mapawatt

Advantages of a metal roof

Chris — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:44:21 +0000

traditional exterior design by burlington architect Smith & Vansant Architects PC

As I’ve been learning more about trying to one day build my dream green home I’ve come across metal roofs. I like the way they look and they can offer some nice advantages for clean energy and energy conservation, including:

No need for replacement like shingle roofs = more long term sustainability
Recyclable at the end of life
Reflects more heat than a shingle roof = great for hot climates
Great for rainwater collection systems
Ease of install for solar PV systems

Another advantage is that they hold up very well in storms as you don’t have to worry about losing shingles. Houzz.com had a great article on the advantages of metal roofing (it was the inspiration for this post).

Home energy expert and another Atlanta based blogger, Allison Bailes of Energy Vanguard had this to say about metal roofs:

I like metal roofs and installed one on the house I built. The can help with cooling in hot climates and probably have a lower lifetime embodied energy cost than shingles because they don’t need to be replaced as frequently.

The biggest disadvantage is a higher initial cost compared to an asphalt shingle roof. Hometips.com also has a great list of advantages and disadvantages of a metal roof. One of those disadvantages I really didn’t think of is the roof getting dented during a hail storm, although I guess this happens to shingle roofs as well.

There is a federal tax credit for metal roof (with appropriate pigmented coatings) and even asphalt roof (with cooling granules) is available that covers 10% of the cost of the roof (up to $500).

Do any of you have experience with metal roofs? Other than liking the way they look (and writing a blog post), I don’t know much about them.

Are smart meters safe?

Chris — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:47:34 +0000

We probably haven’t dedicated enough space to one of the trendiest items for politicians/business people trying to promote clean energy and energy efficiency: the smart grid and smart meters. Probably because we think they’re a bit overrated, a fact we hit on in our post “Smart Grid – Who benefits most, utilities or customers“. This thought was reinforced in our post “Living with a smart meter” where we chronicled Gary Hart’s observations about his life with a PG&E installed smart meter.

Aside from the fact of how useful smart meters are to utility customers, what about something more important: the safety of smart meters. There is at least one smart grid safety documentary and a blog titled Stop Smart Meters that don’t think they’re safe.

The Electric Power Research Institute researched the safety of smart meters last year and they were pretty clear that they’re evaluation found that radiation from smart meters fell well below the FCC limits on radiation:

The EPRI research addressed RF from a specific type of smart meter with measurements conducted at the manufacturer’s test facility. For a continuously-operating rack of 10 meters, each operating at a nominal power rating of 250 milliwatts (typical of many residential units), the RF power density level 1 foot in front of the rack was 8 percent of the FCC limit; at 20 and 50 feet, these values dropped to 0.18 and 0.11 percent, respectively. From 8 inches behind the rack, RF power density was 0.6 percent of the FCC limit.

Notice that their report said “8 percent of“, not “8 percent over”.

According to a Grist article on the safety of smart meters, the radiation from a cellphone at your ear is 1000 micro-watts/cm^2! Almost 5 times the maximum level that the Stop Smart Meter film links to in a research PDF. So why aren’t these documentaries focusing on cell phones instead of smart meters? I guess all these people worried about smart meters don’t use cell phones.

While I’m not sure if smart meters actually help customers save energy, I wouldn’t be worried about the safety of a smart meter if I had one on my home. I’d be more worried about fossil fuel power pollution. When researching this issue for yourself, I would be wary about looking at numbers of radiation that aren’t compared to other sources of radiation that we live with in our daily lives. Also, keep in mind that you should only be concerned with the radiation you would receive from a smart meter while living in your home, not 1 meter in front of the meter. How often have you stood right in front of your existing meter? What about the amount of time you spend with a cell phone inches from your brain!

What are your thoughts?

Pedal to Petal bicycle compost pickup

Chris — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:15:32 +0000

I love a good play on words. I really love a sustainably themed play on words. Pedal to Petal is a company located in Victoria, British Columbia that among other things, offers a vegetable scrap pick-up service. From their site, “For 5$ a pickup, we’ll haul your kitchen scraps away by bike and turn them into rich, organic compost.”

What happens to the finished compost? Again, from their site, “The finished compost is currently donated to farms in the city, and to the generous compost hosts who lend us the space in their yard for a portion of the finished soil.”

Why would you want to use a service like this? Well, if you don’t want to build your own compost pile but you hate seeing future plant fertilizer being hauled off to waste away in a garbage dump, then a service like Pedal to Petal would be great. Not only are you helping local farms, but you’re also providing employment and promoting sustainable transportation in your community.

http://pedaltopetal.com/about

Pedal to Petal has been working since 2008 to achieve the following goals:

To reduce polluting emissions, reduce landfill volume and reduce dependence on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers.
To create employment for our members that aligns with our deep commitment to environmental protection, sustainability, social justice and community self-sufficiency.
Increase the amount of food being grown in the city of Victoria and assist in the effort to provide fresh, healthy food to anyone who wants it, regardless of their income.

