addition to these sort of major changes that we can by, you know, pulling out the old oil fired furnace, there are also some just changes in habit that will save money over time.

TV:  That’s probably where your greatest savings are, is just changing your behavior and becoming conscious of where your energy’s going, by encouraging your family to look for things to turn off.  And typically, if you’re conservative, your power bill in a month might be sixty-five or seventy dollars, I don’t think it’s difficult to reduce that by ten percent.  If you can save six or seven dollars a month, I think that’s very doable.  So you’re saving seventy or eighty bucks a year very easily, and that’s just by changing your behavior a little bit to really watch how you consume energy in the house.

KS:  I wonder why it is so hard to get people to change their habits, and I wonder if part of it is, they just don’t believe it makes that much of a difference.

TV:  Well, it’s hard because it’s, when you pay that monthly bill, I think you’re just used to paying it.  And it’s not until you really start to track it that you realize that it’s just money that stays in your pocket.  And it’s behavior, more than anything else, and we encourage people to try things in the home, for example having a contest with the kids to see if you can drop your usage by, say, fifty kilowatt hours a month and then split the difference with the kids.  Do things that make it fun as well, and actually track your usage.  If you are a Central Maine Power customer, your annual month-to-month usage is kept right at the bottom of the bill, so you can track your success right there on the bill.

KS:  Well, good luck with the kids.  No, but it is true.  I’m thinking about, you know, it’s a common, I hear it all the time, oh, it’s just a lightbulb, I mean that doesn’t really do anything for you.  But as you say, if you develop this kind of, get into the habit of thinking about that, it will pay off over time.

TV:  The other part of that that’s interesting is that people have perceptions.  For example, with compact flourescents, for years people haven’t liked them because they don’t like the color, or they may be slow to start.  And it’s important to acknowledge that technologies change rapidly and a lot of, especially in compact flourescents, for example, the colors are better, the ballasting is better so they come on faster.  It’s a technology that changes at a very, very rapid rate.  So the bulbs of today are a lot different that the bulbs we initially saw when this technology was introduced.

KS:  Tim, thanks for coming on, Tim Vrabel, deputy director of the state energy programs division of the PUC.  And we are going to take a call here in a moment.  We’re going to go now to Al from Portland.  Al, are you there?  Okay, I don’t hear Al, Al might have left.  Heather, did you want to add something?

HR:  Oh, I just wanted to add to Tim’s comments, that refrigerators are energy hogs, or can be, and so are these new television screens, the flat screens, are starting to turn out to be even more energy consuming than the refrigerator.  So I just give people a heads up as they’re shopping for that flat screen or the plasma.

DT:  Tim raised an interesting point, you know, talking about refrigerators.  You look at it more broadly, a couple of things that are creeping into modern homes, not the least of which mine, we have a bar fridge for excess food and beverages.  Well a bar fridge, when you look at the consumption of energy, a bar fridge consumes almost the same amount of energy as a full size refrigerator.  And frequently we’ll put those in a confined area that doesn’t breath very well, so they don’t get rid of their heat very efficiently.  So we overlook them because they’re relatively small and maybe they don’t cost us too much, but that’s probably as much energy consumed by them as a full size refrigerator.  And guess what happens when we upgrade our new refrigerator, we can’t stand to part with that old one so it creeps into the garage and, you know, that’s consuming a lot of energy as well.

KS:  I still have a hard time maintaining a refrigerator during a Maine winter, to keep things cold while it’s cold out.  I understand why, but.

HR:  Well, I want to talk too about side-by-sides vers-, you know, even though a refrigerator may have an Energy Star label on it, it’s energy starred compared to the same ones in the same model.  A top freezer refrigerator will always be less energy consuming than a side-by-side, so just because it’s got the Energy Star label on it doesn’t mean that it uses less electricity.  And there are models out there that you’re not going to find at the big box stores that are incredibly efficient.  They’re very expensive, but look at the KWH per year, that’s what you really want to look at.

KS:  I want to start getting to some more big picture items, including heating systems and that sort of thing, and the one that’s getting a lot of the play right now of course is pellet stoves here in the northeast.  We’re seeing that pellet stoves, pellet stoves are actually hard to find, certain brands are hard to find.  Give me your five, ten second assessment of pellet stoves.  Is it really a great alternative and a viable option for the future?  I know that, disclosure, you are a member of the Maine Pellet Stove Trade Group or whatever, but give me your thoughts.

DT:  Pellets I think represent a real opportunity for the state of Maine to diversify our energy mix, and also keep a lot of the dollars that are flowing out of the state here in the state.  Depending upon whose data you look at, by my assessment, eighty-five cents of every dollar spent on a fossil fuel leaves the state, and much of it leaves the country, making us vulnerable to our national defense policies, etcetera.  Eighty-five cents of every dollar spent on a pellet fuel stays within the state of Maine, that generates jobs.
            But the story gets better, because when we look at the environmental impact, it is a renewable resource, it’s considered a carbon neutral strategy, and so we’re improving the environment and we’re keeping jobs in Maine, and the bottom line for the end user is, we’re reducing our cost of fuel by nearly fifty percent.  And what’s, the other exciting development is pellet fueled boilers.  They’re fully automatic, they’re very efficient, they produce very little ash, and for those folks who don’t want to manually feed a pellet stove, a pellet boiler’s an option to have a completely automatic system.

KS:  All right, let’s take a call from David on this subject, who is on a car phone and he has a question about pellet stoves.  David, are you there?

