Our oil problem

“Our oil problem is not that “we’re running out.” Our oil problem is that we’re producing so much of the stuff that we are changing the planet’s climate.”
– David Frum, ‘Peak oil’ doomsayers proved wrong
LINK

True on climate, but the commenters at the article have it right:

“[W]e are extraordinarily blessed with a moment of respite to temporarily postpone the extremely difficult economic environment brought on by the decline of abundant oil….but it is only temporary, and we would be wise to use this moment to prepare ourselves.”

My comments: Keep bringing on the bikes, insulation, and solar.

Some day houses for sale will have MPG stickers on them

There is sorta such a thing today.  It’s called HERS.  100 is a “normal” house.  0 is a “net zero energy” house.  And negative means you have even more PVs than you need.  Nice.  Someday websites like realtor.com, redfin.com, etc. will let you search on such things.

The best house I’ve seen is this -33 HERS of Carolyn and Kyle Cave in Hadley, MA.   It’s also nice to know what a house is pre-PV to get an idea of how efficient the house and it’s occupants are.  Oh, and a house in Maynard MA is -8 HERS.

Anyway, good work Caves!  Your house follows the important rule of thumb I now encourage people to use — Build (or pick)  your house with a lot of good roof space for PVs.  Small footprint houses like ours are a little more efficient, but we don’t have nearly as much room for PVs.  Dumb.

(Oh, and our house is nearly 0 HERS.  I am not exactly sure what — I forgot to ask for the pre-PV score and if I recall correctly the PV offset used the wrong KW total.)

(Oh, and read about the limitations of HERS at the link at top…)

To figure out how much electricity/energy we use each month…

Like many/most people who have grid-tied PV solar panels…. to figure out how much electricity/energy we use each month I have to do some math.  That’s because the smart meter doesn’t know how much electricity we use directly from the panels.  Some electrons never even hits the electric co’s meter, which can only show numbers for 2 things: (1) the extra KWh flowing out and (2) the extra KWh we need that is coming in (at nights, clouds and cold cold weather)

That’s not enough.  I also have to read (3) the total produced by our PV solar panels.  And then do some math.  The pain in this is that since one’s electricity bill is usually not calendar month, and our smart meter isn’t being read automatically by any device, I have to remember to “read the meter” near the beginning/end of the month.  I can’t use numbers on my electricity bill.

Algebra:

The basic idea:  IN KWh = OUT KWh

(2) ELECTRIC CO METER IN (FROM GRID) +  (3) PV PRODUCED = (1) ELECTRIC CO METER OUT (TO GRID) + X (USED BY HOUSE)

Solve for X and I’ve got it.

Additionally I think it makes sense to divide by the number of occupants in your house before comparing with your friends.  And maybe adjust by things like HDD and CDD (heating degree days and cooling degree days) if they live in a different part of the Earth.

So that’s KWh used per person per month.   We have averaged under 800 KWh per month year round on average for 28 months.  And we have 4 people here.  With 8 living with us for 10(?) months in 2011.

So under 200 KWh per person per month.  For everything, including heating and AC, cooking, lawn mowing and 2 home offices.

It’s hard to compare to most people in the northeast because most people don’t know their grand total since almost no one heats their house with electricity (geothermal or air-source heat pumps) like we do.  So they’d need to add up their gas/propane/wood/oil BTUs used and convert to KWhs.

What we pay for electricity

Our 6/15/2012 electricity bill was $15.86 even though we made approximately 200 KWh more than we used. That’s because we don’t have net metering here yet. (Yet, as in… I assume some day there will be.)

And it looks like we’ve paid approximately $630 for electricity in the last year. If you pretend we have net metering, then that would have been roughly $630 / (11,000 – 8,400) KWh (used vs generated) = 24 cents/KWh. A bit expensive, but not outrageous for Massachusetts.

What this $630/yr makes me wonder is what it would cost to add a smaller PV array with batteries that is off-grid to power us at night so we’d have even closer to $0 electricity bills.

Eh, money probably much better spent on something practical for the family. Like a pool. Or our kids’ school tuition.

Hot solar panels

Today was hot. I think like 95F and mostly sunny and humid.

Anyway, the PV (solar electric) panels didn’t like it. They made 31.9 KWh vs 35.8 a few days ago (with what looks like a similar mix of sun and clouds). It was probably 75 or 80 that day?

So that’s 11% worse performance right there.

