Image: istockphoto.com/DN-Group
An entire genre of television has been built on the notion that people like to watch other people fix up houses. Code Green combines that idea with the drama of competing for a prize. Twelve households were selected (from more than 5,000 entries across Canada) to provide a range of housing styles, construction dates and geographic locations. Each was given $15,000 to spend on retrofitting their home for energy efficiency. Once the green renos are complete, the household that reduce its water, gas and electricity consumption most significantly, and improves its EnerGuide score by the most points (visit http://energuide.nrcan.gc.ca), will win a 2006 hybrid Toyota Prius. So tune in to Code Green and find out who’s the greenest of them all!
Louise and Leung Seto own one of the oldest houses on their Vancouver block. Built in 1912, the house is in the south end of the city, in a once-rural area where people grew fruit and vegetables and kept their own chickens. The Seto’s house, where they live with their three small children, is long on character but short on energy efficiency. Many older houses in B.C. were built when energy was cheap and insulation was not a concern. In fact, the entire basement of the Seto house isn’t insulated. The leaded-glass windows look lovely but are single-paned. (Single-pane windows have an R-value, or insulating property, of about one point; see sidebar.) The Setos feel drafts in every room and run electric heaters all over the house to try to stay warm.
It’s a problem Blanc Star is all too familiar with. At her home in Saskatoon, where winter is a lot more formidable than in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, a December wind can make her old wood windows rattle like a snare drum. Blanc is a single mother of three children, Steven (in his twenties) and teens Emily and Romie. They all appreciate the character of their 75-year-old home, but not the money it takes to keep it warm. Emily sleeps under three duvets in his basement bedroom and Romie had to move her bed away from the exterior wall of her bedroom because her blankets and mattress were too cold to sleep on. And on more than one occasion, Steven has dropped a wet towel on the bathroom floor after a shower and returned the next morning to find it frozen to the floor. These guys may have to spend their entire $15,000 budget on insulation.
But Nancy McKinnell and Cathy Mellett have possibly the craziest insulation story of all. In a situation that is not atypical of houses built in the post-war boom in their part of Halifax, their home is insulated in parts with seaweed. Yes, seaweed. Not in itself a bad thing — it was in plentiful supply, the price was right — but because the job was poorly done, all the seaweed has settled at the bottom of the wall. Cathy and Nancy’s furnace runs on oil, with bills in the neighbourhood of $3,000 a year. Ten years ago, their washing machine was a top-of-the-line top-loading model; now they’re wondering how much less water they could use with a more efficient front-load style. Or should they put that money towards a heat pump? With $15,000 to spend, the options for energy efficiency can boggle the mind.
But no matter how many Energy Star appliances you have, or how new your vinyl windows are, winning this contest —and the game of energy savings in general—is only possible if you pay attention to consumption habits as well.
At Mike and Judi Hoekstra’s house in Chatham, Ont., consumption issues are huge. The couple has—get ready for it—nine children. Four of them are home-schooled, so they spend most of the day in the house. No matter how you slice it, this is a house of huge energy costs: the teenage boys take 30-minute showers, laundry machines go from dawn till dusk, refrigerator doors are held open while children ponder snack options, TVs and computers are constantly running.
Mike and Judy are trying to turn their liability into an asset: if they can turn their brood into a conservation task force and monitor household usage patterns with military precision, they might be able to affect their score enough to win the car.
Meanwhile, in Calgary, Steve Milchak and Karen Pickles are debating over a solar hot-water heater (see sidebar). Positioned on their sloped roof at a 45-degree angle, with southern exposure to the sunny Calgary skies, the door-sized panels would provide a free source of heat for water. “Even on a day last January when it was 25 below zero outside, the temperature on my roof was 45 degrees,” says Dave Kelly, president of Sedmek, Calgary’s leading installer of solar hot-water heaters. “There are nearly 2,400 hours of sunlight every year in Calgary. For these guys, solar water-heating is a no-brainer.”
In Halifax, Cathy and Nancy are considering what’s called a combo system for their one-and-a-half-storey home. “The hot-water heater is really a boiler,” says Bill Whiting, an assessor with GreenSaver in Toronto, “with a coil that runs into the existing ductwork, kind of like having a radiator in there.” A furnace fan blows air across that coil, and presto! You’ve got warm air in your ducts. Plus the furnace redirects energy to heat water only when you need it.