David:  I’m here.

KS:  Go ahead, please.

David:  My question is, we are considering converting from a Monitor heater to a pellet stove, and we have a four-year-old log home, it’s very, very well insulated, very tight, and one end of our house is over a garage that gets extremely cold, and we thought about putting the Monitor in the garage just to maintain a very low temperature, perhaps fifty degrees, to raise that end of the house.  But we’re sort of going back and forth, will there be enough savings to make the conversion from Monitor to a pellet stove. 

HR:  I just want to say something about garages, attached garages, it’s a little bit of a segue, it’s the indoor air quality part of this.  You’re going to need to do some pressure diagnostics between the garage and the main part of the home.  You do not want air that you’re heating over in the garage to be then brought into the living space.

David:  I don’t think we’re going to bring it into the living space.  We just want to, the garage is completely separated from the house, it’s walled off, it’s it’s own room.  We just wanted to raise the temperature in the garage from, there’s no heat in there at all now.

HR:  Okay, I’m lost, then why do you want to heat space that’s not habitable space?

David:  Well, because rooms above it are extremely cold.

DT: I guess my two cents, David, is I would look at making sure that the space between the garage and the living space above is well insulated.  If you can make that garage space essentially outside of your thermal boundary, that’s going to be an advantage.  Just look at the logistics.  Every time we pull a vehicle into the garage, that’s several tons of steel that is at the same temperature essentially as the outside air temperature, and it sits there in a fifty degree environment, you’re paying to heat that automobile up to fifty degrees.
            Now back to your specific question, will the pellet stove net a return over the Monitor heater.  The operating cost difference is approximately fifty percent, so it really depends upon your usage, what’s the term that it will take to recover that investment.  But yeah, you’ll see a return, it’s probably going to be a return on the order of three to five years or so.

HR:  Depending where that stove, I just found from a whole house home performance perspective, that would probably never be suggested, what he’s trying to do.

David:  Okay, that’s fantastic.  Thank you.

KS:  Thanks, David, for your call. There are questions about the availability, as I mentioned, of pellet stoves.  That I’m guessing is a short term problem, but is it an issue through this winter do you think?  And how do we know that those that are available are the ones that we would want to buy?

DT:  Well, you mentioned earlier, we do not sell pellet stoves, so, we’re involved in the Maine Pellet Fuel Association which, I think it’s a great organization to help bring quality standards and price stability to the market, which is a major concern that most consumers we’re talking to have. 
            The availability shortage I think is going to be very short lived.  We’re in a supply and demand marketplace, right now there’s a short term shortage but like many things, whether it be a sump pump during a hurricane season or this happens to be pellet stoves during a fuel crisis, I think it’ll be a matter of a few months before we start to catch up, and probably at this time we’ll be laughing about it, there’ll probably be a glut of them on the market because the market tends to overreact to demand.

KS:  And also adequate people to repair them, because pellet stoves are really more like an appliance than they are a wood stove, they have electronic components that have to be fixed. 

DT:  They’re definitely more complicated than a typical wood stove.  There is a, the combustion process is dramatically different than an open burn configuration, and you’re absolutely right, there’s electric and electronic components that control them.

KS:  All right, let’s take some more calls here, people have been waiting patiently.  Karen from Milo, are you still with us?  Karen, are you there?

Karen:  Yes, I am, hi.

KS:  Go ahead please.

Karen:  Yeah, we live in a very cold part of a cold state, and there are a lot of people that, even some of the modest fixes that are actually out of some peoples’ reach, we have people in town here that are really just struggling to put gas in their tanks.  And I think that the conversation could also go towards maybe talking about things they can do just to conserve what kind of fuel they have in their home, like not heating every single room in the house, it’s not necessary if you’re not in it, and you know, putting blankets, or window blankets on windows and doors and, you know, door snakes and that sort of thing.  Because I think people look at, even caulking or laying down insulation, and think that it’s way beyond their means.  This is just a comment.

HR:  No, I think you’re dead on.  Conservation and changing habits, doing what you can to conserve what you’ve got, those, that’s where it starts.

KS:  Are there some low tech things you can do though, too?  Maybe, I’m even thinking, you know, bags of leaves.  It’s not very attractive, but.

HR:  Well, you know, I gave a talk to some eighth graders in Bath and asked them what they’re doing, and yes, straw bales around the outside, but some of the things that I heard were very upsetting, just, you know, putting black plastic bags over all the windows.  And so it’s not, it’s not lost on any of us that there are people trying to do what they can with limited resources.

KS:  What would you recommend that you’ve seen, that you’ve heard people are doing that they should not do.

HR:  Well, putting a pellet stove in the garage.  Unvented appliances.

DT:  I have to echo that.  Unvented appliances, I still find it very surprising, if not appalling, that we allow those to be sold in the United States.  There’s a very strong lobbying group behind them.

KS:   And can you just explain what you mean by unvented?

