Conservation Pros

The time for energy efficiency to hit the mainstream has come.

An excerpt from an article in December’s Time Magazine:

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn’t pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn’t depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn’t accelerate deforestation or inflate food prices; unlike nuclear plants, it doesn’t raise uncomfortable questions about meltdowns or terrorist attacks or radioactive-waste storage, and it doesn’t take a decade to build. It isn’t what-if like hydrogen, clean coal and tidal power; it’s already proven to be workable, scalable and cost-effective. And we don’t need to import it.

This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency, and it’s often ignored in the hubbub over alternative fuels, the nuclear renaissance, T. Boone Pickens and the green-tech economy. Clearly, it needs an agent. But it’s a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory. It turns out to be much less expensive, destructive and time-intensive to reduce demand through efficiency than to increase supply through new drilling or new power plants. A nationwide push to save "negawatts" instead of building more megawatts could help reverse our unsustainable increases in energy-hogging and carbon-spewing while creating a slew of jobs and saving a load of cash.

Read the full article here.

REGREEN has graced us, at last.

At long last, there’s a set of comprehensive guidelines for Green Remodeling projects!  REGREEN, developed by the United States Green Building Council and the American Society of Interior Designers’ Foundation, is available as a free download from REGREENProgram.org.

REGREEN is an amazingly rich resource for builders, homeowners, designers, architects, remodelers, and anyone else involved in existing structures.

Gone are the days of digging about on the "Internets", desperately hoping to find some sort of clarity of vision, throwing our hands up in disgust thinking, "Can’t someone please just put all this in one place?!"

They have.  Finally.

And, what’s more, it’s not some fantastically convoluted collection of hoops to jump through for points.  It’s a straightforward compendium of best-use practices grouped around the 10 most common household remodeling projects employing a holistic, house-as-system approach.  It also features a library of strategies by environmental topic and case studies of successful green home renovations.

They explain it far better than I ever could in their FAQ’s:

REGREEN is the nation’s first set of resources and tools for green home remodeling
projects. The REGREEN residential remodeling guidelines help make your home
renovation project green, from installing a new dishwasher to remodeling your master
bathroom to refurbishing an entire home interior. REGREEN addresses the major
elements of any green renovation project, including the site of the home, water
efficiency, energy and atmosphere, material and resources, and indoor environmental
quality. The guidelines blend product selection, building systems integration and
proven technologies into a seamless compilation of green strategies and case studies
for the homeowner, builder and design professional.

The REGREEN guidelines can be applied to a variety of home projects, from remodeling
a kitchen to adding a major addition, from redoing a back yard to executing a gut
rehab. Homeowners can either use the guidelines for their own do-it-yourself projects
or visit with a professional who can apply REGREEN as a design guideline.

Hold your chin high, existing home-owner, you no longer have to feel left out just because you’d rather not cover the mortgage on a spanking new, million-dollar, high-performance home, the likes of which grace the cover of Dwell Magazine.

REGREEN can be downloaded here.

Huge Cellulose Insulation Sale - April 2008 Only!

Conservation Pros is pleased to announce their Spring 2008 Cellulose Insulation Discount for Asheville and the rest of Western North Carolina!

For the month of April only we’re holding a Monster Cellulose Insulation Sale…

15% off any and all cellulose attic insulation jobs!

We want to get your attic insulated before it becomes an oven up there and we’re willing to take a huge price cut to do it.

Cellulose can be added over existing fiberglass insulation, can achieve any R-value you desire, is an 80% post consumer recycled product, is fire-treated, insect-treated and mold-treated.

We’re filling up our schedule fast so call today and don’t miss this opportunity to get a great deal on this great green product before April ends and this offer is gone!

Click here to schedule your free Home Performance Checkup®

Click here for more than you could ever want to know about cellulose insulation.

Serving:

Alexander, Arden, Asheville, Black Mountain, Candler, Canton , Clyde, Fairview, Fletcher, Hendersonville, Leicester, Mars Hill, Marshall, Old Fort, Swannanoa, Waynesville, Weaverville, Woodfin

Green remodels - Bucking the Downward Trend

Remember those heady days when anyone with a 600 credit score and a remote control could nurse their dreams of becoming the next Donald Trump? They’re gone. Remember that market run-up when you couldn’t build them fast enough? Gone.

It’s no longer speculation. According to the National Association of Home Builders, new-home sales dropped 29 percent in 2007, the industry’s biggest drop in four decades. Existing homes haven’t fared any better, with sales figures not seen since 2001 in spite of fire-sale pricing.

Even Home Depot, that old, orange stalwart, posted its first ever quarterly loss last year.

It was quite a party. And what a hangover. The market is glutted with shoddy homes, built or remodeled too quickly, that won’t move. Tour one and you’ll see why. The principal design decision seems to be, “How can we get the most dollars out of this joint as quickly as possible and get to the next one ahead of the crash”?

It’s a grim situation, to be sure, but all is not lost. One market segment continues to rise, seemingly unaffected by wild corrective swings. Homes built or remodeled “green” are still in high demand and every smart builder or developer in the country is pushing in that direction.

Oddly, people are willing to pay a premium for homes that appeal to an environmental or ecological ethos, even in the current buyer’s market. Marketing hype, you say? Passing fad? Perhaps.

Or, just maybe, it’s because green homes, new or remodeled, are conceived, designed and built with a focus on the occupants, not on the investor.

