Recycling graywater from sinks, showers, and washing machines to irrigate your garden is the latest in green living—but until recently, was against the law.The home performance community, with its focus on energy efficient, safe, healthy, comfortable, affordable, and sustainable housing, is like a pot of water in full boil. Recent legislation, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is infusing DOE’s Weatherization Assistance program with a rush of funds and the expectations of a million homes weatherized each year. Proposed legislation like the climate bill passed by the House of Representatives in June promises more money and even greater expectations of houses transformed.

The Department of Labor has received hundreds of millions of dollars to support training programs for home performance professionals—from weatherization technicians to high-end builders and remodelers—and workers for the new renewable energy economy. Community colleges across the nation are gearing up for crowded classrooms full of future green jobbers. Groups such as Green for All are serving as the conscience of the movement, and remind us that the new economy has to include those who stand to benefit the most, since the old economy hasn’t served them well. Labs such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and private companies are working at a fevered pace to assist the push for greener housing with advanced modeling tools, statistical data, some of the best minds and hearts, and new technology.

There is also more energy in water, so to speak. In late July, the California Department of Housing and Community Development made a proposal for a new graywater standard to the California Building Standards Commission. The new standard was almost immediately accepted. Graywater is shower, sink, and laundry water used for gardening and for toilet flushing that would otherwise be wasted. It’s taken a while for the state to figure out how to let its citizens use this water legally. Thousands have been using it illegally until now. The standards don’t address using graywater to flush toilets, and there are restrictions. For example, graywater from washing diapers cannot be used, and graywater cannot be used to water edible roots or edible plants with the edible parts in contact with soil.

California uses up to 10% of its energy treating, moving, or heating water, so saving water saves energy as well.

This attic hatch insulation kit install is making the author use some choice language.My attic hatch insulation kit came in the mail this morning and I am very excited. Excited enough to go into a hot dusty attic to install it over the weekend.

I promised Michele that I will practice the Yoga of home improvement projects and keep the cursing down to a minimum. My home improvement projects usually involve some cursing. I worked part time as a janitor when I was in high school and that's when I learned some pretty spicy language. I didn't intend to write about cursing here, but since I am in this so deep now, then damn it, I may as well connect the topic to some cutting edge scientific research. You got a problem with that?

British scientists found that cursing takes away pain. When people put their hands in a tub of cold water and cursed, they could hold their hands in longer than if they said things like, "butterscotch." If you don't want to take my word for it, you no-good so-and-sos, the research results were published in the online journal NeuroReport.

The attic hatch insulation kit will save us some energy losses and utility bill pain in the long run. According to the DOE Weatherization Assistance program, a gosh darn uninsulated 10 square foot attic hatch in a 100 square foot insulated attic can decrease the overall R-value of the attic floor by more than 50%! For example, an attic with R-38 insulation everywhere but on top of a stinking quarter-inch plywood hatch-with an R-value of approximately 0.3-will have an overall R-value of only R-17. What a freaking waste! Bloody hell!
You can find out more about insulating attic hatches at the Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Web site. Do it now!

Non-profits like Green For All are working with federal and state goverments to usher in new "weatherization worker" legislation.Editor's note: our home energy blogger Jim Gunshinan sends in his post from the 2009 National Weatherization Training Conference, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Tuesday, July 21

There are 3,200 people here for the conference in Indianapolis! This is more than twice as many as the last time. Heard from Gil Sperling, Program Manager for the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program, and others at opening plenary. Some buzz about Davis-Bacon prevailing wage legislation. Department of Labor created a new category "weatherization worker" and is polling organizations around the country to come up with prevailing wage numbers. Department of Labor staff is here to get feedback.

Five U.S. Territories are now part of the Weatherization network.

Van Jones speaking at lunch today.

Will set up display for later today. Something like 94 exhibitors are here, including heavy hitters like Home Depot and Sears. Will try to convince Home Depot folks to carry Home Energy Magazine in stores.