DT:  What we mean by unvented appliances, where all the by-products of combustion go right back into the living space, not the least of which is carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, oxides of sulphur.  And in the proper application, they can be safe.  But you have to read the fine print, and when you do so, most people start to shy away from them.  But in my mind, the first rule of indoor air quality is to remove our strong sources, and it just goes against that creed to be introducing a source of contamination into a living space.  So I echo Heather’s concern that unvented appliances, and using appliances in unintended ways, such as, we know a lot of folks are going to be worried about their heating and may operate their gas ranges and gas ovens to heat the space.  Well, that essentially becomes an unvented appliance, with the added concern that you’re using them for space heating and not heating food, and that’s not an intended use and there’s safety considerations. 
            But I like Karen’s approach.  Our mantra has always been, you know, conservation first, and then efficient use of energy, and then consider alternatives.  And she did raise one neat little idea that many folks can benefit from, is adding anti freeze, if they have a hot water heating system, adding anti freeze so you can completely shut off a room that’s not being used without the risk of a freeze up.  And you can, depending on how the system is zoned, you can shut it off, or sometimes if it’s a baseboard radiation, for example, you can close the louvers on it and cover the heating element with tin foil to essentially make that room an unheated room.  But do so in a safe way.  The last thing you want to do is create a freeze up problem on your heating system.

Karen:  I just want to also add, I have a little story.  I know this person who came to this part of the state about thirty-five years ago, and that was even before electricity, electricity was just making it to this part of the state, and he said that you could tell that when the old timers were really excited to get electricity, because there would be one light on in the home after dark so that they could read.  And at that I’ll talk to you all later.

KS:  Okay, thanks for calling.  What about this idea of, we’ve all seen the straw bales around the foundation, does it do anything?

HR:  I can’t comment.  I would imagine it stopping air infiltration.  There are other ways, that’s a low tech way of -

DT:  Well, it’s been done in Maine for probably a hundred years or more, and one of the common areas of leakage in the thermal envelope is that gap that’s the sill plate between the foundation and the walls, and by covering that from the outside, you’re not encumbering a window.  Yeah, it works.  In a lot of older farmhouses they don’t have insulated foundations, and surprisingly many new homes still, even though it’s a code requirement, are going in without slab insulation so that creates some thermal conductivity, basically sucking the cold into the foundation and the walls.

KS:   The house that I bought was built in 1800 and it’s one of these old farmhouses, and it had plastic, a skirt, it looked like Cristo had been there.  But you know, apparently it must have kept the wind out of there.

HR:   Yeah, there are higher tech solutions, a two-part foam on the interior for the traditional home like a lot of us have.

KS:   Let’s take another call from Sally, who is calling from Brunswick.  Sally, are you with us?  Go ahead.

Sally:  I have a question about cellar insulation, about materials, about payback, and about materials to use like in that rim joist.  I have old fiberglass currently.

HR:   You know, I’m going to point to a resource I will mention, mainehomeperformance.org, there is a link to the technical standards for home performance evaluators and trades people, and there is a whole section on foundation insulation and it references some of the materials and gets right into what should go on at the rim joist and sill plates and things like that.  It’s a rather thick document, but there’s a lot of information in there around types of materials for foundation insulation.  It depends if you’ve got a true basement, a walk-down basement, whether you’ve got a cellar with dirt and ledge.  My particular 1880 house now has a EPDM rubberized base on the, over the ledge and the dirt that goes up several inches and is then foamed off, so what we’re trying to do is create the basement as part of the thermal boundary of the home.  Then we’ve got the foam that goes around the, the present foundation that’s exposed to the outside. There are a couple of other solutions too and different materials.  Bluejean batts have been used for around the rim joist, with some two-part foam for stopping the airflow, the air sealant.

DT:  My only two cents, Sally, is be careful with moisture because basements, being below grade, are typically, those foundations conduct moisture and transfer the moisture into the cellar space, so any materials you select should be hydrophobic.  Such as, select the close foam, close cell foam, as compared to the open cell foam, because most any insulating material, if water invades it they lose their thermal properties and they actually exacerbate any mold and fungus. 

HR:  Yeah, that’s a big bad on my part, moisture really is, you’ve got to remedy any water issues in the basement before you do any of these things.

KS:  Now Sally, do you follow it?

Sally:  I’m sorry, I had a follow up question.  On the, when you’re talking about using the closed cell hydrophobic types of foam, is that when insulating the wall surface itself, or, I guess I’m trying to figure if I should reinsulate the rim joist, but I’ll look at the website that you mentioned.

KS:   Well, we’re mentioning websites, we have launched our own which you should check out if you get a chance.  It’s called Staying Warm:  A Plan of Action, and that’s at our website at mpbn.net, or if you wish to bookmark it, go directly to stayingwarm.me and we’ll have information and all kinds of, we have case studies with some, with Dan Thayer helping out with some of the case studies that we looked at on that website, so it’s a chance for you to – we will be adding to that website as well.  But right now our mission is to take some more calls, and let’s go now to Ann from Waterville.  Ann, are you there?

Ann:  Hi there, hi everyone, thanks for taking my call.  We have an old house, it’s two stories, it’s actually a duplex and we live upstairs.  We have an attic space that has some insulation, but last winter we had incredible ice dams on the roof of the second floor with icicles that were enormous, that when they fell they dented the roof below, on the first floor, and we’re wondering, should we add more like blown in insulation, or more fiberglass insulation, or what would you recommend.

KS:   I see the heads shaking in different directions.

HR:  Yeah, well it’s, I’m going to go back to having someone who’s a professional in home evaluations to determine what’s going on.  What you have is heat loss going into the attic, which is then melting the snow and creating the ice dams and the icicles, and that’s pretty common in this part of the country.