A house, any house, is a system of interconnected parts. What makes a house green is a focused effort to integrate all those parts to make the most of this house-as-system concept. Four basic criteria for house-as-system are:

Save Energy, Save Real Cash!

Here’s a sobering statistic; the average American household spends about $3,000 each year to heat, cool and power a home.  That means that, over the next decade, assuming energy prices remain fixed at current rates, you’ll spend thirty thousand dollars on electricity.  And that’s not even the sobering part!  According to some energy experts, as much as half (fifteen thousand of your hard-earned dollars!) of that power will be completely wasted.  

In most cases, coal will be dug out of the ground, trucked to a power plant and burned.  Hundreds of tons of carbon will be released into the fragile atmosphere.  The power generated will suffer losses as it’s transmitted across the lines to your house and, finally, it will power your air conditioner to make cold air.  That cold air will then escape into your attic through leaking ductwork, ultimately achieving nothing.  Nothing, that is, except for creating profit for the power company and the companies that will charge our children to undo the damage done creating that profit.

Leaky ductwork is a huge problem, even if your A/C has been recently replaced.  Most of the time the contractor doesn’t replace the ductwork with the rest of the unit, leaving you a brand-new, “super-efficient” air handler connected to decades old ducts. But the problems don’t end there.  The majority of our homes have drafty windows, inefficient lighting and appliances, are poorly sealed and suffer inadequate maintenance and simple carelessness.

What’s more, these figures don’t even take into account the costs associated with damage to the structure of your house from leaks and moisture.  Or the health costs associated with molds and pathogens from your attic or basement infiltrating your living space.

Perhaps most importantly, no figure in the world can address the discomfort of being in a cold, drafty room.  Or of not being able to use your "bonus room" in the summer because it’s like an oven.

Ask yourself this.  If someone offered you $15,000 to install some weatherstripping and turn down your thermostat would you accept it?  Of course you would, you’d be a fool not to!  Well, that offer stands before you right now.  Make a few changes today and save a ton of your own money this week, this year, this decade.  And, save a few of the countless tons of money that will be spent, by your children and mine, undoing the damage done creating power for us to thoughtlessly waste in such a cavalier fashion.

If you’re ready to make a change, start with an honest assessment of your home’s energy use.  A few degrees on your thermostat can make a huge difference.  Insulate your water heater.  Caulk around your window frames, inside and out.  Climb up into your attic, flashlight in hand and the A/C on full blast, and feel around the ducts for cold air.  Seal any leaks with mastic and tape (ask your local “home center”).  Most of all, make a commitment to implement small changes.  They add up.

They might just add up to 15 Grand!

How can I possibly go “Green” with leaky windows and doors?

There’s a huge amount of money to be made in convincing home and business owners that their windows are horribly wasteful and in dire need of replacement.  HUGE!
 
The collateral damage of this sales tactic is that, now, everyone without twenty grand to spend on this year’s Super-Vinyl-Low-E-Ultimate-Replacement-Windows thinks themselves left out in the cold (or the heat, as it were) when it comes to energy conservation.  And that’s just not true.
 
There’s absolutely no question, modern replacement windows are more energy efficient than their older siblings.  But the green movement is about much more than tightly sealed houses.  For the first time ever, we’re being asked to consider the life cycles of the materials that go into our homes and the ultimate destination of the materials that come out.  When you consider all the plastic and aluminum that goes into your new windows, the resources used to get them made and delivered to your house, and the quantity of materials that will likely end up in the landfill from the removal of your old windows, the equation isn’t so obvious.  Perhaps it’s a more environmentally friendly option to use the windows you have, with a few improvements.
 
Now, here’s the secret your friendly window seller doesn’t want you to know…  Very little heated or cooled air is lost through the window pane itself.  The real problem is air leaking around the sashes and the trim.  And these leaks can be stopped for much less than the cost of replacement windows.
 
Caulk and weatherstripping can save you thousands of dollars in energy costs, prevent your local landfill from clogging up with your renovation waste, and prevent tons of carbon being released into our fragile atmosphere.
 
To see if you need to seal your windows, hold a lit incense stick close to them on a windy day.  The smoke will either move toward or away from the source of infiltration.  If the smoke moves, you’re leaky.
 
The absolute best thing you can do to stop the leaks is to remove the casing and fill the gap with expanding foam insulation.  But that job is dirty, difficult and time consuming.  A more approachable solution for the “weekend warrior” is to caulk around the casing where it joins the wall and the window, inside and out.  A clear, acrylic-latex caulk is the best choice for the job because it dries almost invisible and is paintable.  Silicone, while more durable and effective, will not take paint.  Some vendors are now selling a “siliconized” latex caulk and, as long as the label says it’s paintable, it should work fine.
 
The next step is to replace (or place) weatherstripping in all the places where air can pass around or between the window sashes.  What kind of weather stripping is dependant on what kind of window you have so that issue can’t be addressed in this short guide.  But, it should be said, metal is better than foam.
 
While you’re at it, check the weatherstripping around your doors.  If a flashlight can be seen through the closed door, you’re leaking there, too.  And, while you have it out, caulk those casings as well.
 
One way or another, don’t let sales blather make you think there’s nothing you can do to help prevent global warming, short of spending a small fortune on retrofit improvements.
 
And sleep well knowing you’re doing your part to preserve this delicate planet for your children.  And mine.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!