(later)

Van Jones, White House green jobs czar, spoke to weatherization workers at the National Weatherization Training Conference, "You are the quiet heroes. Your job is to take the inhalers out of little girls' pockets; little boys pockets."

No, he is not encouraging shoplifting, but the kind of homes that do not aggravate kid's asthma. A green home is an energy efficient and healthy one. That's something the weatherization community has known since the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program began in 1976.

Wednesday, July 22

At the awards lunch today, Gil Sperling mentioned that the Dept. of Labor (DOL) is making good progress in discussions with local weatherization agencies to determine the prevailing wage for a new classification of worker, the weatherization worker. The Davis-Bacon legislation from a decade ago (?) requires that organizations receiving federal government project money must hire people at the prevailing wage for similar work in the area. The legislation is being applied to the funds coming through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, (also known as the Stimulus Bill) for weatherization efforts. DOL came up with a new classification of worker, weatherization worker, in order to help the states comply with the Davis-Bacon requirements.

If the prevailing wages of construction workers were the standard, in New York, beginning weatherization workers would have to make $50 per hour! Weatherization agencies all over the country want to pay their workers well, but those kind of wages for beginning workers would wreck the budgets of most of them. So the new classification and prevailing wages will help agencies to pay a living wage, increase pay as workers become more experienced, and allow the agencies to live within their budgets. DOL staff are here in Indianapolis, and there listening sessions have been packed!

Thursday, July 23

A friend asked me What is the headline for the conference? I think it should be Weatherization Gets Down to Business. I am reminded of the ramp-up to the war in Iraq, and the war profiteering that is probably still going on. I remembered the “lost” $8-billion in the first months of the war. And I wonder if that kind of corruption will enter in the “war for energy security and green jobs and against global warming.” It probably will, because humans are involved. But the level of accountability here is very very high, and the expectations are very very clear. And I get the sense that, this time, the adults are in charge.

Since people seem to nod off a bit when I say I'm working on a story about energy efficiency, I've had to re-tool my pitch. "It's a story about how installing solar panels or a wind turbine is the last thing you should do to green your house," I say, perhaps a little over-dramatically.

I have nothing against solar panels, but they do seem to illustrate our collective love of gadgetry. Why else would we leap (or at least dream of leaping) to spend $5,000-$10,000 on solar panels when many of us could make a significant dent in our utility bills with a trip to Home Depot? Small things, like weather-stripping your doors, or making sure you have a well-insulated attic, can make a big difference in how much heat or AC your house consumes.

If you qualify as low-income (in this case, that's less than $44,000 for a family of four) you can get help with this project. If you live in California, you'll find your local participating agency here (or by calling 1-866-675-6623). Elsewhere, begin by contacting your state agency, found here. The Weatherization Assistance Program has received a 10-fold budget increase under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, so now's a great time to apply.

WAP won't replace your TV, but you might consider doing so yourself. Televisions tend to be the third biggest electricity user in the house (after heating/AC and refrigerators). But they don't have to be. All the new features — plasma screens, HD, widescreen — can be (and are, in some models) achieved using less electricity. The California Energy Commission is proposing new TV standards that would cut electricity use by a third.

James Sweeney, who heads the Stanford University Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, calculates that collectively – with current, affordable technologies, and without sacrificing our quality of life – Americans could cut our energy use by 30 percent.

Here's the kicker: To produce that same amount of electricity, we'd have to increase solar and wind by 60-fold. That means, for every solar panel and wind turbine in the country, we'd have to build 59 new ones, plus all the power lines and roads they'd entail. Or, to consider another non-fossil fuels alternative, that's four new nuclear power plants for every existing one.

Listen to the Let's Weatherize! radio report online, and watch our Weatherization Slideshow.

The front of Leaf House. Photo credit: The Leaf Community
Highlights from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed by President Obama on Tuesday:

1. The economic stimulus act provides $5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program; increases the eligible income level for the program from 150% of poverty level (determined by criteria established by the Office of Management and Budget) to 200% of poverty level; increases the amount of money that can be spent per home from $2,500 to $6,500; and allows weatherization assistance for homes that were weatherized before 1994 (previously, homes weatherized after 1979 could not be "re-weatherized").