DT:  So there’s two parts to the solution there, Ann.  One is, minimize the heat loss into that attic space, and insulation is certainly part of that, and the other part is, those spaces need to be vented.  Because no matter how much insulation you add, there’s typically going to be enough heat in that attic space to melt snow.  So if that heat cannot escape the attic space, it’s going to contribute to a lot of snow loss, which as soon as it gets to the cold eave it refreezes into those icicles which can cause havoc, and be really dangerous as well.

HR:  And I would reference, Ann, those technical standards again, about attic insulation, you want to determine whether you want that attic to part of the thermal boundary, again, of the house.  In this 1880 home I have, they’ve put down cellulose, it’s loose packed cellulose.

KS:  That’s what I have in my house.

HR:  Yeah, almost everyone’s got this. 

KS: It’s all over your shoes when you’re up there.

HR:  Yeah, and what I’m contemplating and probably will very well follow through with this is what’s called a hot roof, I will take, include the attic in the thermal boundary of the home.  It means that when I go to do the insulation, I’m not dealing with plumbing chases, chimney chases, it’s a lot easier to then do the insulation and create a tighter boundary on the roof.  But it means removing the vents, and why I’m referencing those technical standards is because when you create a hot roof you have different ventilation, you don’t have ventilation. 

KS:  This is sort of something that goes against, it doesn’t make sense, because on the one hand you’re trying to keep all this air in, and then oh, except in the attic, which when it’s unfinished you want to make sure it can breathe and let the heat out.

HR:   Well no, the breathing -

KS:  Well breathing, breathe I used as a -

HR:  Yeah, I know, I know, and as we always say, the building science changes and there are a lot of experts in building science who have been working on this for a long time, and not everyone agrees around venting, and especially attics.  What you want is ventilation, you want mechanical ventilation, something that you have control over, not random expiration of air.

KS:  William from Hartford is on the line with a question, or comment about compact flourescent bulbs.  William, are you there?  Go ahead please.

William:  We live in a house trailer, an old house trailer, and on a trailer trash budget I can’t afford to put on any kind of a roof or insulation.  So we tried to put in compact flourescent bulbs about a year ago, a little less than a year ago.  The lady that lives in the other end of the trailer has fibromyalgia and a tendency towards seizures.  And apparently there is a flicker rate which I can see on my oscilloscope from those flourescent bulbs, and they seem to bother her with headaches.  Is that possible?

KS:  I’m not sure we have the expertise in the room here to get at that, that’s more of a neurology question is my -

DT:  Well, any time that you have a compact flourescent, you will have a flicker rate that is approximately sixty cycles, which is the same as the frequency of the power and you’re stimulating it.  But beyond that, I think I’m way over my pay grade to try to talk to you about the effect of those CFS.

William:  I was afraid of that, but it’s about the only thing we can do here to try to conserve energy, and I hope I don’t have to take them out.  But it does seem to be giving her headaches.  The other item that we do here, in the winter time particularly, is to dry our clothes on inside lines.  It does two things, it saves on the electric dryer, and it adds moisture to the air, which gives us the ability not to run the humidifiers to keep us breathing.  So this might be something that some folks would want to do, I don’t know.

DT:  Well, I’ll give you one better, William, some people think that it’s kind of crazy but you’d probably be better to dry those clothes outdoors. 

William:  Well, I do in the summer.

DT:  Well even in the winter time, those clothes, on a clear day, will dry nearly as well on a clear, dry day in the wintertime as it does in the summertime.  You know, people say, well it can’t be, Dan, if it’s below freezing outside it will never vaporize.  Actually -

William:  Oh, it sublimes perfectly.

DT:  Sublimation, you’re right, and it does a pretty good job.  The problem with drying them inside the house is that for every pound of moisture that is evaporated, there’s going to be an associated cooling effect.  So indirectly, you’re using your heating system to dry those clothes.

KS:  William, thank you for calling. I’d like to thank my guests, Dan Thayer of Thayer Corporation, Heather Rae, a CleanTech Energy consultant and contributor to cleantechblog.com, thanks to you both, and thank you for listening.  And be sure to check out our Staying Warm website, it’s our new website at mpbn.net, or you can also bookmark us at stayingwarm.me, it’s devoted exclusively to home energy issues and information.  And again, you can find it at mpbn.net.  I am Keith Shortall.

KS:  And we’re going to continue taking your calls, 1-800-399-3566, let’s go to, let’s see, let’s go to Calvin from South Portland, Calvin, go ahead please.

Calvin:  Hi, thanks for taking my call, and thanks for such a great show on a very important topic. What I’d like to know is, you know, your thoughts on a lot of the changes you’re talking about here, and my feel that these changes really need to be legislated.  Republicans like to call it the Nanny State, but when we’re talking about global warming and fossil fuel dependence, don’t we need to push these things forward pretty quickly, and that involves a lot of changes in law.

KS:  Well we, obviously energy policy is a big discussion, and it’s hard to separate that out from some of the things we’re talking about today.  And you’re right, unfortunately that’s not today’s show.  I think we will do another program on this in the next month or so as we get closer, and particularly as we get into the political season, I think this is a page one issue that all of the candidates will be talking about and should be talking about.  So we will get to that, Calvin.  I’m just not sure that we’re equipped to talk policy at this point.

Calvin:  Well even, you know, discussing things about, you know, the light bulb changes, these are things that while we talk about them being great personal choices, you know, it’s time really to start talking about banning the incandescent lightbulb, for example, or you know, insulating and building systems being required to be at certain  levels.

