I realized the other day that the next realistic steps my household might take to reduce carbon emissions are to carpool more (we commute to work together but could add up to 2 more people in our car) and to move to geothermal heat.

Geothermal systems – even with the rebates – would probably cost $15,000. That’s a ton of money. Even supposing we had $15K to spend on a system (and that’s a big “if”), would it be the best way to spend it? What would truly be the most carbon-reduction-bang for fifteen thousand bucks?

Some initial ideas:

• Help 15 households insulate their attics to R-60
• Buy super-efficient furnaces for several households
• Help 3-5 farmers build hoophouses to produce local veggies through the winter
• Invest in a “neighborhood energy startup” with a gasifier (makes heat and electricity and biodiesel), possibly with a permaculture system of greenhouses, coppice groves, etc.
• Just buy land and start a coppice grove for sustainable heating fuel production, and possibly invest in a pelletizer
• Some kind of education program? I’m thinking the actual return is hard to measure, and it’s not education about global warming that folks around here lack.

Anyone have data on any of these? Or other ideas? bonus points for things that are done once and keep on saving energy and reducing emissions without any further attention or work.

I thought I’d list thethings we do as a matter of course to save energy. You can use this list as a resource, an inspiration, or ignore it completely; just please don’t use it as a springboard for guilt, unless guilt actually motivates you to change.And especially don’t guilt-trip if you’re un/underemployed and just trying to get food on the table.

But if you can put aside a few extra bucks, a lot of this stuff gets at 30% tax rebate until 2010, so now’s a great time to make some of these changes. I’d dearly love it if you would find one or more things on this list that make you think, “Hey, I could do that” and then take 3-6 months to work it into your daily life. If you really commit to doing just one or two at a time, five years from now, you’ll be doing all this and more and it won’t even seem like a drudge.

I do recommend writing out all you do to save energy, though. It sure surprised me to write all this out…it’s become so natural that I don’t even think about it any more.

And please, won’t someone write the “Energy Savings 102″ book? It seems like lots of people say “change your lightbulbs” or “throw away your fridge and furnace” but there’s not a lot out there describing realistic steps to take in between. Well, maybe this is the beginning of that list, and y’all can add your own comments of additional steps to take.

Details, details…

Household portrait

• Two adults, both employed outside the home.
• Work (and town in general, including groceries) is 11 miles away from home.
• Closest public transport is 8 miles away – by the time you get to the bus stop, you might as well keep walking to your destination.
• No kids, no pets.
• Husband attends capoeira class twice a week.
• 1800 sf ranch house w/partial unfinished basement, breezeway, and garage
• 1300 sf of garden, plus 8×12 greenhouse
• All electric appliances (hot water, dryer, range/oven)
• Propane and wood (fireplace insert) heat
• Car 1: 2003 Prius, 45mpg, ~25,000 miles/year
• Car 2: older Ford Explorer, 18mpg, ~1200 miles/year
• We live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, zone 5b. Winters are very cold compared to the rest of southern Michigan and moderately snowy – it can get down to -20 at night for several days straight, though more usual low nighttime temps are around 10 degrees.

Gasoline savings

• When my 18 year-old Honda Accord died, we replaced it with a used 2003 Prius.
• We drive to work together every day, with a few rare exceptions.
• We generally shop for groceries on the way home from work and “combine trips.”
• We loaned our 30mpg car to my brother indefinitely so he doesn’t have to drive the 18mpg SUV 40 miles to/from work each day.  That also makes us much more restrained about driving the second car anywhere at all.