2. $4 billion was allocated to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to retrofit public housing, and $510 million to retrofit the homes of Native Americans.

3. The stimulus bill gives $500 million to the Department of Labor to train workers for careers in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

4. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides increased tax credits for homeowners for energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy installations; the act increases the tax credit for energy efficiency improvements from 10% to 30%, and gives a 30% tax credit for the cost of qualified solar energy systems, geothermal heat pumps, small wind turbines, and fuel cell systems.

5. The tax credit for homeowners who install a natural gas refueling system for a natural gas car, a charging system for a plug-in electric or hybrid vehicle, a hydrogen refueling station for a fuel cell car, or another refueling system in their homes is doubled from $1,000 to $2,000. The credit is good through 2010 for most refueling systems and through 2014 for hydrogen refueling systems.

There are many more provisions in the bill that support building energy efficiency, automotive energy efficiency, the manufacture and use of renewable energy systems, and research into (among other things) high performance batteries.

We recently covered in Home Energy Magazine a story from Italy about the Leaf Community. It is a live/work community outside of Rome where they create all the energy they need by taking it from the sun, the wind, and the ground (using geothermal heat pumps). They are doing a lot of research into storing energy, and that is clearly becoming a top priority among scientists. Energy produced from the sun and wind, for example, is intermittent, and sun and wind resources are often far from populations that need clean energy, requiring expensive transmission systems (more overhead wires). At Leaf House, they produce hydrogen using the electricity produced by photovoltaic solar panels, and store the hydrogen in a "chemical battery". The hydrogen can later be reclaimed and used in a fuel cell to create electricity.

Retrofitting homes to be more efficient, healthy, and sustainable is a "three-fer", as President Obama called it in a recent television interview: it saves energy; makes homes more affordable; and creates jobs. And research such as that taking place at Leaf House opens the door to unimagined, elegant solutions to our energy challenges. One thing that the economic stimulus package has already delivered — something that has long been lacking in the energy efficiency and renewable energy community — is hope.

I woke up this morning in Washington DC to snow flurries and then, at a conference of the National Association of State Community Service Providers (NASCSP), to a blizzard of acronyms. I will be dreaming of strings of letters for the rest of the year.

NASCSP is an organization of state-level leaders of weatherization programs and community action agencies. The Department of Energy (DOE) provides funds to the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP). Its mission is to make the homes of low-income people more energy efficient, safe, healthy, and affordable. It has a pretty good track record in that for every dollar they spend weatherizing a house, someone saves two dollars, and the planet avoids a few tons of greenhouse gas emissions. And the weatherization community is a pretty diverse group. In the green building world, I have never seen so many women and people of color involved in every facet of the work.

Some of the funds for weatherization work also come through the Low-Income Heating Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP); some through Energy Conservation Block Grants (ECBG); some through Community Service Block Grants (CSBG); the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (ReGGIe) in the Northeast; and other acronyms… I mean organizations. Thank goodness, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) keeps track of all those funds and how they are spent, and these folks are sticklers for details. They know what all the acronyms mean. Under the Obama administration they are gearing up to be even more demanding of transparency and performance.

It's a very exciting time to be in Washington and at the NASCSP conference. The House "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009″ allocates more than $6 billion for weatherizing homes in the United States. The Senate is still debating its version of the bill, but right now they are allocating $2.9 billion for weatherization. President Obama has made a firm commitment to weatherizing 1 million homes a year for the next ten years, and even mentioned "weatherization" several times on television. He calls it a "three for." The program helps people afford to stay in their homes by lowering their energy bills, it creates good jobs with a future, and it moves the nation closer to energy independence. To put things into context, the budget for weatherization in 2008 was about $250 million.