35.8 – 31.9 = 3.9 and

3.9/35.8= 11%

And compare that 35.8 to a cold day and that’s another 10% I am sure!

In my Enphase history I see plenty of sunny days above 42 KWh, so a day with a few clouds could easily still be 40 KWh.

Anyway, just sayin’. Our roof mount panels have a fair bit of a space below them. I bet if they were quite flush mount the heat would be even harder on them.

Some day I will rig a big cheap LASKO window fan up on a ladder and compare the output of the cooled-off row via the Enphase page.

Our PECs: site vs source (primary) energy

Another good way to weigh one’s home energy usage is per person. (not arbitrary per sqft or per HDD, etc.). PEC=Primary Energy Consumption. Makes sense if we are trying to be “green”.

That’s what Marc Rosenbaum is proposing here.

If I am understanding the gist of what he is saying it is as follows as applies to us:

1. Here in MA/New England, power plants are about 33% efficient. They waste 2/3 of the energy (mostly fossil fuels) in making a unit of electricity. The exact number Marc uses is 1/2.7, not 1/3. (37% efficient source to site.) So… since we have used approximately 11000KWh/year, that is 29700 KWh/year in source energy that we REALLY used.

(Worry about PVs later… in step 3.)

2. We are 4 people, so look up our “fair share” according to his “people = bedrooms+1″ equation and we should be trying to meet 13,600 KWh/year in source energy. For everything… heating, cooling, hot water, appliances, cooking, lighting.

3. One should be able to offset some percentage of hot water and electricity usage from onsite generation. Marc explains (I believe) that the Passivhaus PHPP allows up to 20% offset for a traditional solar hot water system, so in his mind, why not allow up to 20% of electricity use as well. And indeed… we heat our hot water with an air-source heat pump too, so I am lumping it all together. And actually, since I am dealing with real data, not estimates, I see from my record keeping that in the last year we have exported 5600 KWh to the grid. So that is the equivalent of 2.7 that much in “source energy” that we have offset = 15,120 KWh

So if we reduce our 29,700 by 15,120 => 14,580 KWh/year

4. 14,580 > 13,600 KWh (Marc’s limit for 4 people)

So we didn’t meet Marc’s proposed criteria for PEC for a Passivhaus in New England, even assuming my generous PV offset based on our grid export numbers.

Pretty close though. Why didn’t we meet it? I assume:
- Our house is too big (1741 TFA via PHPP)
- 2 of us work at home and waste energy
- Windows and HRV not efficient enough
- We should use more solar thermal heating (I have plans on this front)

‎”Your house is a leaky bucket and the sun is a hose. To raise the water level, you need fewer leaks or a bigger hose.” — Nick Pine in a discussion of his “box on the lawn” solar collector design in http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SolarHeat/

March energy report

KWh used in March: 799.
KWh made in March: 801.
We made electricity (net).
This is for everything in the house. Heating, hot water, appliances, lights, all the water filters and radon filters the house needs.
721 HDD (base 68F — which is roughly what we aim for during the day in heating months)
It was 17% warmer in March 2012 than in March 2011 in HDD (base 68F)

Overheating, Passivhaus Style

One limitation of the PHPP modelling used in the Passivhaus / Passive House certification process is that the only kind of solar thermal heating which is modeled is windows (passive solar… BTW, not to be confused with “passive house”… 2 different things!) and not fancier (active solar) stuff with anything movable insulation and/or small fans and/or externally located solar-air-heaters like:

1 – commercially available solar air-heater SolarSheat or Sunmate (great example here)
2 – low-mass thermally isolated sunspace ala Nick Pine / Norman Saunders / William Shurcliff
3 – “solar siding” ala Nick Pine (essentially a very large solar-air heater, kinda like SolarWall or solar tempering)
4 – DIY downspot heaters ala Scott Davis
5 – a solar “yard furnace” ala Nick Pine (see messages in the SolarHeat yahoo group — always free membership required).
6 – Commercial or DIY solar water heating used for heating (via radiant floor heating or an water-to-air heat exchanger)

OVERHEATING RISK

So the only thing you can do in PHPP is (in New England) optimize the windows for high SHGC (for the winter-time gains needed, winter being the main energy hog here in 2011) and add overhangs (ideally movable, like a trellis of greenery) or exterior shades (like they used in switzerland and france) to deal with the summer risk of overheating (since it still gets hot and sunny here). Also problematic for overheating are periods of the fall and spring when the sun is still low and leaves are not on the trees but it’s warm outside. Yes, you can open the windows. That will help a bit. Yes, you can install a concrete floor. That will help a bit to even out the swings, though it’s slow to react. But this is what Nick Pine and others like to call “living inside the heat battery”. Temps swing around a lot and you have little control over it besides turning on the heat or AC or moving shutters and insulating shades and such around manually. If you have the time.

