Archive for the ‘Environmental Impact Calculator’ Category
January 15th, 2009
Dear President Obama: Let’s Turn The White House Green
Stumble it!
President Obama, we humbly beseech you to make your new home, The White House, a model green home. You have an incredible opportunity to make it a home from which all Americans can learn, and of which we can all be proud. What better way to start our country off on a bright new green path to the future than by making The White House the Great American Green House?
We’ve been encouraged by some of the things you’ve said about your intentions to make your home more eco-friendly, and we’d like to offer some thoughts on how you might flesh-out your green home renovation program.
First, let’s ground ourselves in some numbers. The White House is over 55,000 square feet and has 132 rooms. There are over 35 bathrooms and the building has three kitchens. Using our Household Environmental Impact Calculator, (and a few resources like the CBECS data for commercial buildings as your house doubles as an office building) we estimate that that The White House has a carbon footprint in the range of 1.2-1.5 million pounds of CO2 per year, uses somewhere around one million gallons of water, and generates over 50,000 pounds of trash each year. As a point of reference the average 2000 sq. foot American home has a carbon footprint of 65,000 pounds, uses 90,000 gallons or water and generates 3,800 pounds of trash per year. So The White House is no low-impact house! We have our work cut out for us.
Fortunately your predecessors have already taken some steps in a positive direction. President Carter famously installed a solar water system in 1979, which was then unfortunately taken down by President Reagan. However, in 2002 a new solar system was installed to power lighting for the grounds. Apparently the toilets have been changed to low-flow models and many of the water fixtures have also been upgraded. President Clinton commissioned the Rocky Mountain Institute to do a study on the White House and make recommendations for environmental improvements. We’re not sure how many of those got made– you’ll want to kick the tires on that one. (Perhaps someone from RMI could comment here?)
Here are some ideas we’d like you to explore for turning The White House a nice shade of green:
1) Let’s get the entire building off the grid. You could install more solar panels, and/or augment the system with a wind turbine. You could also look at geothermal energy options. We think it would quite feasible to generate enough power for the building using renewable energy sources. This would serve as a great example of clean-power living, and would actually save the government money in the long run.
2) How is the insulation situation? I’m sure you have attic insulation but let’s have a look inside the walls. I read that there are hundreds of year’s worth of copper wiring in many of the walls– let’s clean them out and blow in some soy foam or denim insulation. Full insulation could reduce heating and cooling costs by 5-10%.
3) Let’s turn part of the lawn into an organic vegetable garden. Encouraging Americans to eat fresh, local, organic produce will cut down on carbon emissions and also help us live healthier lives. That green grass is lovely, yes, but it sure sucks a lot of water for a low return on investment. Eleanor Roosevelt started a Victory Garden at your house long ago…let’s bring back that wonderful tradition! Author Michael Pollan has also advocated this idea. It would be a great treat to serve visiting dignitaries “Roasted White House Garden Vegetables” with their meal, would it not?
4) Speaking of organics, let’s make sure there’s a composting system in place. What happens with all of the food trash from the kitchens today? Well a composter could reduce the building’s trash load by 25-25%. It would be easy to set up, and your gardeners could use the compost mulch on your vegetable garden.
5) We hear Michelle has picked her decorator… and we hope that they’ll choose to use plenty of eco-friendly product in your decoration choices. How about some cork floors? They are sustainable and absorb sound. Or some reclaimed American wood flooring could look very nice. For furnishing we recommend antiques (anything used is more sustainable than newly made) or eco-friendly furniture made of sustainably-harvested woods and other recycled materials. For paints, obviously make sure to use no-VOC varieties, so that you and your family don’t breath toxic fumes. We need you to stay healthy for at least eight years!
6) Let’s review the lighting. Is everything running on LED and/or compact fluorescent lighting? The Pentagon has just announced they’re switching to LEDs– so should The White House. And we’d also want to make sure that we had maximized the use of light sensors– no need to light uninhabited areas. Perhaps there is even an option for increased day-lighting? We could install some new solar tube lighting to save energy and money.
7) How about getting all of your vehicles to run on biodiesel? There are a lot of big SUVs rushing around you and your home… it would be wonderful to have them running on American biodiesel fuels. Energy independence starts at The White House! You could have a biodiesel pumping station right there on the White House lot. Maybe one day even Air Force One will run on biodiesel!
Those are just some initial ideas. We here at Low Impact Living can’t wait to see you inaugurated and we hope you settle into your new home very nicely. We’ll look forward to hearing news of your Green House plans!
Popularity: 10% [?]