Electricity savings

• Four of the 5 of our most commonly-used lightbulbs are CFLs. The fifth one is in an enclosed fixture, and the only bulbs we can find small enough buzz so much they drive me nuts.
• We swapped out every 100 watt bulb in the rest of the house for 1 or 2 40 watt bulbs. (When we moved in, the ceiling fixtures each had two or three 100-watt bulbs – yikes, you could *tan* in there…).
• We’ve scouted the house with a Kill-o-watt and eliminated virtually all “phantom power draw.” So, for example, we unplug the TV, DVD player, and converter box when we’re not actually watching.
• We now turn off the furnace in the basement during the summer – it appears to have a significant phantom draw.
• The TVs are on about 5 hours a week total; half of that is for playing exercise videos.
• We air-dry all shirts, pants, and skirts on plastic hangers on a clothes pole in the laundry room.
• The water heater is set at the temp where it is comfortable when the shower is on 100% hot.
• No one in the house uses hair dryers, curling irons, clothes irons, or other small energy-sucking devices.
• We try to “stack” baking tasks, so we only have to heat the oven once to make, say, pizza and granola.
• We avoid A/C as much as possible – thermostat is set around 78 during the summer. We open windows at night whenever it’s cool and not-humid (which was almost all of last summer).
• We installed a pergola over the front picture windows. The screen across the top blocks the sun and heat in the summer, but we put the screen away in the winter so we do get some solar gain when it’s cold.
• All appliances are Energy Star (slowly replaced over the years). Front-loading washer, normal-sized fridge, very small chest freezer.
• Water softener calculates the number of gallons used, rather than cycling every day. This saves water, too, and since we’re on a well, water usage = electric usage.
• We’re playing with solar cooking, fireplace cooking, and cooking with retained heat (“haybox cooking”), but those aren’t part of our daily life at this point.

Heat savings

• R-65 cellulose insulation in the attic
• Attic hatch sealed with Velcro (kit)
• Switches and outlets have those foam thermal seals.
• The drafts between/behind our kitchen cupboards have been sealed with spray foam. (No idea why that’s so drafty, but freezing cold air used to come out from between the bottom of the cupboards.)
• At first, we sealed our unusable fireplace with an inflatable draft stopper, but after 5 years we were able to fix the fireplace and really seal the air leaks by installing a fireplace insert. And, of course, now we can heat with wood. I have some qualms about pollution, but the insert is EPA rated, reburns essentially all particulate matter, and is fueled with locally-renewable resources. It also lets us truly heat only the living room.
• Seal the windows each winter with that plastic that tapes on and shrinks tight.
• Thermostat is 63 in the winter when we’re home and awake, 55 when we’re gone, and 57 overnight. We do not feel cold, and we do not wear hats in the house (though we do wear slippers and are generally under a blanket when sitting around reading or watching a movie in the evening). Fixing the fireplace let us drop the thermostat 5 full degrees, and we feel WARMER now than we did before. (Seriously – cap your fireplace or put in an insert. Fireplaces are evil.)
• Thermal curtain between the house and the breezeway. This keeps the breezeway around 45 all winter, which is actually a good “root cellar” temp.

Food miles

• The vast majority of the food we eat at home was grown within 100 miles of home. The major exceptions include rice, sandwich bread, raisins, raisin toast, carrots, avocadoes, and ice cream ~2pt/mo.
• I grow enough veggies to keep us in greens from June to October. Hopefully the greenhouse will extend that some, too. Contrary to popular belief, I do not grow the majority of our food, nor is that really a goal of mine.
• A recent change we’ve made that has had a really good impact on our food miles and waste production is making our own yogurt. Now, instead of shipping 6oz refrigerated cups of yogurt from California, we make yogurt twice a month from local cream-top milk bought in a glass bottle. We stir in homemade jam. The only plastic to throw away is the bottle cap, we’re almost never out of yogurt, and the furthest anything had to travel was the sugar (~ 100 miles).  And did I mention we’re saving nearly $20/month just in yogurt?
• We eat out too much to really be sustainable. :/

Ok, that’s all I can think of right now. Man, some of this stuff happened so long ago I forget we did it. Which means you can do it once and forget it, too, and it’ll keep saving you energy as long as you’re in that house.

Goal: 10.25 tonnes
Actual: 14 tonnes

Well, we missed our goal. By a *lot*. We used only about 1 tonne less carbon than last year, so far as I can tell from my less-than-perfect recordkeeping for 2007-08. I’m not happy about it, and I’m not making excuses. I am looking for reasons, though, and ways to cut. But I also feel like we’ve hit a plateau, and it’s going to take some oomph and hard decisions to further reduce our carbon output.

* per household, or for 2 people
**  Every place you look will tell you a different number for average US carbon emissions per household. To get the average figure of 22.7 tonnes, I used the same conversion factors I used for us and applied them to the US averages I found.