A better way is keeping the solar collection on the outside of the thermal envelope of the house and optionally automatically store some for later in a huge highly insulated water tank in the basement (though that gets more complicated and/or expensive) (Getting close to 100% solar heating means being able to get thru quite a few days of no sun, so do your BTU/KWh heat load and storage capacity calculations over at the SolarHeat yahoo group.)

Advantages:
1. You can have pinpoint control over how much of that solar heat you let into your home!
2. Not blinded by all the light pouring thru lots of windows
3. Not as limited in architecture. Want bedrooms to the south but not wanting light blocking shades, etc, etc. Bad view on the South? Just add a huge air collector… no windows needed!
4. Easier to add solar heating existing homes/retrofit

So back to the overheating. To summarize the reasons to think carefully about cooling/preventing overheating in a passivhouse or otherwise superinsulated home:

1. too much passive solar. Big windows on S with high SHGC and no overhangs? Look out!

2. point source cooling on first floor (A BE2012 presentation about the VT Passivhaus by Habitat for Humanity detailed the warm 2nd floor)

3. warm bedrooms in summer. (related to point 2). bedrooms are often on second floor. If you are using air-source mini-split heat pumps to heat/cool your house and there is not an inside head in a bedroom, then guess what… on those summer nights when it doesn’t cool down outside and you need to keep the windows closed, it’s going to get warm in the bedroom… you’ve got 300Watts per person and warmish air coming in thru the fresh-air ventilation system (HRV or ERV) and how is it going to cool off? That’s right… it’s not. People should worry A LOT about this. Winter time is no problem with point source heating downstairs (or down the hall in our case). It’s a tad cooler in the bedroom, but the body heat — 300W per person — helps mitigate. Plus most people like it a “little” cooler for sleeping.

4. Global Warming. Not to get too pessimistic, but some scientific predictions are than NH weather will be like NC in 30 years. LINK. And Southern VT is already like PA in the 1960s. Yikes. It’s worth considering!

That said, the basic idea of worrying more about the heating load than the cooling load in New England and the midwest is a valid one. There are many many more HDD (heating degree days) than CDD (cooling degree days). So optimize for heating first. But have a cooling plan too! It still gets very HOT AND HUMID in Massachusetts and Minnesota!

Also not allowed in PHPP is counting PVs as a solar hot water heater. Instead of buying an expensive and complicated traditional solar hot water heating system that still might only provide a 60-70% overall solar fraction for the year, I explored building one myself for $1k and ultimately decided to just increase the KW of our PV (solar-electric) array to meet the hot water demand (I calculated) a full 100% (net for the year). Marc took the same route described here.

I am of course very open to correction on my assessment of the current state of the PHPP (circa 2010-12) with regard to solar.

Taylor Wilson

(I would personally spend my time tinkering with solar energy, but hey ok, to each their own!)
(as read on Google+)
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Taylor Wilson

At 10, he built his first bomb.
At 11, he started mining for uranium and buying vials of plutonium on the Internet.
At 14, he made a nuclear reactor.

Wilson got his start on Fusor.net, a website where nuclear hobbyists who call themselves “fusioneers” fill message boards on topics that would enthrall only the geekiest subset of society, like “So where can I get a deal on deuterium gas?” The goal of every fusioneer is to build a reactor that can fuse atoms together, a feat first achieved by scientists in 1934.

“I’m obsessed with radioactivity. I don’t know why,” says Wilson in his laid-back drawl. “Possibly because there’s power in atoms that you can’t see, an unlocked power.”

Taylor Wilson (born 1994) is an American nuclear scientist who was noted in 2008 for being the youngest person in the world (at age 14) to build a working nuclear fusion reactor.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Energy offered federal funding to Wilson concerning research Wilson has conducted in building inexpensive Cherenkov radiation detectors; Wilson has declined on an interim basis due to pending patent issues. Traditional Cherenkov detectors usually cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (USD), while Wilson invented a working detector that cost a few hundred dollars.

