Initial Report on Our Household Energy Project

Carbon Neutral Household Operations in 2012

In my personal quest for my family to be carbon neutral, 2012 was a significant step forward.  In 2011, we reached the point where our house itself did not require any fossil fuels to operate (by using wood heat and commercial renewable power).  In 2012, we undertook an energy audit and resulting house efficiency work to make a major reduction in the amount of electricity we use (thanks to Snug Planet). I'll quantify this when the heating season is over but we are now pretty much using no electricity for heat, relying entirely on wood for that.  Electricity usage for appliances and hot water should also have been reduced substantially.

Also, having found a carbon offset provider I like (Finger Lakes Climate Fund), I was able to offset all our personal air travel, car usage, and landscaping machinery fuel usage, resulting in overall carbon-neutral household operations in 2012 - for the first time ever.

Does this mean we are environmental saints with nothing left to do?  Absolutely not, nothing could be further from the truth.  My major goal in 2013 is to get a solar installation, which should mean we will generate most or all of our electricity on site.  Beyond that, I'd like to move to electric and/or plugin-hybrid cars to reduce our reliance on offsets.  The house could be made far more efficient still if we did a deep-energy retrofit when we replace the siding, and if we replaced the windows with more efficient (eg non-Victorian) ones.  All these are steps we can take entirely on our own in the next few years.

Looking to less easy fixes over the longer term: we buy many goods and services from suppliers who are not themselves carbon-neutral.  As carbon neutral alternatives become available, I would very much like to select those where practical.  Also, I work for a mainstream company who presently have no concern for their carbon footprint (eg, they won't reimburse carbon offsets for my work-related travel - I asked).  That too is something I'd like to improve on in the long term.

Still, it feels good to have gotten as far as we have.

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Experiencing an Energy Audit

Last week, I had an audit of our house's energy use done and I wanted to share a few impressions of the process.  Partly I hope to inspire a few readers to do the same, and partly I figure some of my readers know a lot more about this than me and can answer some of my questions.  The audit was performed by Jon Harrod of Snug Planet, a local energy efficiency firm here in the Ithaca area of upstate New York.

For background, our house is a Victorian farmhouse from either 1850 or 1870 (we heard both in the sales process) and has about 2100 sq ft of floor area.  It's stud construction and sits on a vented stone basement with a part dirt/part concrete floor which is always damp at best, and often with standing water after rain.  A first round of energy efficiency improvements in the 1980s had seen the walls insulated (probably with blown in cellulose), about six inches of cellulose blown into the attic, and fiberglass installed between the ground floor joists.  Most of the windows are the original single pane Victorian casements (and are obviously drafty) but some have been replaced with double-paned windows probably in the 1960s.

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