HR:   Actually that is underway.  There are energy and building codes that will go into effect in Maine in 2010, so things are afoot.

KS:  Things are afoot, and as I said, we will get to that, Calvin.  I think we’re just going to stick to the nuts and bolts today, but thanks for your call.

Calvin:  Well, I do have a pellet stove I’m looking at right now that I’m hoping to install in the next week or two, so I am on that page as well.  So thank you very much.

KS:  Any questions about that?

Calvin:  No, you know, I did notice that they weren’t available.  I did buy mine online, I had it delivered from the midwest after shopping around locally and finding that, you know, there was a long wait to get a stove.  So I was very happy with the price I was able to find, unfortunately out of state, but you know, for folks that are maybe thinking about making that conversion, you know, there is that option as well.

HR:  What’s your phone number and what’s the name of the company?

Calvin:  I went through Rural Farm King in, I think in Indiana or Illinois, and got a great price on a Breckwell biggy home heater, so I was very happy.

KS:  And for some reason, all the calls disappeared just when you said that. 

Calvin:  Well, yeah, maybe they’ll send me some free vent kits or something for the plug.  But anyways, great show and thank you very much.

KS:  Let’s go now to Larry in West Baldwin.  Larry, go ahead please.

Larry:  My question and comment is, we have endeavored to get a new freezer, because ours is quite old and I think pretty inefficient.  And we have sought to get an Energy Star freezer in the manual mode, and we found that to be quite rare.  And I wonder why, compared to refrigerators, why it’s so hard to find one that’s manual that is Energy Star.

HR:   I’m sorry, I don’t know what a manual, do you know what a manual -?

DT:  Larry, I think that you’re referring possibly to the defrosting mode as manual.

Larry:  That’s right, rather than frost free.

HR:   Oh, I thought that you were turning it on manually, I thought why would you want an intermittent freezer.

DT: Well, it’s fair to say that Energy Star standards have not extended to all appliances and all configurations, and I suppose that might be one that’s just a little bit behind.  But you raise a great point, Larry, because freezers are, being a refrigeration device, it takes a lot of energy to operate them, and they take a lot more energy when they’re not properly defrosted, and it’s awfully easy to ignore that inch of frost that builds up in the device.  But you know, for every inch of frost in a freezer, you’re probably adding twenty five percent to the cost of operating that freezer.  So if you buy the manual one, make sure you manually defrost it when you see the frost get more than a quarter of an inch.

Larry:  Yes, but when you do find them, why they are, the energy usage is so much less for the manual versus the automatic defrosting.

DT:  That’s a good, a very astute observation on your part.  The reason for that is, with the automatic defrosting freezers there is usually an electrically heated pot under the device that evaporates the water, so when it defrosts the condensate drains into that pot and then gets flashed off.  But that electric heater runs pretty much continuously, so that accounts for why, the efficiency difference that you observed, you’re right on. 

Larry:  Okay, well okay, very good.  I have another question, and that would be about anyone familiar with getting some foam insulation around the cellar areas, the base of the house, and particularly with a soybean based foam. 

HR:   Check on Isonene, I think that’s the brand name for soy based.  But I would, if you’re interested in the green attribute of Isonene, look at the percentage because I’m hearing it’s really not very much, so.

KS:  The percentage of?

HR:  The percentage of soy in the product.  There are, as Dan was saying earlier, there’s open cell and there’s closed cell foam, and you really want closed cell. 

Larry:  Yes, and that would be you might say a sprayed in foam.

HR:   Yeah, and then you need to check whether it’s open or closed, and then there were some concerns about shrinking in some of the closed cell foam products, and the person I worked with, you know, obviously has moved away from that brand and found one that doesn’t shrink.  So if you have access to the Web, there are some resources of people talking about this very issue and what to look out for.

Larry:  Just go to soy bean based spray-on foam, I guess, on the Web.

HR: I would just search on two-part foam.

Larry:  Two-part foam.  Okay.

HR: Polyurethane, yeah, maybe yellow foam or something, it’ll get you there.

KS:  Let’s go to Fort Fairfield.  I knew this would come up, there’s a question about outdoor wood boilers, and Richard, go ahead.

Richard:  Hi, thanks for taking my call.  We live in a farmhouse that was built in 1869 but it was remodeled in 1983, so it’s essentially a new house.  And when we bought it, we, first thing we put in was an outdoor wood boiler.  Now, I know they’re not for everybody and they, you know, you have to be conscious of your neighbors and obviously have enough space.  But a lot of people up here are buying pellet stoves right now, and it seems to me that our solution might be a little friendlier, considering the fact that pellets require manufacturing, which requires energy, once again, to make them and then to ship them.  During the summer and the spring and the fall, we pull reclaimed wood from the landfill and burn that all the way through, it’s dried, it’s kiln dried, we don’t burn anything that has any oil on it or any toxic chemicals in it.  So it’s reduced our energy bill substantially.  With the heat exchanger, we have hot water 24/7, as long as we want it, and we use radiant floor heating and baseboards.  It’s basically taken six cords of wood a year to heat this house, plus what we pick up from the landfill, and the previous owners that had it were going through two thousand gallons of heating oil every year.  So if people are kind of wondering about it, I’ve had it for three years now, I figured our payback time would be seven years, with oil as it is now it’s probably bumped to four.

KS:  Dan, what are your thoughts on just the efficiency, say, of wood boilers, outdoor wood boilers.

