LittleJoe

Freecycle: lightened my load :)

During the past year we've switched to using an electric mower instead of a gas-powered mower, electric grass edger and string trimmer instead of gas-powered devices, and disconnected our gas-fired water heater and installed a solar water heating system. A side effect of this is that our garage was now cluttered with the devices that we were no longer using. I was enjoying a beer Thursday evening with some friends and mentioned that I needed to get rid of this stuff. Smitty suggested I list the stuff on Freecycle. Duh! I'd heard of Freecycle a year or more ago and had forgotten about it. It works like this: instead of tossing something in a landfill, thereby polluting the ground and taking a useful item out of circulation ...'gift' it on Freecycle. Or if you need some item, check Freecycle and perhaps someone has the item you need and is ready to pass it on to a new owner.

In the words of Freecycle:

Please be gentle in your expectations, gracious in your giving and appreciative for the things you receive. Please treat each other as you want to be treated and remember, you are making a difference, one gift at a time!

How cool is that? So I popped on to the Tampa Freecycle group. I listed the items earlier today, and by mid-afternoon the items all had new homes. I have more room in the garage, and these perfectly good devices will continue to provide useful service. Words really can't express how much I enjoyed this.

Now I'm looking around seeing what else we can release :)

CatalogChoice.org: reducing paper waste

From their website:
Catalog Choice is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.

This is pretty cool! I just signed up today. I created a free account, listed our address and the names to which we receive snail mail. I then went through the rather extensive list of catalogs (using the search feature a time or two) and selected the various catalogs that the US Post Office delivers to our mailbox - and that we then deposit directly into the recycle bins. As Shirley and I were talking about it, we kept remembering more junk that comes to us. So now, ever so slowly over the coming months, the volume of junk mail that is delivered to us should diminish. The number of wasted trees will be reduced a little. A little less fuel will be wasted in the transport of the catalogs. And the companies who produce the catalogs will be wasting less money, since we don't buy from these catalogs anyway!

So lighten your load. Go sign up and reduce your junk mail.

Tankless water heater installed

Back in April of this year we had a solar hot water heater installed. It's 100% passive, and I love it. But if we have a day with no sun (or several guests in the house) there's not enough hot water. We'd considered that this might be the case, and so had factored in the cost of a tankless gas-fired water heater as a supplemental system when we first decided to get rid of the original hot water tank. Fortunately for us, the local gas company (TECO Peoples Gas) has a program that allows customers to purchase a tankless water heater - installed - for US$25/month for 5 years. So it's a total of $1,500 (a little high), but the monthly payment gets included in the regular gas bill. So it's painless. I called ExpertGasPlumbers and booked it.

Here's the inside of the garage where the old tank used to be. If you click on the image and view it enlarged, you'll see the comments pointing out the piping from the rooftop solar water heating system.

And here's outside where the tankless unit gets mounted. Because we're in a warmer climate, it works well to locate the heater outside, and there's no special venting needed. It does use a little electricity for the thermostat and the ignition (there's no pilot light).

Things don't look much different on the inside with the installation all done. There is a small thermostat control, and a little extra piping. I went out to check during the installation and noticed that the guys had originally routed the pipes in a manner that would have bypassed the solar heater completely. D'OH! So I showed where things needed to be connected and they were extremely nice about it and rerouted things as needed. Whew! That could have been a fiasco!

Things look quite different on the outside, of course. Our new Rinnai R70 unit is up and running. When I first turned on the hot water inside, the new unit fired up ...once the hot water from the solar unit had flowed down, the gas-fired unit detected the water temp and shut itself off, letting the solar-heated water just flow on through. Perfect :)

Cool-N-Save - easy way to reduce A/C costs

We enjoy watching Living with Ed on television. Ed Begley, Jr. has been working to live ever-greener for 30 years, and the show never fails to give us several great ideas. A recent episode featured the Cool-N-Save product. The idea is to provide a gentle mist of water around the air conditioner condenser - only when the condenser fan is running - so that the evaporation of the water will help the air conditioner with its cooling chores. The projected energy savings are up to 30 percent! Given that the Cool-N-Save costs under a hundred bucks (US$87), it will be worth it even if our savings fall far below 30 percent. Here in Florida, air conditioning is one of the main power consumers of a home (for all-electric homes, water heating is the other real biggie).