Build your own compost pile

Chris — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:02:13 +0000

While I’ve featured my compost pile before, I don’t think I’ve dedicated a whole post to it. We’ve had a pile below our deck for almost three years now. It is probably one of the easiest, cheapest, and most rewarding sustainable project you can do. Here are the instructions for building your own:

Get 4 posts and some chicken wire
Put the posts in the ground in a square pattern. Wrap chicken wire around posts.
Start putting in compost feed

You want to shoot for a 50/50 mixture of green (high nitrogen) and brown (high carbon) materials. Think grass clippings vs. wood chips. Or new dead stuff vs. old dead stuff. We put the following in our compost:

Fruit/Vegetable scraps from the kitchen
Paper towels (green friendly cleaning solutions only)
Cardboard cereal boxes
Leaves, twigs, etc.
Coffee grounds
Pet hair
Dryer lint

What we dont put in the compost:

Meat
Dairy
Carbs (bread/pastas. They just turn to glue)
Plastics
Dog poop (high bacteria)

Here’s a great list of things you can or can’t put in your compost pile. My neighbor brews his own beer and he brought over the spent grain once, but it was a lot and probably too much for my compost pile. It started to smell a bit because my mini pile couldn’t digest it fast enough. I’ve had a couple mishaps, like the time I dumped the paper from the paper shredder in the compost but forgot I shredded a bunch of old credit cards. Or the time I saw a possum rooting around down there (it was only once, I swear). It requires a little bit of turning to keep oxygen moving in and prevent it from smelling (it’s not a bad smell though).

Overall, it’s very low maintenance. I can reach write over the deck and drop stuff in. It really cuts down on the trash we have to throw away. It’s pretty cool to see all the stuff you throw in there turn to dirt in a few months. It’s also rewarding when you start finding a bunch of earthworms. You know they’re doing the hard work for you.

I use the compost in my herb garden and hanging tomatoes in the summer. I wish we had a bigger yard so I had more things to use it on, but hey, dirt doesn’t really go bad. You can also find nice enclosed compost pails that make it easy to turn them.

So what are you waiting for, gardening season is right around the corner!

Embrace the EV future

Chris — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:33:09 +0000

Americans (both consumers and the media) have been slow to embrace the EV future. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) recently addressed this issue with their excellent post, “Why So Many Critics After 17,000 EV Sales in First Year?“.

They explain why RMI embraces an EV future:

Rocky Mountain Institute sees EVs as a crucial step in moving the United States away from fossil fuels for reasons of national security, human health, environmental protection and durable economic advantage. EV benefits go beyond fuel economy. Reinventing Fire, RMI’s new, peer-reviewed book backed by 30 years of Institute research, shows that EVs—ultimately made of ultrastrong, ultralight materials that dramatically speed energy savings—can become energy storage vessels that feed electricity back into a revamped, more-secure electrical grid.

And criticize the calls for elimination of the $7,500 tax credit and unfair cherry-picking of negative EV facts:

Of course people respond to incentives, and the EV tax credit—written to phase out when a manufacturer’s sales hit 200,000—is a proven way to spur a socially desirable change. Governments have long subsidized transportation, directly and indirectly, from granting rights for oil drilling to building our vast network of roads with tax dollars. Because Congress has approved tougher fuel economy standards, creating an incentive for EV buyers similar to the hybrid incentive that was phased out as sales grew would seem like consistent policy.

These calls to repeal the EV credit show both that the nation can’t necessarily count on Congress to guide its energy future (though, in fairness, Congress is a long way from acting on this) and that the nation’s media are adopting a flawed narrative about EVs. It is becoming pro forma that news stories about EVs say that Volt and Leaf sales disappointed this year and that the Volt is under investigation for battery fires. (General Motors on Thursday announced a fix to strengthen the Volt battery case, a day after niche EV maker Fisker, which has had no fires, recalled 239 cars to study similar issues.) Most EV media pieces—the Post editorial being no exception—lack context about early hybrid sales and the fact that two Volt fires started under extreme conditions in a laboratory, unlike the tens of thousands of real-life fires each year in gas-powered vehicles.

The Post editorial (which incorrectly said the Volt fires occurred in “road tests,”) took this tilted narrative to a new level, saying, “The Obama administration says that the credit helps build a market for EVs, which helps create jobs. Given the price of eligible models, like the $100,000 Fisker Karma, that rationale sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics. …” The piece cherry-picked the Fisker’s price tag as an example of overpriced EVs, but made no mention of the best-selling EV, the Leaf, which lists for about $32,000 before the tax credit.

I highly recommend reading the full article on the RMI website (linked to above).

Critics of electric vehicles say they are overpriced and that buyers wont recoup the higher up-front costs in gasoline savings. To those critics, I say you’re missing the point. I addressed this issue in our post Payback of Electric Cars:

The first Leaf/Volt buyers will not be buying their car because it is going to save them money at the gas pump. They will be buying the Leaf/Volt because they want an electric car.

Look at it this way: What is the economic practicality of a Lexus, which is just a souped up Toyota. Why spend the extra money on a Lexus when it will never pay for itself over the regular Toyota?

People don’t buy Lexus because it saves them money. They buy Lexus because they want heated leather seats, and wood-grain, and xenon headlights, and nice sound systems, and navigation, and etc. etc. etc. The first electric car buyers aren’t simply buying them to save money; they are buying an electric car because they value having a car that uses less gas for the way it makes them feel. They view an electric car or plug-in hybrid as a luxury; just like some people see chrome wheels as a luxury.

Those who embrace the EV future see value in living sustainably. A future filled with electric vehicles means less air pollution (especially as we clean up our electric grid) and a stronger America. Let’s quit bemoaning the flaws of EVs and start championing the benefits so an EV future becomes a reality.

Check out our updated list of currently available electric vehicles.