DT:  Well, Richard raises a good point.  It’s not for everybody, they still have to be manually fed, and he does, I’m glad that he understands that there is an impact.  One of the problems in applying an outdoor wood boiler is that that smoke is generated at nearly ground level, and it tends to be swept across property lines to neighboring places, and it can create a real nuisance if it’s not controlled.  And as a matter of fact, there’s some new regulations that have recently gone into effect to prevent that.
            That said, any time that you can recover waste to convert that to energy, that makes a lot of sense.  But you mentioned that you’re burning six cords of wood.  What we’re finding with outdoor wood boilers, for a couple of reason, partly because they’re never, they rarely operate at a hundred percent of capacity, and they’re also subject to a lot of thermal losses, that their combustion efficiency is maybe fifty percent, and sometimes even less than that.  When contrasted to the pellet boilers and pellet stoves of combustion efficiencies of eighty percent, yes, there’s, you’d probably, if you’re burning six cords now, you’d probably burn about four tons of pellets, so there’s some pretty good economy there.  And surprisingly, there’s not a lot of energy that is required. Of the cost of the pellet, maybe fifty percent of the cost of that is the value added and fifty percent is the raw fiber.

Richard:  But you’re not, in most of the pellet stove applications, I see that you’re not also supplying the domestic hot water.

DT:  You’re absolutely right, that the pellet stove does not, but the pellet boiler would.

HR:  All of this begs the question of total life cycle cost.  We were looking at price comparisons between an electric device and wood pellets or something else, and there are other costs that come to bear.  And I think it’s great to use waste material as a fuel source, but everything has all of these other, they like to call them externalities in economics, but really I don’t see them as external but as really embedded in the product.

DT:  Well, externalities make, are important to consider, and Richard did consider that by not burning toxics in the waste wood.

Richard:  Well yeah, I mean, you know, we’re adding a wind mill next year and solar panels, we hope to be off the grid, we hope to be off the grid in two years.  But as far as loading, just for most people to know is, even when it hits, well it really didn’t hit thirty-five below here this year, we only had it a couple times, I’ll only load it twice a day.

DT:  Load it a few times, and burn it as hard as you can.

Richard:  Yeah, I mean, but in that kind of cold weather it will, you know, I’ll only have to go out twice.  And I figure that’s good exercise for me.

DT: Another positive externality.

Richard:  Yeah, exactly.

KS: Richard, thanks for calling, we have time for a few more calls.  Let’s go to Joanne from Bridgton, Joanne, go ahead.

Joanne:  Yes, hi, thank you.  The water pump in my house is actually feeding the sprinkler system for the landlord’s house, and I just became aware of that, because it’s going on and off without anything else on in the house, you know, there’s no toilet being flushed, there’s no leak, no water running in my house.

KS: Joanne, sorry but you dropped out at the beginning, we missed the beginning of your comment. 

Joanne:  Okay, yes, the water pump in my house from my private well is actually being utilized by the house across the street, who happens to be the landlord, to do the sprinkler system in his garden.  Is there any, I have no idea to gauge how much that’s costing my utility, it’s on my meter, my utilities.  Is that a big energy user, a water pump?

DT:  Well the answer of course is, it depends how much water, and what the size of the pump is.  But yeah, pumping water is not an inexpensive proposition.  And whenever you’re using that water for something other than domestic purposes, such as irrigation, I think you said irrigation, we couldn’t quite hear you, you broke up a little bit, but it doesn’t take very long with irrigation, even with lawn watering, for example, to use a substantial amount of water, and that means there’s no free lunch because you’ve got to pump that water.  But Joanne, you bring up another good point about pumps.  If you start to see some unusual pressure characteristics in the house, that’s worthy of some investigation, because if you, there’s a check valve at the bottom of a well called a foot valve, those occasionally fail and it causes the pump to sit there and cycle on and off, and of course that pump is in the well so you’re not going to hear it and that can really cause some excessive energy usage.  So when you see those unusual pressure patterns, start asking yourself some questions and go into the cellar and see if you hear something, a relay clicking on and off pretty regularly.  But of course you’re going to have to work this out with your landlord, and I’ll leave that up to you, but -

HR: I have a question on her question.  Is there a way to use a kilowatt or some kind of meter to find out what that pump is – I don’t know how elec-

Joanne:  Central Maine Power informed me that two hours of the pump is probably equivalent to like six dollars (audio cuts out) two hours per day.

HR:  But for you to, no, there’s a kilowatt, it’s a device and that’s the name, a brand name of it, but you can plug it into an appliance to find out what the electric usage is for that particular appliance, so I’m wondering if there’s a way to do it for your pump.

DT:  Well, the pump would be hare wired in and you couldn’t use a plug in that meter, but there are others, if you had an electrician that had a clamp-on amp meter they can tell you fairly quickly.  And it sounds like that’s what Central Maine Power did.  And that number you threw out there makes sense, that’s about the right amount, it sounds reasonable.

KS:  Joanne, thanks for calling.  We’re going to move along and try to get in a few more calls here in the last few minutes.  Beth from Belgrade is building a new home.  Beth, are you there?

Beth:  Yeah, I just, my husband and I are building a home this fall and have been trying to filter through the most efficient ways to go about our heating system, and just, if you were me, what would you do?

HR:  Okay, if I were building a new home today, it would be a slab with radiant heat, and a geo exchange heat pump, only if I were building new.  With passive solar, active photo voltaics and solar thermal, that’s my wish list, but that’s me.