January 12th, 2009
Green Home Contest: Win 3 Nights at the Green Hotel Carlton
We want to start the New Year off with an eco-bang, and so we’re launching a new Green Home Contest. Low Impact Living and Joie de Vivre Hotels challenge you to make your home as green as you can! We’re going to reward the greenest home of all with a luxurious 3-night stay at the very environmentally-friendly Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. More on the hotel and the prize in a minute!
Low Impact Living will identify the single family home (and its proud owners) that has the lowest Low Impact Living Index (calculated using our Environmental Impact Calculator), and we’re going to share with you what that family has done to get there. Don’t worry if you haven’t done big projects like installing solar panels or a wind turbine - as the calculator shows, many of the best green home projects are simple and inexpensive. We’ll show you how to identify projects to make your home more eco-friendly. The contest will close on February 15, 2009. So you have time to make green changes!
What you have to do to enter
1. Visit our Household Environmental Impact Calculator and calculate your base LILI (Low Impact Living Index). It will only take you five-ten minutes to use the calculator and create your account.
2. Once you have entered all of your base inputs, move on to the “select projects” page of the calculator. Make sure you only check projects that you’ve finished (or will finish by February 15th) before you log out.
3. Make sure that you log out or save your profile before leaving - if you just move on to another web site without logging out, your inputs could be lost.
4. If you’ve already created an account through our calculator, then you need to return and, log in again. We’ve added some new features recently, and they won’t work unless you refresh your account.
5. The calculator isn’t all-encompassing yet, so there may be projects that you’ve done that don’t show up. If this is true, send us an email at contest@lowimpactliving.com describing what you’ve done. Low Impact Living staffers will review your efforts and award up to a 5% additional deduction for compelling projects.
How we’ll select the winner
The contest closes on February 15, 2009, and we will announce the winner on March 1. This will give us time to check with the finalists to make sure that they’ve completed all of their checked projects. (Past entrants to our green home contests are not eligible.)
If you are a finalist (in our top 10 lowest LILI scores), we may ask you to verify that your projects are actually completed, via photos or receipts / invoices for work performed. We’ll also ask for your address (not to be published!) so that we can verify entered information about your home. If you are a winner, then you have to be willing to let us share your projects and process with everyone via our blog, and to provide us with the photos and project descriptions necessary to do that. You’ll become a green star overnight!
What you could win!
The greenest homeowner will receive three nights at Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. The Hotel Carlton is a member of the Joie de Vivre chain of hotels, which is deeply committed to making sustainability part of its core business operations. In fact, their mission is to “adhere to the strictest environmental standards, engage in sustainable practices and maintain an impeccable quality of guest experience.” The JDV Hotels environmental program includes hotel-wide recycling programs, composting, use of renewable energy, use of recycled paper products, energy-efficient lighting and much more. To learn more about Joie de Vivre’s commitment to sustainability, click here. To learn more about the Hotel Carlton, click here.
So, good luck, and get to greening!
Popularity: 6% [?]
November 5th, 2008
Your Eco-Friendly Home: A Guide to Your Dream Green Abode
If the current buyers’ market has you ready to buy the eco-home of your dreams, pick up a copy of Your Eco-Friendly Home: Buying, Building, Remodeling Green by Sid Davis. This guide gives you all the general home building, buying or renovating information you need, be it the low down on mortgages, credit scores, or contracting. But Your Eco-Friendly Home then takes you a step further, explaining how to make your home as green as possible while keeping your budgetary and other individual needs in mind.
Your Eco-Friendly Home is divided into 3 sections — buying, building, and remodeling — so readers can skip ahead to the section that’s most relevant to them. This no-nonsense book wastes no time convincing you why a green home’s desirable, as anyone who picks up the book is likely already aware of both the environmental and personal benefits a green living space provides. Instead, Your Eco-Friendly Home dives right into the thick of things, kicking off the first chapter by explaining why you should begin your home search not by immediately looking at houses, but by get your loan pre-approval letter.
Throughout the book, Your Eco-Friendly Home provides helpful checklists, such as “11 Things to Consider Before Making an Offer” and “Avoiding the 7 Biggest Mistakes that Many New Green Homeowners Make.” There’s advice on finding the help you need, whether it’s an eco-friendly real estate agent, a green architect, or a knowledgeable contractor. And there’s easy-to-understand information on how you can accrue passive energy savings, pick out the best ventilation system, and decide on whether to invest in solar and wind power, among other helpful tips.
Smaller remodeling projects — from creating a green roof to simply setting up a composter — are also covered, along with some basic information on cost-benefit analyses in evaluating what project to undertake. Of course, LIL’s own Environmental Impact Calculator can help you crunch the numbers on green renovation projects you have in mind!