In his 2009 budget sent to congress last February, President Bush allotted $0 to weatherization. That's what people in weatherization work are used to for the past several years – figuring out how to do more for less. Now they are getting ready for a flood of money, and that is not an easy challenge. For the weatherization community, the state agencies, the nonprofit service providers, and the contractors who are fueled by the desire to have everyone live in a safe and affordable home, it means doing the same excellent work they have been doing for decades – just much much more of it. These people are big on quality and will not sacrifice it for numbers. They know they will be judged on measurable results – energy saved per dollars spent.

"It's like we have been swimming upstream for a decade," said a conference participant. "Now we're going white water rafting."

Bad for the Lab, Good for the Country

Staff at Building Solutions, a home performance
company, install PV on a roof in Oakland. Next year, the renewable
and energy efficiency business will be even better.
Credit: Kate KenkeDr. Steven Chu, Noble-prize-winning physicist, and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was named as President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy. Home Energy is a nonprofit magazine, but our offices are at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the magazine was founded by Alan Meier, a lab scientist. People around here are saddened by the loss of Dr. Chu as director of the lab, but extremely excited about his nomination as Secretary of Energy. Dr. Chu believes in science and the important place of technology in helping us meet our energy goals and fight global warming—think cellulosic bio-fuels, nanotechnology, and yet undreamed of solutions to the present energy and environmental crisis.

Weatherization Works!

Word in energy efficiency circles is that the funding for Department of Energy (DOE’s) Weatherization Program will increase several-fold with President Obama’s proposed economic stimulus package. The Weatherization Program is managed state by state from money provided by DOE, and the funds pay to retrofit the homes of low-income families. Homes become healthier to live in, more energy efficient, and more comfortable for the occupants. For every one dollar the Weatherization Program spends, almost two dollars in energy savings results. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been retrofit so far, leaving about 99.5% of existing homes. Talk about green jobs potential! Many nonprofit and for profit organizations do weatherization work, and, basically, you retrofit the home of a low-income family the same way you retrofit a mansion. Lots more skilled people will be needed to do the work, and the jobs will provide a good income, benefits, and the possibility of future advancement. Community colleges, unions, professional training organizations, online trainers, and other players are gearing up to train the new green workforce.

How Many Btu Do You Do?

I promised in my last blog entry to explain the concept of heating-degree day and cooling-degree day. Sometimes you will hear that a home uses so many Btu or kWh per heating- or cooling-degree day, per square foot, per year. The degree days indicate the heating or cooling load on a building’s HVAC systems. A degree day is the rise or fall of one degree Fahrenheit for 24 hours. The rise or fall in temperature is measured from a baseline of 65F°. For example, if the average temperature tomorrow is 45F°, than the heating load on your heating system is 20 heating-degree days. If on a hot summer day the average temperature over a 24-hour period is 85F°, than the load on your air conditioner is 20 cooling-degree days. The number of heating-degree days for a winter in New York is around 5,000. Barrow, Alaska has about 20,000.

You can figure out how much energy you use to heat or cool your home by subtracting the baseline energy use. During a month when you are using neither your air conditioner or heater, such as in October or March (called the “shoulder” months), your gas and electric use represent your baseline. The baseline covers energy for lighting, appliances, hot water, and plug loads. Subtract out the baseline from your winter or summer energy use and you have the amount of energy to heat or cool your house. If you know the square footage of your home, and you have weather data for your area (go to www.degreeday.net to find out heating-degree days and cooling-degree days for your area), you are in a position to brag to your neighbors (or not) about your energy use.

At our house we used about 90 therms of natural gas from September 7 through December 7, 2008. There were about 480 heating-degree days (HDD) in our area during that time. Our baseline use of natural gas is about 10 therms per month, for heating water and cooking, leaving 60 therms for heating over the three-month period. Our house is about 1,200 square feet (ft²). Therefore, we used 60 therms/(480 HDD x 1,200 ft²), or about 0.0001 therms/HDD·ft². Since one therm of natural gas contains about 100,000 Btu of energy, that equals about 10 Btu/HDD·ft². That’s not bad, but not great either. How about you?