DT:  Well, I’m a little bit different, Beth, I think I would agree with Heather, I would certainly spend the money to get a great thermal envelope, be fussy about it and be on site to inspect it going in, because still a lot of builders build by rules of thumb that were handed down over generations that might not apply.  Optimize passive solar gain, consider domestic hot water heated by solar thermal.  Radiant heating is by far the most efficient and the most flexible.  If you’re planning to do any air conditioning, then it makes a lot of sense to use a geothermal heat pump.  If you’re not interested in air conditioning, the geothermal heat pump should be compared to a new pellet boiler interfaced to a radiant floor heating system.  But sounds exciting, good luck with the house, Beth.

HR:  I want it.

Beth:  All right, well thanks for your advice.

KS:  Can you talk just quickly a little bit about geothermal, we’ve dropped geothermal a couple of times here.

HR:  And I like to, prefer the term geo exchange heat pump, because it gets people away from the thought that there’s a geyser out in their backyard or something to that effect.

DT:  That’s a good distinction.  Geothermal heat pumps have been around for a long time.  The more common version that people might be familiar with is the air-to-air heat pump, which uses the heat value of the outside air but essentially pumps, or transfers that.  And people say, I don’t understand how, what do you mean by pump.  Well, an air conditioner is a type of a pump.  If you can visualize your window air conditioner, if you will, being a type of heat pump that transfers heat energy from one place to another.  Well, we can tap these sources of heat, outdoor air being one source of heat.  But guess what, in the northeast we have some pretty challenging weather when it comes to heating, and we know that our largest heat loss is when it’s coldest outside and that’s when it’s most difficult to extract that heat.
            By using Mother Earth, once we get down under the frost line, we have a pretty constant earth temperature of somewhere around forty-seven to fifty degrees Fahrenheit.  Well that’s a great heat source for a geothermal heat pump.  We don’t have to pump the water out, as Heather says.  There are various ways of coupling it with the earth, everywhere from an open loop, a standing column, to a closed loop system.  But cost of operation of a geothermal heat pump, sorry Heather, is going to be about fifty percent of a fossil fuel.

HR:  Yeah, it’s amazing.

KS:  Let’s try a few more calls.  Liz from Portland’s been waiting patiently.  Liz, go ahead.  She might not have been so patient.  She’s been on for a while.  Again, I thank you for your patience, we are getting a lot of calls here.  Let’s go to Brad from South Berwick, Brad, go ahead.

Brad:  Good afternoon.  First I wanted to thank you for the program, I think this is fantastic and is something that should be on the forefront of everybody’s mind.  In the interest of disclosure, I’m a partner in an alternative energy company that’s headquartered in New Hampshire, we service northern Mass, New Hampshire and southern Maine.  And in terms of some of the alternatives, we deal strictly in waste vegetable oil, and there are options out there, multi use boilers –  just so you know, I’m not a retailer, I’m a wholesaler, I deal predominantly in large industrial customers so it doesn’t, I’m not making a sales pitch here.  But one of the things that I think that people can do on the whole is, when they dine out, look for the green stickers.  There are a number of companies that are similar to our that do collect waste vegetable oil and turn it into use.  Everything we collect and produce stays in New England for alternative energy use, and we’re reducing foreign energy consumption by x-hundred thousands of gallons annually.

HR:   Yeah, you don’t have to sell at least me.  I have a bus that I converted to, a camper, it runs on, it ran on waste veggie oil out in Colorado, and I wrote about trying to find bio diesel from Denver to Maine.  And sadly, I wanted to have some way that I could use the same fuel for my vehicle as I would for heating my home and that didn’t quite, I couldn’t quite pull that off.  But I wish we had talked about that when we were on the air, about bio fuels.

KS:  Oh, we’re still on the air.

HR:  Are we still on the air?  But you know, it’s that whole, I was on a talk for an hour last week with, of bio fuels, algae and cellulosic ethanol, and it is so exciting, what priming, what’s in R&D right now around bio fuels.

KS:  It smells good, too, doesn’t it.

HR:   And my bus smelled great.

Brad:  Yeah, actually there are, you know, the real issue of course with those is the sustainability of the feedstock sources, and we do actually supply in a large scale basis a regional startup as a matter of fact, but there is a company in Vassalboro, Maine that’s making bio diesel and has been for quite a few years off of waste vegetable oil.  And so, you know, we have issues sort of internally amongst the partners about – not really issues, we just share a common belief that it needs to be from a sustainable feedstock source and, you know, the concept in the midwest, imported product, the carbon footprint on that’s huge.

HR:  No, no, and I read about that, I was going through Illinois, and soybean based bio diesel was not what I, that’s not what I was aiming for with the sustainability component.  And I’d like to see more of it here in Maine, you know, I went on Rte. 3, there’s an outfit out there that’s got some nice veggie, there’s some down in Portland, I, my home -

Brad:  That’s actually the same company, yeah.

HR:  Okay, well my home is too far away right now.  And Peter Arnold from Chewonki had suggested that maybe I set up my own little refinery.  I don’t think that’s happening, but someday.

Brad:  It’s reasonably easy to do, it is one of those things that you – again, I’m not in that business, we’re in sort of the feedstock source side of it – and you do want to be kind of careful with how you do it.  You get a bad batch and you can really sort of wreck some things.

