Why houses don't use the information we already have

I love fireplaces. I know people who hate them, but I love them. I have fond childhood memories of getting to build fires and light them any time I wanted to at a certain neighbor's house, so there's a sense of connectedness and competency that comes from seeing one. Another part is the coziness that the smell of pine smoke hanging in the winter air evokes. I've never had to depend on a fireplace for heat, so it's recreational. And I make fires so rarely that I just buy pre-chopped wood, so there isn't work associated with it.

My childhood home had a fireplace chimney on the roof, but the space the fireplace would have been in under it was a sun room. Someone long before my parents bought the house took out the fireplace. I always wondered about this, and vowed that I'd never do that.

Well, I have a fireplace now, and I'm seriously thinking about doing exactly that. It is the fireplace that makes my living room cold.

First, there there the masonry which conducts my heat outside. Second there is a pipe that allows air warmed through the glass doors to move upward toward the sky. Third, and most frustratingly, the fireplace is located in a bump-out in an external wall and the bumpout is capped above ground. So this conduit for the warm air in my house is exposed to the elements on 5 out of six sides. Finally, the cap on the bottom on my bumpout is rough plywood. And when I knock on it, I can hear the firebox echoing. So it is an uninsulated exposed masonry extension of my living room. I feel like my house is mooning the world.

When I was house shopping I found myself wondering over and over, "With 6,000 years of building experience, why do we still do things like this?" My house was the first I'd seen that I didn't have that reaction too... all the windows are double-paned, the roof space is insulated, I share a wall with neighbors for better use of heating resources, the roof lines and decks are positioned to provide shelter from the summer sun but access for the winter sun, and the floors are partitioned into modest-sized rooms that open onto shared areas.

Then there's this darn chimney. So why do we do things like this?

The simple answer is it's the market. I want the best house for the money I have to spend, and I'm more likely to respond to the visible things inside -- the fireplace -- than the care taken in construction. If I wanted to buy a house this size with a pre-insulated basement, insulation in the external walls, an efficient fireplace, great window placement, and energy star appliances, they're available just up the street... for a mere doubling of the cost. If I want all that, and my current house payment, I'd have a condo in a transitional urban neighborhood.

This, of course, is also the reason why there are so many more houses like mine than there are like the houses up the street.

What's "A Lot"?

My friend Monkey and I've been chatting in the comments section of my September Quote of the Day about what the "a lot" in the quote means. The quote comes from a forthcoming book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air, by David J.C. MacKay as noted in this post.

MacKay is a Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Physics Department at the University of Cambridge and the gist of his book is to take known sources of sustainable energy, estimate their production at full implementation, and to compare that to current energy use. The result is that for Britons there is some cutting back on electrical consumption to be done before they get under the sustainable threshold (no carbon-emitting sources of electricity). There's a much bigger change required if they are also to avoid nuclear sources.

The quote I lifted was MacKay's justification for setting a threshold of a 10% reduction in energy consumption for the efficiency measure to make his list of things Great Britain needs to focus their political will on. His contrasting point was that there's a massive marketing campaign focused on getting people to unplug wall chargers when they're not being used. Here he compares the power draw of all the chargers he could find in his house -- 0.5 Watts -- to the total average power consumption of the average Brit -- 5000 Watts. So the action of unplugging chargers is focused on 1/10000th of the average power consumption of a Briton. If the world cut it's total power consumption by 1/100000th, we'd hardly notice the difference.

So, if we're going to advertise, if the politicians and greens are going to bloviate, let's do it about things that cut at least 1/10th of our individual and national use.

In terms of looking at what changes I can make as a home-owner and what to focus my time and money on, this yard stick bumps certain projects to the top of the list and other projects lower down. Two things that make the above 10% list are replacing my current fridge with a smaller and efficient model, and replacing my water heater with a tankless water heater. Things that are much lower on the list are hanging a wash line and unplugging the microwave when I'm not using it. These are good things, but they have much less pay back.

Perhaps Monkey is looking for an action point. If you were to go through your life and make a list of all the ways you could save energy or gas or heating oil, and one of those items turned up a 10% savings, focus on getting that done. A list of things to consider:

• Share a ride to work once a week.
• Hibernate or shut off your computer rather than leaving it on.
• If your fridge is nearly empty or contains only compost and condiments, consider unplugging it.
• Change your bulbs to CFLs. Don't use halogen lamps unless they're also working as a space heater.

The Green Job Search

Man! Just when I'm ready to start posting again, I have the freaky experience of being laid off, again, on Tuesday, September the 11th. I have a couple months of perspective on looking, and while I'm not employed yet, I think I have enough objectivity to start to talk about it.

I've been thinking a lot about my Grandfather. When he returned home from his time in WWII, he needed a job. He found one at the nursery around the corner. It wasn't the electronics job he had the skills for, but it was *a* job, and it helped pay the mortgage. I've gotten the impression that this wasn't cable-bill sized pay the mortgage, but that he was actually covering all or most of his mortgage by a job he could walk to.

If I took the rough average of home prices around me, let's say $160,000, and figured the mortgage as .8% of 80% of that home price ($128,000 with 20% down), that's $1024 per month. Now, that figure should be 28% of one person's salary. 1024/.28 = 3657.14 per month, or $44,000 per year.

So, what are the chances that most of the people I work around could find one job in walking distance that would pay that? Pretty slim. There's the Subway, the Burger King, and the Blockbuster. The grocery store might have paid that at one time, but wages paid at grocery stores have been dropping. If I want to ride the bus a couple of miles, there are two Wal-marts, but even if you can get a full-time job there (rare), you're looking at about $23,000.

So, where does the income to buy these houses come from? From people getting in cars and driving to clusters of offices.

Over the summer, I read Blue Sky Dream which is a child's view of the creation of the suburbs. His dad worked in the aeronautics industry and his family was transferred to "The Valley of Heart's Delight" in California just as the transformation from fruit-growing farms to suburban sprawl was starting. By the time he'd graduated from high school there were no longer any fruit farms in the San Fernando valley.

Now that I am looking for work as a professional in one of those office clusters, I see up close one of the elements he talks about. Corporations are indifferent to where their employees live. On the one hand, that's a positive privacy thing. But on the other hand, since every company hires the best qualified people who submit an application during the time a posting is open -- essentially randomizing the process -- qualified person X who lives 3 miles away ends up working for The Other Guy, 25 miles away, while equally qualified person Y commutes past The Other Guy to get to our company.

I feel foolish for trying to find work within a couple miles of home. It seems impractical and hopelessly naive. But I suspect that one major piece to getting to our post-carbon world is figuring out how to have most people do exactly that.