Well, I've got quite a list of chores I've been wanting to get to around the house and the yard, so I took a vacation day today to tackle some of them. One of those jobs was installing our new Cool-N-Save unit.

The installation is very simple, although some might find the adequate instructions not quite detailed enough. So Shirley snapped a number of pictures as I installed the unit. We probably took 30 minutes to do the installation, but that was largely because we kept going back inside to fetch a felt pen, a wire cutter, a cable tie, etc. We've posted the installation sequence up on Flickr.

And with that, we are hoping that our footprint on the earth has perhaps become just a little bit smaller :)

Timer for outdoor compact fluorescent lights

A year or two ago we replaced the 3 lights outside our garage with compact fluorescents to save on energy use. That's good, but sometimes we'd go somewhere and not return until after dark ...with the lights still off, so that defeated the purpose of having outdoor lighting. And sometimes we'd neglect to turn them off in the morning, and they'd end up being on all day. Well I finally located a timer (from Swylite) that works with the low current draw of compact fluorescents. I figured this would be a pretty easy install - maybe 5 minutes. Wrong.

The switch for our garage lights is in this strip of 5 switches. The one on the far right is a timer for the 'holiday' lights (we string up a number of LED lights around Christmas, and they are all connected into outlets that are controlled by this timer). The second switch location in from the right is where the garage light switch was, so this is the location for the new timer for the outdoor compact fluorescents. This would have been a quick install, but one of the wires I needed for the connection was, as fate would have it, located behind the left-most switch. Sigh. So I had to remove 4 switches and do the hookup and then squeeze all of that junk back into the proper locations. Ugh! It probably took me 30 minutes to do this little hookup, since getting things to fit in there and to all align properly with the switch plate was far more involved than it should have been.

Ah, but all's well that ends well, right? It finally all went together and now the lights turn on and off at the proper times. One nice little feature of this timer is that it allows us to set a 'variable' mode. This means that the lights will come on and be turned off within 15 minutes plus or minus from the times we set. So there is not an exact time every day when the lights go on or off. Just a little more security. And some energy savings and convenience :)

Yaris is ordered :)

We do still plan to get a smart car - but that will be our little car. Our big car will be a 2008 Yaris liftback ...quite like the one pictured here. It will be about 3 months before we are driving it, since the only way to get one with side curtain airbags and ABS (both requirements for us) is to do a special order.

The Yaris and the smart car will each get around 40 mpg (a little under 6 litres per 100 km). Since we're buying the Yaris through Costco, we were able to skip all of the usual hassle of negotiating price and trying to decide what is truth and what is lies from someone just trying to make a sale. We met with the individual referenced from the Costco site, told them the options we wanted, and they showed us the invoice. We put down a US$500 deposit and when the car arrives, we will pay the rest of the invoice price and skip the nasty part of car buying. Very cool.

When our Blazing Blue Yaris shows up (a little brighter, I believe, than the image above), we'll sell Shirley's '94 Acura GS. It's been a pretty good car, but it requires premium fuel, is larger than we need, and is half as fuel-efficient as the Yaris and smart car will be. The plan is to then sell my 10-year old Subaru Outback when the smart arrives. We have mixed feelings about changing vehicles, since both of our cars have been pretty good. But it's time to downsize, go for better fuel economy, and get more safety features.

Any suggestions for vanity license plates?

An inconvenient purchase

We are now edging, trimming, and mowing our lawn with a zero carbon footprint (aside from the impact of the manufacture and shipping process). We've been using corded (not cordless) edger and trimmer for years. By paying a little extra to the local utility company, all of our electricity comes from renewable sources (wind, solar, etc). And the mower I just bought today is a corded electric Black & Decker mulching mower. I'd actually bought a Neuton cordless mower, but it didn't have enough power to cut the St Augustine grass here in Florida, so I returned it. Well, now that I've tried the Lawn Hog, I'm real glad that the Neuton didn't work out.