HR:  But, yeah, but I think people need to be aware that, especially around waste veggie, algae, and cellulosic sources of bio fuels, that this idea of getting off of foreign sources of oil doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re drilling to get – it’s just a new way of thinking, there are other ways to prime the pump.

Brad:  Absolutely, we sort of view the bio fuels industry currently as a transition environment, I mean it gets, you know, the concept of ethanol, the concept of bio diesel in forefront of everybody’s mind and then the research, the real sustainability side of it comes from different feedstocks, or I think algae really is the way that bio diesel is going to go.  Certainly in the meantime I would, you know, we run actually our plant, our trucking operation all operates off of bio diesel, and the cost savings on fuel alone, you know, each truck, if you compare the miles per gallon from regular petro diesel to a B-20 blend, my trucks operate consistently a mile and a half per gallon, which when you go from seven to eight and a half miles per gallon, on a percentage basis, is reasonably significant.  And then you, you know, factor in the engine wear and the longevity of the engines increase, I mean that actually starts to add up over some period of time.

KS:  Brad, thanks for calling, we’re going to try to work in a few more folks here, thanks for your call.  I guess I spoke too soon about Liz from Portland, apparently she still is there.  Liz, are you there, Liz?  Okay, well maybe she’s not.  Let’s try Tom from Portland.  Tom, go ahead please.

Tom:  Yes, I did want to make a comment regarding the outdoor wood boilers and their efficiency and so forth.  And what I use in my house is known as a wood gasification boiler, and what my furnace essentially does is, it burns wood at about fifteen hundred degrees and it destroys all the pollutants so there’s not as much pollutant factor as the outdoor wood boilers.  And what it does is it, there’s a, I have three tanks in my basement, each contains four hundred gallons of water, and what it does is, it heats that water and saves the heat in those tanks and then circulates it through my baseboards.  And so my furnace has the ability to burn at full throttle very efficiently, and does not shut down and choke off the fire as the house doesn’t need any more heat. 
            And it’s really a wonderful system that was developed by Professor Richard Hill up at University of Maine in Orono, and it almost seems to me like a marriage between these outdoor boilers and the one that I have, you know, with having this storage battery for heat with these tanks of water in the basement, might help these outdoor boilers perform a little more efficiently and maybe a little, not quite as dirty as they do.

DT:  Tom, I congratulate you.  I didn’t know that any of those boilers were still left in the state.  That Hill boiler was licensed to a variety of people, I know there was one manufacturer right in Monmouth called Dumont, and they made the Tempest boiler.  That was back in the early eighties, that was the state-of-the-art for wood gasification.  And what’s cool today is that that wood gasification process has been updated and modernized, and that’s what you’re seeing now, the process is essentially the same in the pellet stoves and pellet boilers. 
            So the downside of the Hill boiler, it’s a batch feed, you still have to be around to manually fill that wood box, or charge, you know, fill the heat exchanger a couple of times a day.  But I’ll tell you, just to, by comparison, the new pellet boiler technologies burn, instead of fifteen hundred, they’re up closer to two thousand degrees, so there’s another jump in efficiency, less creosote, less environmental impact.  But congratulations, I didn’t know that folks were still using those.

Tom:  Well I salvaged it out of a house several years ago and rebuilt it in my own house, and it performs just magnificently, and it just, it’s a fantastic means to burn wood if people do heat with wood, and if nothing else, having to feed that thing every day keeps me more in tune with what it is I need to put in my house and, you know, it separates me a little more from the reliance on the Middle East, and I’ll tell you, I don’t mind having to huff the wood and feed that thing and just keep in tune with my own consumption a little bit more.  But I, you know, as I said, maybe, maybe, if people have these outdoor boilers and, you know, if they were to do something like heat up a mass of water in their, within their house, and let those things burn as hot as they can and try to conserve that energy, that way, maybe there’d be a little less pollution, a little less regulation needed on them.

KS:  Okay, thanks for calling.  We’re almost out of time.  I just want to, on behalf of Lawrence from Saco, I don’t think we’re going to get to his call but he, I believe he’s asking, should you shovel your roof?

HR:  I don’t know why he, I know a guy fell off his roof down the road from me, I wouldn’t suggest it. 

KS:  I’m wondering if there’s any insulation properties to -

DT: Well, that’s another qualified it depends, so that’s our number one tool of us practitioners.  Well, shoveling the roof, a snow pack on the roof will add to the insulating value, but be careful of the consequences.  If that attic space is not properly insulated and vented, and there will be some melting and that water can potentially create an ice dam that it, I would suggest that if you don’t have ice and water shield under the shingles most of the way up, that I probably would be shoveling it to some degree.
            The other thing is, you have to consider the loads.  Last winter we saw some unprecedented snow loads on roofs, and that’s a structural concern.  Whenever you start to see doors that don’t close very well in the house, or any signs of moisture around sills, you got to get up there and shovel unfortunately.  But do it safe, you know, it’s, it’s not an easy task, and a lot of times people damage those roofs with the shovels.

KS:  Well, I wish we had more time, there’s so much more we could get into.  And I want to thank you Dan Thayer of Thayer Corporation, and Heather Rae, a CleanTech Energy consultant and contributor to cleantechblog.com, thank you for being here as well.  Thanks to all of you also for listening, and be sure to check out our new website, Staying Warm, you can find it at mpbn.net, it’s devoted exclusively to home energy issues and information.  Again, you can find it at mpbn.net, or bookmark it directly at stayingwarm.me.  I’m Keith Shortall, thanks for listening.