Another hot-water option is an instantaneous hot-water heater. Like Cathy and Nancy, the Hoekstras in Chatham pay to keep their hot water hot all the time, so it’s ready when any of the 11 people living there might want it. Mike and Judy are toying with the idea of an alternative: an instantaneous heater, which uses gas or electricity to heat water on demand. The water-intake pipe coming into the house passes through an electric coil that heats the water only when you need it. If the Hoekstras stop using hot water to wash everyone’s clothes—most laundry detergents work just as well in cold water, and cold water is better for your clothes—and they stop paying to heat water that just sits in their enormous tank, they could significantly reduce their hot-water costs.
Another option is to install mini instantaneous coils at each hot-water source in the house, heating the water immediately before you use it. Why heat water in the basement and haul it up to the second-floor bathroom, only to have half of it sit unused in the pipes after you turn off the tap?
If the hot-water options aren’t enough to make your head spin, there’s also the furnace factor. Furnace technology has improved so significantly in the last several years that you can now get a furnace that runs at 96 percent efficiency. That means that 96 cents of every dollar of heat are captured, and only four cents get lost in venting. In other words, virtually no heat loss. As a comparison, most furnaces run at a 60 cents/40 cents ratio.
As near-perfect as that may sound, there are some cases where even a high-efficiency furnace is trumped by a heat pump (see sidebar). Kai Turcotte is debating getting one for his house in Kelowna, B.C. At 25, Kai is the youngest homeowner in the competition. This is his first home, where he’s lived for just over a year, long enough to feel how sweltering his new place is during a hot Kelowna summer and how chilly it is inside when winter hits, so a heat pump is tempting, even though it’s more expensive than a high-efficiency furnace.
As the only single homeowner in the competition. Kai has no one with whom to share the burden of budget strategizing. He didn’t know how badly insulated his house was, but he knew just from looking that his single-pane windows needed replacing. In Edmonton, windows were in the plans as well. “We already had a few on order before we got selected for Code Green,” says Elaine Hardowa, another Code Green competitor. “Of course, we can’t install those until after the end of the competition, to keep things fair, but now we can buy some more.”
Windows can appear to be an obvious place to start improving a home’s energy efficiency, and there’s no question the visual bang that buck delivers, compared to the hidden benefits of insulation or a spanking new furnace no one will ever see. But GreenSaver’s Bill Whiting cautions against leaping into the windows game too quickly. “We talk about windows last to most homeowners. In terms of the ratio of cost to impact, windows are the worst—most expensive, least return on your money. You need a second reason, other than energy efficiency—be it safety, aesthetics, curb appeal, noise reduction—to replace your windows.”
In Victoria, Tim Curtis and Carly Hall have a slightly different reason. Their house, a 1950s bungalow, is in the prestigious Uplands neighbourhood, just a stone’s throw from the beach, and enjoys stunning sunset views. “It’s probably not a winning strategy, just to replace all our windows,” Carly admits, “but when you wake up every morning and take a towel to each window in the house just to wipe the river of moisture off enough to see outside, you know you have a problem that needs attention.”
After six weeks of travelling the country to see the evaluations and help with renovations, I decided to book my own EnerGuide evaluation with Bill Whiting to see what I might do at my house. Unfortunately the $15,000 handouts didn’t extend to the host of the show. (“But won’t it help me bond more during the interviews if I’ve shared the same experience...?” Sigh. I tried.)
The report pointed to some big-ticket concerns, like improving the 50 percent efficiency on my hot-water heater. I’m keen on having huge solar panels on the roof, and free hot-water heating is just the beginning. I also love the idea that people walking by will notice them, maybe talk about alternative power sources and see solar as a viable urban option.
But in the meantime, it looks like my husband and I are going on a weekend caulking and draft-proofing bender. The GreenSaver team installed a fan, sealed into my front door, that blew air out to depressurize the house. Then they measured how hard it had to work to keep the house at that lower pressure—the more leaks in your house, the harder the fan has to work. While the fan was running, I ran around the house feeling every window, plumbing pipe, fireplace, baseboard—any opening to the outside. The fan simulates 50 kph winds blowing at the house, so you can really feel any drafts. Suffice to say, I’ve got latex caulking at the top of my shopping list. The good news, though, is it’s totally affordable. “Dollar for dollar, that can be the best value you can get in improving your home’s energy efficiency,” Whiting says. And, he admits, you don’t even need the fancy door fan to figure it out. “Walk around the house with an incense stick on a windy day and you’ll see that plume of smoke move pretty significantly
at the spots where you need to caulk or add weatherstripping. Basically, if you see a hole, fill it!”