The Lawn Hog was US$229, $184 less than the Neuton (the Neuton was $359 plus $20 for a mulching kit, plus $34 shipping). The price difference makes some sense, since this new mower has no battery. Batteries are expensive to buy, and also would have to be replaced every 2 or 3 years. By using a corded mower, we have no lead battery to deal with, no charger running 24x7, and this thing is powerful. I was amazed that it cuts better than our 6.5HP gas-powered mower! The first grass I tried it on was the small remaining patch in the fenced back yard, that needed about 3 inches of height cut off. The Lawn Hog hummed right through the tough St Augustine grass, and mulched it up with no problem whatsoever (we have no use for the rear bag, since we let the mulched clippings fall to the lawn).

Now, some folks don't like having an electric cord hanging from their mower. I can understand that. It is definitely inconvenient. But the very first mower we owned 25 or so years ago was an electric that we'd bought at a garage sale, so I was comfortable with the cord thing. And it's worth it to save money on the purchase, save hassle and expense on the maintenance of the mower going forward, and best of all, to know that mowing my lawn is no longer polluting the air. Oh, and it's quieter and doesn't stink :)

Smart reserved...

We've talked about it for some time. And today we took the first step. We have reserved a Smart Car. Pictured on the left (click to see it larger ...although even full size, it's only 5 feet 1 inch high ...that's shorter than I am, so it's pretty short!) ...pictured on the left is what we've reserved. A yellow Smart. We first saw these little guys in Paris 5 or 6 years ago (and then elsewhere in Europe). In Spain last month, we saw 4-door models -- which almost seems like sacrilege, but still far better than the lone-occupant behemoths we see so often around the US.

It's unknown yet what the mileage will be, but it should get over 40mph. Hopefully it will be well over. We've considered hybrids, but the battery technology is not yet where it needs to be. There are (in our minds) too many issues with the recycling of the batteries and with the composite materials at the end of the product life. And the Smart car is quite safe, as this YouTube crash video will demonstrate. Of course, as they mention in the video, while slamming into concrete at 70mph will leave the Smart in better condition than many cars, the human occupant would still have a challenge surviving such sudden deceleration.

So for now, we'll stay abreast of the developments and will definitely plan to attend the street smart road show in Tampa in October. Our US$99 deposit is fully refundable at any time. The tentative plan is that we would sell Shirley's car next year, which should leave us needing about US$9,000 to cover the cost of the Smart. Given that I typically work from home a day or two a week, and Shirley typically does not work on Fridays, and her lab may be moving close to my office, there's even a possibility that we could do some or all of our commuting together in the Smart. That'd be cool.

Solar water heat: I've had a few lukewarm showers

Our passive solar water heating system was installed on 23 April 2007 ...almost 2 months ago. If the weather stays sunny, the system works great. Morning showers are as hot as one would like. But now that the storm season is upon us, we are finding that if we have a full day of overcast weather, then the water doesn't get up as hot as we'd like.

On the morning after a sunny day, I have to have the shower faucet set to about half hot and half cold -- any more than that and it would be too hot. On the morning after a full day of clouds, even with the faucet turned all the way to hot, the shower is only warm.

Well, this was not unexpected. We had hoped that we could get by with just the passive system, no tank in the garage, and zero energy consumption aside from what the sun delivers for free. Now it's on to Plan B. Our plan all along was that if we discovered that we sometimes needed more hot water, then we would install a gas-fired, tankless water heater as a backup. So we'll start shopping for something like this Bosch unit. The cost is about $750 ...so even if have someone else install it (still deciding), after the federal tax credit, our net would be a cost of about $700 or less. We'll see. And the periodic lukewarm shower isn't really that bad anyway :)

Solar: Tale of Two Showers

Actually, it's a tale of 3 showers, but I was too drawn to the Dickensian reference. Our solar home water heating system was installed as of 1:45pm on Monday, 23 April 2007. This is a completely passive system: no electricity or batteries at all, no gas, just the regular pressure in the water pipes, and the sun's rays beating down.