Agonizing detail, including several surprising ways we reduced our impact, after the cut…

Here are some factors to take into consideration

• Most of our family lives far away – 600-1000 miles away. Not visiting is not an option at this point in time.
• My husband was participating in some training that required 1300-mile round trips 3x/year. He carpooled with 2 other people and he always drove, because our Prius gets the best gas mileage of the available options. That training is done, and will eliminate nearly 400o miles of travel next year.
• Our stove, dryer, and hot water are electric. No other option where we live, except maybe solar water pre-heating.
• We had a leak in our propane tank for 6-9 months last year.
• We live in southern Michigan; temps got down to -20 at times this winter. Our thermostat is set at 55 when we’re out of the house; 63 when we’re home and awake; 57 overnight.
• We bought a full cord of wood but didn’t use it – next year, we’ll do more wood heat instead of heating the whole house.
• We bought wind offsets from our power company AND from Native Energy, to the tune of 125% of our electric usage. However, we’re counting offsets as a “gift” and recording our actual usage here.
• Our wood was harvested by a neighbor about 3 miles from the house and consisted mainly of ash trees killed by the emerald ash borer.

Things that really, really helped us save energy

We had already plucked a lot of low-hanging fruit like CFLs, carpooling to work, and putting plastic on the windows in the winter. Here are a few things that don’t show up on many how-to-save-energy lists that REALLY worked for us:

• Fixing the propane leak. The month we got it fixed, we saved 125 gallons of propane over the previous month. If we’d fixed the leak earlier, we might have made our propane goal.
• Putting in the fireplace insert . Inserts seal up tight, like a wood stove, and block the flow of warm air up the chimney. Keep in mind – we had an inflatable flue blocker installed, but you could tell air was always moving through there. So fixing (sealing) the fireplace let us turn the temp down, saved 175 gallons of propane (maybe twice that, if we’d fixed the propane leak sooner), and felt *warmer*. If you can’t spring for a fireplace insert (~$5000), seriously consider getting the chimney permanently capped (~$350). You are losing more heat up the chimney than you’re gaining by burning wood – not to mention that inserts trap/reburn much, much more of the pollution caused by burning wood.
• Heating only the main living space, when practical. The fireplace heats the living room but doesn’t do much for the rest of the house. We’d heat with wood one evening and one or two weekend days each week and let the furnace kick on overnight. We didn’t start a fire when we were only going to be home and awake for an hour or two. Next year, we’ll try to do more of our heating with wood, though that may mean we use a small electric heater in the bedroom to take the chill off. I’ve discovered it’s hard for me to sleep when my nose is cold and runny.
• I discovered I feel colder when the temp gets up to 68, vs. 63 degrees. We’re still learning how to regulate the heat from the fireplace, so there were times when the living room got up to 68 according to the room thermometer. I generally felt colder then than I did when the fireplace was still heating up and the room was 62-63 degrees. My only explanation for this is that maybe I was getting too warm and starting to sweat, which then made me feel cold.
• Our furnace has a large phantom power draw. In May, 2009, our electric usage was 130kwh (30%!) less than average. I can think of two things we did during that time: One, we turned off our radon fan for a week or so. (But I’ve done that before and not noticed a dip in kwh). Secondly, our furnace has an off switch right on the furnace. (It looks like a light switch.) I turned the furnace off at the switch off for about half of May, rather than just turning the thermostat off. I think our furnace was drawing a lot of “standby power” even when it was not in use. Hopefully, we can keep the central system off for the summer, except for the nights when it’s too hot and humid to sleep.

So ok. We were nearly 4t over our goal, and only about 1t less than my estimate of last year’s emissions. But we still managed to be under 50% of average US carbon emissions this year, which isn’t bad. It’s still too much, but it’s not horrible. I guess it takes more than a year to make changes of this scope.