In May 2011, Wilson entered his radiation detector in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair against a field of 1,500 competitors and won a $50,000 award.

The Boy Who Played With Fusion
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion

Tayloy’s website:
http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Welcome.html

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/89423

You can choose to believe that this child is special and especially gifted, and that may be so. I choose to believe that this means that children should be allowed to specialize at younger ages… They should be taught how to get the answers they might need for themselves, not from teachers.
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Nick Pine: A solar yard furnace — a “box on the lawn” approach

Taken from the SolarHeat yahoo group at:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SolarHeat/message/27383

=======================

http://www.dbb-project.com/introduction/insulation.php says

Dynamic U-value Ud = VRhoaCa/(e^(VRhoaCaRs)-1) W/m^2-K, where

V is the air velocity in meters per second,
Rhoa is air density, 1.2 kg/m^3,
Ca is air’s specific heat, 1000 J/(kg-K), and
Rs is the wall’s static thermal resistance in m^2-K/W.

Using V = 1/3600 (1 meter per HOUR , and Rs = 5.7 m^2K/W (US R32),
Ud = 0.058 W/m^2, like a US R98 wall. V = 10 meters per hour makes
Ud = 1.7×10^-8 W/m^2K, ie a US R-value of 334 million

This is exciting, no? We often try to make lots of air flow through
an air heater in order to keep temperatures and outdoor heat losses
low, but that uses lots of fan power and requires large air ducts
to move heat to a house. With “dynamic insulation” we might make
very hot air or water without much fan power or outdoor heat loss
and move it to a nearby house through smaller ducts.

My friend T just got her 100 year old house in New Jersey airsealed
and insulated with dense-packed cellulose in the formerly empty 2×4
wall cavities. It has no solar heat now, but it might have about
40′x8′ of solar siding on the southeast and southwest walls.

With 100 F air inside for 6 hours per day, each square foot of R2
twinwall polycarbonate siding with 80% solar transmission would gain
0.8×980-6h(100-35)1ft^2/R2 = 589 Btu on an average 31.5 F December
day with a 35 F daytime temperature.

If the December gas bill says it used 65 therms at an average 40 F
outdoor temp and an 85% furnace efficiency and it used 600 kWh/mo
(68.2K Btu/day) of electricity indoors and 65×10^5/0.85 Btu
= 30d(24h(65-40)G-68.2K), the house conductance G = 539 Btu/h-F,
so it would need 24h(65-31.5)539-68.2K = 365K Btu of heat on
an average December day, which could come from 365K/589 = 620 ft^2
of solar siding on the southeast and southwest walls.

The house needs 1826K Btu for 5 cloudy days in a row, which could
come from 1826K/(140-80)/62 = 488 ft^3 of water cooling from 140
to 80 F in a 9′x18′x3′ tall plywood box on the lawn with a $195
15′x24′ folded EPDM liner from

http://www.pondliner.com/product/15_x_25_firestone_45_mil_epdm_pond_liner/Firest\

one_EPDM_Pond_Liners_15

At 140 F, with R30 insulation, it would lose 24h(140-31.5)486ft^2/R30
= 42K Btu on an average day. A 12′x20′ twinwall roof with a 34 degree
slope would gain 12′x20′(0.8(980sin34+610cos34)-6h(140-35)/R2))
= 126K Btu/day. If the tank is 4′ tall, the box would be 11′ tall.

The box could provide about 126K-42K = 84K Btu of house heat
on an average December day at a rate of about 84K/6h = 14K Btu/h
in 14K/(140-70) = 200 cfm of 140 F air. A 20′ duct (40′ round trip)
with a 0.2 “H20 pressure drop with 0.2 = 0.1×40′/100′x200^2/D^5
would have a D = 6″ diameter. It might be an underground foamboard
box with 2 6″x6″ cavities.

(A more remote box might have hot and cool (80 F house return) tanks
and 2 car radiators, with one cooling 140 F air that exits the other
in order to provide cooler air near the twinwall and a near-infinite
mesh collector thermal resistance. This sounds complex for a heating
system, but it’s child’s play compared to what Google is up to, eg
video hangouts with tracking reindeer noses and antlers.)

With only 320 ft^2 of solar siding on the southwest wall, the box
would need to collect 42K+365K-320ft^2×589 = 219K Btu/day. It might
do that with a 16′x20′ twinwall roof and a 17′ box height.

Nick