I especially loved the way Your Eco-Friendly Home shows how green living extends outside the home by emphasizing the importance of location. As many environmentalists have pointed out, an eco-mansion in a far-off suburb that requires a lot of driving to get anywhere still gives you a pretty big carbon footprint. The book strongly recommends considering issues such as proximity to good schools, work, and amenities, with an eye to keeping your footprint as small as possible.
The appendix points to a wealth of resources and green websites to help you towards your eco-friendly journey — and even includes tips on selling an eco-friendly home!
Want a preview? Read the 12 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Green, a list adapted from Your Eco-Friendly Home. The book’s available for $17.95 now at popular retailers.
Popularity: 5% [?]
August 4th, 2008
Winner of LIL Green Home Contest Announced!
We’re pleased to announce John Neville and Jawn McKinley as the winners of our first Low Impact Living Green Home Contest! Of the over 1,000 users who registered using our Environmental Impact Calculator during the contest period, their Low Impact Living Index of 11 was the lowest of the low. Given John’s background, it’s no surpise – he has been working in sustainability for over 20 years and is on the Board of Directors of Sustainable Arizona – as you’ll see, he practices what he preaches!
John and his wife Jawn had begun to employ many green techniques in their former home in Minnesota, but when they decided to build a new home in Arizona he started with a clean green slate. The results were pretty impressive: their Low Impact Living Index is a mere 11, which indicates it has an environmental impact nearly 90% lower than the typical home in his region. Compared to the average home in the desert southwest, the house uses 85% less energy and 90% less fresh water, and it produces 90% less stormwater runoff, 80% less trash and over 99% less wastewater! Oh, and John and Jawn’s carbon footprint is a net zero due to the high energy efficiency of their home (including a solar hot water heater and passive solar heating and cooling), the purchase of green power from their utility, and their use of carbon offsets for their cars and air travel. We’ll now walk you through the main areas that allowed John and Jawn to achieve this amazing performance.
Energy Efficiency & Carbon Footprint
John and Jawn’s LILI score of 11 is nearly 90 points lower than the typical score in their region, and 45 of the 90 point reduction come from their efforts in energy efficiency (and associated carbon footprint). They’ve done all of the easy things – compact fluorescent lighting throughout, low-flow water fixtures, pipe insulation, efficient appliances, etc. But they’ve also employed some more substantial and advanced green building features, including:
- Use of a solar hot water heater and in-floor radiant heating to heat the house in the winter. The house is also oriented to the south, has a heavy concrete slab to retain heat and ample windows on the south wall to improve passive solar heating.
Despite summer daytime temperatures in the high 90s or more, the house has no air conditioning. The roof is insulated to R-45 and has a cool roof installed, and the walls are formed by insulated concrete forms (ICFs) that are insulate to R-25 and are made of 85% recycled material. In addition, John can circulate cool water through the radiant system to further cool the slab on hot days. There are also awnings over all south-facing windows that shade the intense summer sun (shown at right on a sunny summer day).
One side benefit of these features: John says visitors are often amazed that he’s always walking around in bare feet, whether it’s on an eight-degree winter night or a 100-degree summer day!
Because their home is so efficient right now, solar electric doesn’t make all that much sense yet: the payback period would be more than 20 years based on current power prices and rebates. Instead, he buys green power that comes from solar and wind energy from his local utility.
Water and Wastewater Efficiency
Another 32 points were lopped off of their LILI score by being incredibly water-efficient. This is critical in the Southwest, as water is always scarce and getting scarcer due to global warming. Once again, John combined the accessible with the truly innovative to build a water efficient house. Through a combination of low-flow fixtures and water-efficient appliances, John and Jawn use only 30 gallons a day per person indoors, much lower than the national average of 70 gallons per capita per day.
In Arizona, though, it’s what outside that really counts, for over half of residential water use is for irrigation. John and Jawn rarely use any irrigation water, for not only do they have all drought-tolerant native plants around their home, they also have 3,500 gallons of storage in two cisterns (almost three months worth of irrigation) to collect rainwater from their rooftop. And, they have an innovative wastewater system that collects solids in a tank, aerates and lightly chlorinates the liquids, and then distributes the cleaned effluent to water a bed of native plants and trees – they have nearly zero true wastewater discharge.
Other Savings
The balance of John’s LILI savings come from nearly eliminating stormwater runoff (four points) using cisterns and an innovative network of terraced gardens, swales and water holes to slow, filter and capture runoff from all but the biggest storms (all shown in the image above). They also compost and recycle everything they can, reducing trash to only 20% of the typical household in his region (eight points).