What these results tell us

• We drive a lot. Even at an average 45 mpg, gasoline is our #1 carbon emission. We do carpool, combine trips, and all that good stuff, but we’re 11 miles from town, so round trips add up. Long car trips are our big downfall, though. And they’re tough to cut because our best friends, most of our family, and important parts of our spiritual life are 650 miles away.
• We need to find a more efficient way to heat our home in the winter. We insulated the attic to R65 a couple years ago, and we put the fireplace insert in, but heating 1800 square feet for 2 people is just silly.
• We use more electricity than we could possibly “make up for” with solar, wind, or human power. While our electric usage is less than half US average, and I don’t think we have that many appliances, lights, etc., we still use way more electricity than we should. We use about 13.5 kwh/day; suggested use for a solar array is 3 kwh/day. This is a tough one to cut, because out here in the boonies there’s no alternate fuel for hot water, stove, and dryer, and I’d thought we had already cut all phantom power and useless gadgets.

Changes we’re planning to make next year

• Keep the furnace turned off at the switch as much as possible without freezing people or pipes.
• Heat more with wood – any time we’re in the house and awake for more than 2-3 hours.
• Insulate the walls of the house and see if we can turn the thermostat down any more.
• Get a new, better-sealed and -insulated front door.
• I’m going to shower only every other day, and wash my hair on the off days. (I have a really hard time getting out of a hot shower! I tried timing myself this year, which helped, but I think just skipping showers will be easier with better results.)
• Washing clothes on true cold, rather than “auto temp cold” – which is actually using some hot water.
• Fewer long trips by car.
• Air travel is dicey; we have family with health issues and won’t have as much control over our need to fly as we’d like.
• Experiment more with environmental energy: solar cooking, haybox cooking, freezing jugs of water on the deck in the winter and putting them in the fridge, etc.
• Contemplate unplugging the fridge in the winter (use ice jugs and turn it into a cooler) and unplug the tiny chest freezer in the summer (eat all the food until harvest/hog season comes back).

So that’s where we are. Next year’s goal is 10.5 tonnes. We’ll see how that goes!

If you read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the idea of global warming, and you know that it is going to have serious effects in the coming decades (see this image only if you want to be depressed). You may also know that scientists are suggesting there is a “point of no return” where we won’t be able to stop or reverse global warming. This point is usually described as a ratio of how much carbon (or more accurately, carbon equivalent[1]) is in the atmosphere. There’s some debate about the exact number, but somewhere between 300 ppm and 450 ppm is considered the “safer” level that will prevent the worst of the effects.

Individual people can have a lot of impact on the total CO2 emissions dumped into the atmosphere. The average American household dumps 18 tonnes of carbon equivalents into the air every year. The sustainable level of carbon emissions – that is, the level that every person in the world could emit and keep the greenhouse effect from worsening beyond the point of no return – is one tonne per person per year [source].

If that sounds like a pretty big drop, well…it is. There’s a group of folks who are committing to make that reduction within a year. They’re calling it the Riot4Austerity, and I take my hat off to them for their bold undertaking, and I hope to reduce my carbon to at least 75% below American average in the next 2 years.

But for me, right now, it’s just too much to change all at once. Anyone else out there feel the same way?

I wanted to come up with a more manageable “chunk” to whittle away at, and I wanted to know the relative merits of various actions. Take the bus for 45 minutes or drive 5 miles? Eat 100% local or go vegetarian? Give up the hair dryer or turn off the A/C? Give up my car, or airplane flights? If I can do one thing to reduce my footprint today, which thing should it be? If I can’t give up my car, how else can I make up the difference?

And so, I bring you the One Stone Carbon Challenge. The basic premise is simple: I’ve created a list of activities which produce, on average, one stone (14 lb) of carbon emissions. You choose activities that prevent 14 pounds of carbon equivalent from entering the atmosphere, and you mark one stone off this chart (200Kb PNG). When you’ve crossed off the 157 stones on the chart, you’ve prevented one tonne of carbon pollution.

I’m putting the detailed calculations on a static page, here, to prevent any further clogging of people’s feed readers.

So, let’s make this a formal Challenge, in best blogging fashion. The One Stone Carbon Challenge runs from now until May 1, 2009. Comment below and tell us:

1. That you’re participating
2. Your goal – how many stones will you reduce by May 1?
3. If you like, tell us your current carbon footprint, and at the end, recalculate your footprint and tell us the difference. Feel free to skip this if it sounds too much like a Weight Watchers weigh-in.

Feel free to snag the icon above to post on your blog, for thems what like badges.

