Green Options

Editor’s Note: This post was provided by one of our paid sponsors, Chimneyballoon. Stop heat and AC from escaping through your fireplace or woodburner chimney with a Chimney Balloon fireplace plug draft stopper.

On a cold winter evening, who of us is not tempted to go to the living room, stoke up a fire in the fireplace, and read a book in front of the hearth? You may be thinking “I am doing myself a favor by supplementing the furnace with additional heat”. But there’s a dark secret about your fireplace: you are making your house colder, and could be contributing significantly to pollution depending upon how you burn. Fireplaces can be monstrous energy eaters!

The wood burning fireplace is an “Energy Eater”

The air action that a wood-burning fireplace initiates in our home is wasteful. The second the damper is opened, heated air begins pouring out of the top of the chimney. As the fire in the hearth accelerates, the combustion process grabs already-heated air from your home and burns the oxygen and combustible gasses in it. The heat that is created in this combustion quickly rises and grabs more heated inside air and tosses it up the chimney. You can restrict the amount of inside air that the fireplace has access to by installing glass doors, but this will also severely limit the amount of radiant heat that fireplace can cast forward into your living space. This radiant heat is the heat you feel on your skin in front of the fireplace, and is the only usable heat that the fireplace will produce since the combustion heat is pouring out the top of the chimney. In the meantime the home is drawing in cold outside air from other places (i.e. windows, light sockets, doors, etc) to replace the air that is escaping the home through the chimney. This is referred to as the “stack effect.”

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the final one in an eight-part series. If you are thinking about installing a wood-burning mass heater, this article should help you.

Operating a Mass Heater
Mass heaters are a different approach to burning wood. If you don’t don’t understand this, you won’t just be disappointed — you’ll fill your house with smoke or, worse, poison your family in their sleep! Getting proper performance from a mass heater requires a little planning, and some involvement, on your part.  The tradeoff for this extra effort is safety and tremendous energy efficiency.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the seventh in an eight-part series. If adding thermal mass to your house isn’t realistic, another approach is to install a massive heater. That is to say, the heater contains the thermal mass your house may lack.

Clean and Super-Efficient Wood Heating
Super-efficient wood burning heaters with lots of mass are called by many names: masonry stoves, russian stoves, finnish stoves or finnish fireplaces, mass heaters. Though mass heaters may look like traditional fireplaces, they’re actually very sophisticated heating devices.

Burning wood in a mass heater doesn’t involve feeding in wood a few pieces at a time. The wood is added all at once, lit, and burned as quickly and as hotly as possible. Because of the high combustion temperature, there’s virtually no smoke. Combustion is so complete that, with the exception of a bit of smoke released when the fire is first started, most of what comes out of the chimney is carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the fifth in an eight-part series.

Open fireplaces have a reputation for polluting air. Actually, a fireplace, when burned hot and fast, creates very little pollution. The trouble is, a hot fire in a fireplace sometimes yields less heat than a smoldering fire. Where does the heat go?

The optimal amount of combustion air contains just enough oxygen to burn all combustible gases liberated by the heat. Any additional air grabs heat and sends it up the chimney. Under some circumstances, fireplaces can so far exceed this air-to-fuel ratio that they suck more heat out of a house than they radiate back into it. The fire actually makes the house colder!

Usually when we are talking about plumbing fixtures for green building we are dealing with something that conserves water. But some plumbing devices can contribute to energy savings, as well.

When you are in the shower, the hot water from the shower strikes your body and transfers some heat before it falls away. But most of the heat in that water simply goes down the drain. Reportedly, 80 to 90 percent of the energy used to heat water for the shower is lost down the drain.

A drain water heat recovery unit (DWHR) transfers heat from water running down the drain to cold water going to the water heater. This preheats the water so that the heater is starting with warmer water, and thus needs less energy. A DWHR unit can save as much as 25-30% of the energy used for water heating, and payback periods range from 3 to 7 years, depending on use patterns.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the third in an eight-part series. This article addresses climate conditions found in the San Francisco Bay Area, but may have applicability elsewhere.

Forced air systems are the most common heating systems in California and are used in most new construction elsewhere. They have two big advantages: they are cheap to install, and they provide heat at a moment’s notice. Having “instant-on” heat is vital for intermittent use spaces like ski cabins. Otherwise, forced air is the least energy efficient and least comfortable way of heating a typical home. Why?

Ventilation and Heat Loss

For the health and well-being of its occupants, a home must exhaust stale air and refresh it with new air drawn from outdoors. Forced air systems heat and blow this air, via ducts, throughout your house. Since new air is continually entering and leaving, you are heating the outdoors.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the first in an eight-part series. The series specifically targets climate found in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has applicability elsewhere.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling amounts to 46% of all energy consumed by our homes. Water heating uses another 14%. In coastal California, where extreme heat is rare and winters are mild, a properly sited, well designed passive solar home can generate its own heat and hot water, and do without air conditioning.

Historically, few homes are so well sited or built. Since our area has more heating days than cooling days, most homeowners need a heating system. What few know is that many indoor air quality problems can be by-products of forced air heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in their homes.

I don’t like wearing shoes or socks, but I live in Minnesota so most months out of the year I don’t have a choice. I remember one time when I was a teenager, I decided to walk barefoot down the paved road in front of my parents’ house. It was a beautiful summer day, but my feet later screamed “WHAT WHERE YOU THINKING?!” Yes, the hot pavement scorched the bottoms of my feet. Luckily, a Dutch company has thought of a smarter way to put that hot energy to use.

Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV is siphoning the heat from blacktop roads and parking lots to warm homes and offices. This technology was first dreamed up about 10 years ago, but advances in cleantech and global warming concerns have caused some people to take a second glance.

The technology is called the “Road Energy System” and it’s actually a spin-off of a method to heat roads and reduce the need for maintenance due to cold weather. A grid of flexible, plastic pipes filled with water lay under the pavement and are heated by the sun. As the water is heated, it’s pumped underground, where it stays about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The water can then be brought up later to heat the road and keep the ice off.

It is time to start thinking about getting our homes ready for winter. Maintenance and repair work done while the weather is still mild will pay off not just in the coming cold weather, but with year round benefits. Here are five common issues to think about when considering your winterization projects, and how to avoid making some common mistakes while improving your house.

Window film insulates windows. False.

A window

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Editor’s Note: This week’s post from Lighter Footstep reveals how to stay cool when it’s oh-so-hot. Five Unusual Ways to Stay Cool, by Chris Baskind orginially appeared on July 13, 2007.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the heat is on.

There’s no doubt summer is here — and with it, the perpetual quest to stay cool. For those of us interested in sustainability, the thought of huge summer cooling bills (and all the greenhouse

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Editor's note: Summer's coming, and our friend Chris Baskind, editor at Lighter Footstep, has put together a monster list of tips for staying cool… the green way.

With summer officially around the corner and temperatures edging higher, the Lighter Footstep editors have put together a giant list of ways to keep your cool.

We'll start with a quick apology to our readers in the Southern Hemisphere: we know you're there. Bookmark this and

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