Lessons Learned
While John built their home from scratch, he learned lessons that are applicable to both new construction and renovation projects. Some of his key thoughts:
- Always start with the small projects first. By focusing on such things as using compact fluorescent lighting everywhere, making sure his home was very tight and well-insulated, and using low-flow water fixtures, he was able to get away with much smaller heating, cooling and renewable energy systems. This in turn helped him keep his overall budget quite reasonable - about $185 / square foot.
- Use the local climate to your advantage. John designed his home so that it takes advantage of Arizona’s ample sun in the winter and the cool of the earth in the summer, but you can often do the same with an existing home. John recommended that a neighbor run only the ventilation portion of her central AC system at night to bring the cool desert air into her home, and that simple change reduced her AC needs by several hours each day.
- Green doesn’t have to be more expensive, but it might require more time and effort. When John built his home five years ago, he said that many of the vendors he worked with weren’t familiar with green techniques and products, and he had to play a very strong oversight role to make sure things got done the right way. There are many more green product and contractor options now, especially near larger urban areas, but you’ll still have to spend some significant time ensuring that your contractors are using the right green products and techniques.
Next Steps
One final key lesson that John has taken away from his green efforts: regardless of how much you’ve done, you can always improve. He says he’s always tweaking things and making minor improvements. As for big projects, John hopes to get rid of his backup natural-gas-powered boiler (used only in the coldest and grayest of winter periods) and replace it with a solar-PV-driven tankless hot water system at some point, eliminating his last use of fossil fuels at home.
John and Jawn, thanks so much for sharing your project and insights with us, and congratulations on having such a low-impact green home!
To learn more about how to do many green projects in your home, visit LIL’s green projects page.
Click on these links for how-to information on the following related topics: radiant heating, rain gardens, home energy efficiency, solar hot water heaters, and graywater recycling.
Popularity: 3% [?]
June 16th, 2008
Win $500 For Your Great Green Home!
We’re amazed at how many of you have taken action to make your homes green, based on what you’ve entered in our Environmental Impact Calculator. So amazed, in fact, that we’re going to reward the greenest home of them all with a $500 credit for green products and services from Low Impact Living. We’re going to identify the single family home (and its proud owners) that has the lowest Low Impact Living Index (calculated using our Environmental Impact Calculator), and we’re going to share with you what that family has done to get there. Don’t worry if you haven’t installed solar panels or a graywater system - as the calculator shows, many of the best projects aren’t that expensive. Also, we’ll be giving a second prize of $250 to a randomly-selected entrant, even if you’re at the very beginning of your green path! So, even if you’ve just started out, throw your hat in the ring and see where you stand!
What you have to do
- If you’ve already created a LILI account, then you need to return and, at a minimum, log in again. We’ve added some new features recently, and they won’t work unless you refresh your account. If you haven’t used the LILI calculator before, then visit www.lowimpactliving.com/scores and get started.
- Once you have entered all of your base inputs, move on to the “select projects” page of the calculator. Make sure you only check projects that you’ve finished (or will finish by July 18th) before you log out.
- Make sure that you log out or save your profile before leaving - if you just move on to another web site without logging out, your inputs could be lost.
- The calculator isn’t all-encompassing yet, so there may be projects that you’ve done that don’t show up. If this is true, send us an email at contest@lowimpactliving.com describing what you’ve done. LIL staffers will review your efforts and award up to a 5% additional deduction for compelling projects.
How we’ll select a winner
The contest closes on July 18th (extended from July 15th), but we won’t announce winners until the week of July 28th. This will give us time to check with the finalists to make sure that they’ve completed all of their checked projects.
If you are a finalist (in our top 10 lowest LILI scores), we may ask you to verify that your projects are actually completed, via photos or receipts / invoices for work performed. We’ll also ask for your address (not to be published!) so that we can verify entered information about your home.
If you are a winner, then you have to be willing to let us share your projects and process with everyone via our blog, and to provide us with the photos and project descriptions necessary to do that. You’ll become a green star overnight!
What You Could Win
The greenest homeowner will receive credits for $500 of products or services found on LIL’s website. If it is a product or products that can be purchased via links from our site, we’ll simply purchase your “wish list” for you and send it your way. If instead it is services (say, a few visits from a green cleaning service or a small down-payment on solar panels), then we’ll pay the vendor directly once you’ve agreed on a price and have a quote from them. The same goes for our randomly-selected $250 second prize. It’s as simple as that!
At the end, we’ll also publish the collective impacts of our calculator crew - even if you don’t win, you can feel proud once you see the tons of CO2 and tanker trucks full of water that we’ve collectively saved!
So, good luck, and get greening!
Popularity: 2% [?]