So, the smart competitor — and consumer — goes for caulking and draft-proofing first and windows last. They turn off computers and TVs, switch to compact fluorescent bulbs in every light fixture and install low-flow shower- and faucet aerators. Ah, but with $15,000 to spend, that’s just the beginning. What would you do to your house with that money? Tune in to what other people chose — and to see who won the Toyota Prius — when Code Green airs on CBC and Newsworld this month.
The winner gets to drive the Toyota Prius home. The two runners-up will each receive a $2,500 gift certificate from TIM-BR MART. Second place also wins a Dyson cyclonic vacuum cleaner, as well as a selection of non-toxic cleaning supplies from Whole Foods. Third place gets a Gardena hybrid push-mower and a selection of Perfectly Natural lawn and garden fertilizers. And if you weren’t one of the chosen few, don’t feel left out. You can still enter Code Green’s At Home challenge online (www.codegreen.tv). Complete certain energy-saving steps and you’re eligible to win one of six Dyson cyclonic vacuum cleaners, one of six electric bicycles and a Toyota Yaris (first prize).
RESULTS: BEFORE AND AFTER
OZZ Corporation — an Ontario-based energy outfitter that also provides high-tech equipment for energy savings — or the local utilities installed pulse output meters — for gas, water, electric and heating oil — in each household. Each meter has a relay that registers every time a unit is used. The meters were connected to an Internet-enabled data-logger in each house. Every five minutes, the data-logger added up the pulses from the meters in a given house and transmitted the information to an OZZ data warehouse in Concord, Ont. OZZ hosted a website, and each of the households could log on and view, at five-minute intervals, how much they had used of any given utility
Once the renos are done, Code Green contestants will still be able to monitor their consumption, of gas, water, heating oil and electricity. In 2010, when Ontario is mandated to have a smart meter in every home — plus and time-of-use hydro billing — all homeowners in the province can save money by tracking their own consumption.
R-value
Single-pane windows have an R-value, or insulating property, of about one point. An R-value indicates an insulation’s resistance to heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating effectiveness.
Solar hot-water heaters
Solar hot-water heaters are different from photovoltaic solar panels, the kind that generate electricity. The water-heating panels contain tubing that is filled with glycol—a liquid that won’t freeze when the sun goes down. The sun heats the glycol, which flows through a pipe into a warming tank in the basement. There, the heat from the glycol in the pipe preheats the water in the tank. So the water gets a temperature boost, from roughly 5 to 10 degrees Celsius coming in from the city pipe to maybe 45 degrees. In the spring and early fall, the hot-water system only has to heat the water by 10 degrees instead of a full 35. In the summer, solar heating does all the work. The nationwide year-round average is that solar will cover 60 percent of your water-heating energy.
Heat pumps
There are some cases where even a high-efficiency furnace is trumped by a geothermal heat pump, which collects energy from the ground. These pumps are especially effective in climates where the temperatures are extreme in both winter and summer.
Here’s how it works. A piping system is buried in the earth, and an antifreeze-and-water solution circulates through the pipes, collecting the ground temperature, which is typically –1 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. The solution then flows through the pipes into a house and from there, into a heat exchanger, which passes the energy from the solution into the refrigerant inside the heat pump. The pump compresses the temperature — thereby increasing it — to a maximum of 54 degrees Celsius. If that’s a bit much to wrap your mind around, think of a piece of meat in the freezer: the freezer sucks the heat out of the meat (just as the pipes collect the heat from the ground) and the heat goes to the back of the fridge/freezer and is dispersed in the house. A geothermal heat pump does this on a larger scale. A geothermal heat pump also performs a cooling function. When it switches to cooling mode, it takes the heat out of the air in the house and deposits it back in the ground.
As for cost, your electricity bills will increase 25 to 40 percent, but because you no longer have a fuel bill, your overall household energy costs will decrease 40 to 60 percent.
Green Living Network