I’ll check back in on May 1!

Hey, folks-

I’m hatching my next project – sort of a carbon-reduction challenge for those of us not yet ready to go for the 90% reduction levels of the Riot 4 Austerity. I could use a few more pairs of eyes to check my math and help me figure out a few calculations.

If you’re interested in helping out with a couple hours of research and middle-complexity math calculations, drop me a comment. The final product will be available here for free, and your contribution will of course be cited. :

Emily

Last year and this year, we got propane fill-ups in early November and right around New Years. Yesterday’s fill up was 330 gallons; last year’s was 327. This year was colder, though; 2448 heating degree days* as opposed to 2173. So we have, overall, used a bit less propane per heating degree day: 0.13 gallons vs. 0.15 gallons. That means that on Jan. 1, which had 45 heating degree days, we saved 0.9 gallons of propane over last year. That’s almost $2 saved. At this rate, we’d probably save 135 gallons of propane and $300 (minus the price of wood – about $50 so far this year) over the course of the winter.

We’ll see if fixing the leak has a noticeable difference. We’d normally get another fill-up the last week of February, so I’ll update at that point how we’re doing.

* Heating degree days (definition) can be found if you go to the Weather Underground forecast page for your town, scroll down to “Yesterday’s Official Weather and Almanac” and look for “Since July 1 heating degree days.” There’s also a column for normal and last year.

Highlights:

• How is it that we drive so much?
• 4.5% of our electricity is used when devices are off
• Wood heat has been really nice to add to the mix

Details after the cut…

I guess I have totally mis-estimated the amount we drive. Sometimes I know where the miles go – long road trips – but sometimes it’s kind of a mystery. Electric usage is up from last month, but down about a third from two years ago. (Last year we had a hot tub in November, so no real comparison there). It’s hard to say how much impact the new freezer has – it was, after all, Thanksgiving this month with lots of baking in the electric oven and extra hot showers.

I did run around with the Kill-a-Watt some this month, and discovered to my horror that the TV/DVD player in the yoga room has been drawing almost nine kilowatt hours a month when it’s OFF. So, that puppy’s getting unplugged except when I’m actually using it. The goal for a solar-powered home or the Riot for Austerity is 3 kwh/day. We’re currently at around 13 kwh/day. Three of those are just hot water – but we don’t really have a choice on our fuel for heating water, we can only use less of it. Ditto for the stove/oven, but I have no way of breaking that out separately. I figure the lowest reasonable budget for us is 5 wkh/month of non-hot water electric and 2 kwh/month for hot water. So this month’s project was just to find out how much “phantom” energy draw we could eliminate. That TV was sucking 3% of our total monthly electric usage (non-hot water) when it was off (and there’s an additional 1.5% for things like the laptop, cordless phones, etc.). That’s nuts!

Showing monthly usage of wood and propane continues to be difficult. We definitely used both this month, but didn’t buy any, so it doesn’t show up here. We’ve used about half a face cord of wood so far this year, and we’re just now getting to the cold part of the year. I do think our propane usage is way down, though. It’s hard to tell because the gauge is, at best, an estimate. I will know better when they come to refill it. The propane company has a magic formula to guess when we need a fill-up. They tend to show up when the tank has 20-25% left. I’m guessing their estimates will be off this year, and show up when the tank still has 35% or more in it. We shall see. I rather like heating with wood…especially when we also have the luxury of just turning the thermostat up and letting the machines do all the work. I’m still concerned about soot and other pollution from the wood, but it’s hard not to feel ok about a fuel that derives from standing deadfall, travels exactly 3 miles to your house, saves you money, and puts the money you do spend into the pockets of your neighbors.

Wow, we are just not doing that well on this. I never would have guessed that we’d drive an average of 3000 miles every month! And most of that is not stuff we’re willing to give up…too many friends live out-of-state. However, my husband’s taken his last regularly scheduled quarterly trip out of state (or is there one more?), so that will save about 1300 miles every 3 months.

Note: Wood and propane are listed as quantities bought, not quantities used. I don’t have a good way of knowing how many gallons of propane we’ve used, so I’m just listing it as a lump sum. All I can think of for the electricity spike this month is canning.