Shower 1: The next morning (yesterday) I took my normal morning shower. But it wasn't normal. It was lukewarm at best. Yikes! My hope was that the 40 gallons of water in the rooftop 'tank' (the series of copper tubes on the roof: pic) just hadn't had enough time to get fully heated.

Shower 2: Yesterday evening, after a rather strenuous workout on the Bowflex, I decided to take a 'hot' shower. As hot as I could get it anyway. Yee-ow! I had to turn the faucet quite a bit further toward the 'cold' side than I used to. The hot water was hot! Excellent.

Shower 3: This morning. This was the first morning shower after the system had enjoyed a full day of sunshine ...and a night cooling off. The water was not as hot as last night. But it was exactly how it used to be with the gas-fired water heater.

Next up? Well, to see how much (if at all) we might have to adjust our lifestyles to live with only solar water heat, this evening after getting home from work, I started a load running in the dishwasher, put a load of towels in the clothes washer, and got on the treadmill. After doing a few miles, I put my nasty sweaty gear along with a load of clothes in the washer (so this was now the 2nd load) ...and hosed off and took a dip in the pool :) ...so tomorrow morning we'll see how the water temp is after what has been a much more normal (or a bit above-average) use of hot water.

And Shirley tried holding an oven thermometer under the hot water flow and it got past 150F before she pulled the thermometer out. So far, so good :)

Solar water heat INSTALLED :)

The guys from Solar Source arrived this morning and about 3 hours later the installation was done! I had thought we'd need a day or more to heat up the 40-gallon roof-top tank. Nope. Jerry, the crew foreman, came in and we turned on a bath tap and a sink for about 2 minutes to flush some of the cold water, and at that point I had to remove my hand. I tested it a little while ago with an oven thermometer, and within a minute or two the temp was up to 130F ...I pulled the thermometer away then, 'cause the splashing water was too hot. Amazing. For safety, I plan to install anti-scald faucets in the bathrooms. Anyway ...the pic on the left (click to enlarge) shows the water heater for the house water up there on the roof ...above the panels that we already have had for heating the pool water.

The pic on the right (if you click to enlarge) is annotated to show what the garage looks like now. The 'old' gas-fired water heater - which is only 2 years old, since we bought it new with the house - is now completely disconnected. Jerry and the guys already drained it for us. Nice! I'll pop it on Craigslist in a few days.

This will be a definite experiment, seeing how much - if any - we need to adjust our lifestyle to fit with using only the sun to heat our water. I love it.

Solar water heat tomorrow!

At least we should be having the solar water heat system installed tomorrow. The last time we had it scheduled, I called and rescheduled when it was almost 4pm and no one had shown up nor called yet. I've got a couple of meetings tomorrow afternoon, so I confirmed with Solar Source on Friday that we're on the schedule for tomorrow (Monday) and stressed that it has to be a morning installation. I'll call again first thing in the morning to be sure. So hopefully, today is the last day that we'll have that gas water heater hooked up (it's the device in that far corner of the garage; the cylinder and the round tank nearer are the water softener system). You might also notice some of our skis in the pick. Yup, here we are living in Florida and we have skis on the shelves in the garage. Oh well. Someday I might use them again (and actually, Ben did take his snowboard up to Washington state last month on spring break and did some snowboarding on Mount Hood).

So hopefully tomorrow night I'll be posting pics of the solar water heat system. In preparation for what might be a day or so of lag time while the sun gets our water all nice and toasty, today we washed sheets, towels, clothes, and dishes. Just in case :)

Water heat: Solar is delayed a week

Well we were supposed to get our solar water heating system installed on Friday. Solar Source had called on Thursday to confirm, but by noon Friday no one had shown up nor called. So I called them and was told that I should have been told on Thursday to call the morning of our installation to see if we were on the schedule for the morning or the afternoon. Huh? OK, well we certainly did not get that instruction. Fine. We were told that we were on the schedule for the afternoon. At 3:30pm, I faxed the local manager at Solar Source to state that I was a bit disappointed with this first encounter with the company. At about 3:45pm ...with no one having shown up yet, and still no call, I called Solar Source. They were going to put me on hold and check on the status of the crew. But I wasn't real keen about having someone show up at 4pm or later on a Friday to begin what we had been told could be several hours of installation. I asked to be rescheduled, and for a morning installation. At this point, we are slated to have the system installed on Monday, 23 April. And that's perhaps fairly fitting, since it's the day after Earth Day :)

