Like many people these days, I have been concerned about the skyrocketing oil prices and wondering what they will do to my pocketbook when winter rolls around. My husband and I live in an old 10-room farmhouse (early 1800s) in Bolton, and there are limits to what we can do to wean our household off of oil and off of electricity, which is also generated in part by oil and other fossil fuels.
We moved to our home during the last oil crisis—two days before the blizzard of ’78, to be exact. The house—a fixer-upper whose size and heating requirements made it a white elephant on the real estate market during the oil crisis—stayed on the market for two years before we bought it. One of the first things we did to our work-in-progress (a.k.a. the “money pit”) was to insulate the attic floor. During the 30 years we’ve lived here, we’ve chipped away at the things that needed doing, but with today’s growing energy crisis, some of those things have taken on more urgency. Besides insulating the attic floor, we’ve insulated the hot water tank, replaced most of our windows, and continue to work on plugging up leaks in places like electrical outlets.
We’ve also gotten used to setting the programmable thermostat we installed about four degrees lower in the winter, at 64º rather than 68º.
Has it made a difference? I track our oil and electrical usage on computer-based spreadsheets, so I can see the effects of changes we make. In 2005, the year after we replaced most of our windows, our annual oil usage went from 1,873 gallons to 1,116. Last year we used 879 gallons.
Two years ago we had a home energy audit and found that our old clunker spare refrigerator in the shed was sucking up about 180 kilowatt hours of electricity per month—nearly 30 percent of what we’re currently using. We replaced it with a more energy-efficient model. I may be burned at the stake by the Energy Star gods for saying this—but we didn’t buy an Energy Star refrigerator. We shopped around and found that the Energy Star refrigerators we looked at were quite a bit more expensive than other models. We did, however, compare the energy ratings and kWH usage between Energy Star and other models before making that decision, and we found a non-Energy Star unit that used only about 40 more kWH per year than its Energy Star counterpart. The savings in purchase price was great enough to justify the purchase of the non-Energy Star unit.
Another result of our energy audit was the replacement of about two dozen standard light bulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs).
Did any of this make a difference? With these changes, our annual electricity usage went from 11,505 kWH in 2005 to 9,565 kWH in 2006.
In 2007 we further reduced our energy usage by changes in the laundry room. First, our clothes washer gave up the ghost, so we went shopping for a new model. From all we’d heard and read, we knew that front-loaders were more energy-efficient than our old top-loader, with the added benefit that they use less water. As with the refrigerator, we found there were non-Energy Star models that were almost as energy-efficient, and bought one that was significantly less expensive than the Energy Star version.
Next, we purchased a five-line retractable clothesline and installed it outside, and started hanging the laundry out to dry, rather than using the electric dryer. I bought a small wooden drying rack for indoor use during inclement weather, but it wasn’t big enough or sturdy enough to accommodate more than a few items, so it didn’t get a lot of use. This summer I purchased a larger model, which should get more use than the other one this winter. (Incidentally, one of the objections people have to hanging clothes to dry is that the clothes are often stiff when dry. I’ve found that use of phosphate-free detergents helps, along with the addition of about ¼ cup of white vinegar to the wash cycle.)
Did it make a difference? These changes brought our yearly electrical usage from 9,565 kWH in 2006 to 7,085 in 2007. To further reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we enrolled in National Grid’s Green Start program, so the electricity we are using is generated in part by renewables.
We continue to look for ways to reduce our reliance on oil, and have read about alternative energy sources for heating and electricity. Our house and water are heated by oil—the heat is steam, via radiators. We have a centrally-located woodstove, which we use for heat in the winter whenever we’re home. It does a good job of heating the place up, and the ceramic tile we have on the floor in the “woodstove room” helps retain the heat. In the winter the furnace comes on only when the temperature drops and we aren’t around to feed the stove. We’ve found that, in the dead of winter, keeping the thermostat set lower than 64° seems to be more inefficient. The furnace has to work so hard to get the temperature back up, that the temperature will actually drop several degrees in bitter-cold weather—with the furnace cranking full-bore—before any heat gets to the radiators. And it takes hours.
The furnace also comes on—in summer and winter—to heat our water.
Unfortunately, most of the alternative heating systems we’ve learned about are very expensive and out of our reach at the moment. But this spring, eager to find a way to further reduce our oil consumption, we decided to look into a solar water-heating system. I wasn’t sure something like this could even be installed in an old house like ours, but thought it was worth pursuing. We talked to an installer who explained how such a system could be implemented in our house, with minimal disruption to walls and ceilings. We calculated that, based on the price of oil (back in May), and including $3,000 worth of credits from the state and federal government, our payback period would be five to six years. At current oil prices, it will certainly be less. But a consideration as important to us as ROI is availability of oil. We want to make sure that whatever oil we use is going to where we need it the most.
In July, our solar water-heating system was installed. It consists of two flat panels on our south-facing roof, a water tank, and piping that runs from the panels, along the roof and down the back of the house on the outside, to the tank. The insulated pipes are filled with glycol, which captures the heat from the panels and circulates it into the tank. Installers ran into a snag when they realized that our boiler produces steam heat. They hadn’t run into an old system like this before, and had to go back to the drawing board to figure out the best way to connect it to the solar water heater. They settled on a configuration that actually takes the boiler out of the equation altogether for water heating, and added an electric water heater with a passive link to the solar water tank.
With this configuration, the furnace will come on only when the thermostat calls for heating. The electric water heater will come on when it senses that the temperature of the water from the solar tank has fallen below a preset threshold, which will occur most often during wintry stretches of cloudy weather when the solar panels aren’t absorbing as much heat from the sun. We’ll be using more electricity, but less oil, and we are assured that we will experience a net reduction in energy usage with the new system.
Will it make a difference? I’m sure it will, and I’ll be tracking it closely on my spreadsheet.