Solar water heat coming on Friday

By this time next week we will no longer have a hot water heater in our garage. We are going completely solar for our water heating. We did some research and have signed on to purchase a ProgressiveTube system (pic) through SolarSource. They will install the system next Friday, and I am stoked! Since we get so much sun here, there's really not much worry about lack of sunshine. In some areas, one would retain the electric or gas-powered water heater as a backup ...but we should be OK. Since our current gas water heater is only 2 years old, I'll plan to sell it on Craigslist; there are plenty of landlords who look for good used appliances for replacements in their rental properties.

The USA unloads far more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other nation. So as a partial contribution to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, my goal is to reach a point of consuming half of the natural gas and electricity that were using when we first moved into our house. We've got most of the incandescent light bulbs replaced with fluorescents, the programmable thermostat has been set to keep the place a little warmer in the summer and a little cooler in the winter, we're of course converting our water heating to have a zero carbon footprint (apparently water heat accounts for about a third of the energy usage in all-electric homes), and we're trying to be more diligent about turning off lights and devices that are not in use. We've also gotten rid of most of the grass in the back and side yards (ALL of it in due time) and have been replacing it with drought-tolerant Florida-friendly plants (this doesn't save a lot of fossil fuel, but it does reduce use of fertilizers and reduces the area of mowed lawn ...and does a fair amount to conserve water).

But the biggest contribution to CO2 emissions is, of course, automobiles. I'm usually able to work from home a couple of days a week, so that helps. Our local bus system does have some routes now that did not exist a year or two ago, so it's now time for me to do some research and see if there's a way for me to work via bus ...without the commute consuming the full day with transfers and waits. We'll see.

One step at a time ...as long as we keep stepping.

Researching solar water heating

Continuing with the effort to lessen our carbon footprint on the planet, we're exploring a solar hot water heating solution. I browsed on over to FindSolar.com, entered some data about our location and electricity and water usage, and then read about some of our options for harnessing more of the sun's energy for our needs. I would love to be generating all of our electricity from panels on the roof, but I'm afraid we just can't afford the cost. But we can afford the installation of a system that would handle our water heating.

We already have a solar system that heats the water in our swimming pool. And it does a decent enough job of it that February was the only month when I did not use the pool. So we do have plenty of sunshine to do the job. If you click the little image on the left, you'll see a representation of how a system would work to heat the home's water. One of the features that I like is that it would use a PV panel to produce the electricity needed to run the pump. So it would truly use the sun to power the whole system. The initial estimate is that our net cost would be US$1,950. The full cost would be close to US$3,500 ...but some rebates and tax credits from the state and federal government will reduce that nicely.

So I'm now waiting for some bids and more info. We may also explore just putting in a tankless electric  water heater -  more research to be done - but I'd really like to go solar. Watch for the updates :)

Litton house: electricity 100% from renewable sources

Yup, 100% of the electricity that we consume at our house is generated from renewable sources. Well, that's the net effect anyway. Our local electric company, TECO, has a program whereby one can purchase renewable energy 'blocks'. Each block costs US$5 per month and is equal to 200 kWh of electricity. Our average monthly use is currently 1400 kWh (more in summer and less in winter). So we have signed up to purchase 7 blocks per month. It's a bit silly, in a sense, that we'll be paying US$35 a month more each month for energy that ultimately costs less once one factors in the long-term costs to the planet. But that's OK. The way this program works in reality is that by purchasing 7 blocks of energy each month from renewable sources, TECO will route 1400 kWh of electricity (generated from solar / landfill gas / biomass sources) into the portion of the grid that serves our neighborhood.

My hope is that enough homes and businesses will sign on to these programs that eventually the bulk of the energy we use will be produced from renewable sources.