As BP continues to struggle to contain the oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, many of us are wondering: how can we help?

We can all take steps to reduce our oil consumption, which we believe is a critical part of the long-term solution to preventing future catastrophes. Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels starts with one person, one household at a time.

Save How You Get There

A humbling 80% of petroleum consumed in the United States goes toward transportation. Time to take a bike!

1. Get Efficient – Trade in your gas guzzler for a smaller, more efficient vehicle. Switching from a light-duty SUV that runs at 20mpg to a 50mpg hybrid will save, in the average household, 450 gallons of gasoline a year.

   Soon, electric cars like the Chevy Volt will be available, providing an option to have a “net-zero” car by offsetting your charge time with grid-tied solar power!

2. Drive Less – Even better than driving more efficiently is to drive less altogether. Consolidate shopping trips. See if your employer is willing to switch to a 4-day work week. Telecommute if possible. Could video-conferencing avoid the need to travel out of town for a business meeting?
3. Alternative Commuting – Consider non-motorized options when you do need to get out of the house.  Biking is one of the healthiest things you can do, for yourself and for the environment. Walk. Use public transport if it is available.

Save What You Consume

4. Buy less – Avoid products with excessive plastic packaging – and recycle what you do buy. Bring your own shopping bags and lobby stores you buy from to use biodegradable plastics derived from plant matter. Many of the businesses in the Green Alliance have already made this switch.
5. Buy local – It’s a simple equation: the fewer miles a product has to travel, the fewer gallons of oil burned to bring it to your table. And there are myriad other benefits – see the Portland Buy Local campaign and the Seacoast Local campaign for ideas and inspiration.
6. Buy organic – According to the Sustainable Table, “As much as forty percent of energy used in the food system goes towards the production of artificial fertilizers and pesticides.” Organic food avoids petroleum-derived pesticides and other chemicals, which have adverse environmental effects of their own. MOFGA has a great resource list of local food retailers, farms, and CSAs. In New Hampshire, try the NH Farmer’s Market Association.

Save on Energy

7. Plug the holes – Much of the old housing stock in Maine and New Hampshire is literally losing heat out the window. You can start down the road of weatherization with a professional energy audit, and take advantage of great incentives.  This year, instead of cleaning your boiler, have it optimized to burn less fuel.
8. Save the juice -  Many homes are “leaking” electricity as well as heat, simply by leaving gadgets or other appliances plugged in when they don’t have to be, or running them at non-optimal times.  You can test this theory with a Kill-A-Watt meter, which will help you identify which appliances are using a lot of electricity (you might be surprised how many gadgets use electricity even while they’re “off”).

   For more robust electric use monitoring we recommend installing a TED (The Energy Detective), which provides tracking and graphs of electric use over time. Once you’ve optimized your consumption, off-set the rest with grid-tied solar power!

9. Heat smarter – A properly sized solar hot water system in Maine or New Hampshire can save 300 gallons of oil per year. Want to go even further? Rip out your oil boiler and replace it with a clean-burning wood or pellet boiler, or with a condensing gas boiler.

Everyone can do something to reduce our perilous dependence on oil. Take whatever step you can today and plan for the next step when able.

The climate magazine Grist reported that the past decade was the hottest on record. Not so cool.

Without going into doom and gloom scenarios, the reality is that the earth’s temperature is increasing in a real and very tangible way.  Despite fluctuations and bizarre weather patterns in the short term, evidence is showing that overall, the temperature is going up, up, up:

Much discussion has been made of temporal, and unusual weather patterns, but Grist reports that there’s much more to the story than that:

These natural cycles alone, however, fail to explain the temperature patterns of the last decade. While the strongest El Niño of the century pushed 1998 temperatures up to their then-record high, temperatures in the hottest year (2005) did not receive a boost from El Niño. And 2007 was tied for second hottest year on record, despite the development of a cooling La Niña. Furthermore, while global temperatures have been climbing to record heights, incoming solar energy has in fact been declining since the beginning of the decade. In early 2009, solar activity reached its lowest level in a century.

This trend is real and continuing.  As individuals, we may not be able to implement dramatic sweeping changes in legislation or the way big business is done, but we can make changes in our lifestyle which, in aggregate, results in big changes.

Of course, ReVision Energy strongly encourages a lifestyle that moves away from fossil fuel use and towards using clean renewable energy sources.

We also encourage everything else you can do to reduce your carbon footprint – drive less, reduce your energy use, support local businesses and energy responsible businesses.

While we don’t have much of it, there is still time to offset our years of environmental neglect and move towards a renewable energy economy.  We can all stay cool together!

Two Meters: The top meter reads the amount of electricity the home is using; the bottom meter reads the amount of electricity the panels make. The bottom meter will spin backwards if the panels make more than the home is using at any given time.

Today we conclude the narrative of the Rhoda Family, one of the first ReVision customers to install three renewable energy systems:solar hot water, wood pellet boiler, and solar electric.

Yesterday we saw how investing in a pellet boiler allowed the Rhodas to dramatically decrease their use of fossil fuels for heating.

Chris Rhoda today explains why completing the system with clean energy from the sun is a wise investment in the future:

Prior to Charlie’s arrival I had read that 20% of a home’s water use can be toilets. My wife and I decided to change one of our three 3.5 gpf toilets to a 1.6 gpf toilet on the second floor to see if it would save on electricity since we had a whole-house Reverse Osmosis (RO) system. We knew we would save almost 7,000 gallons of water each year (10 flushes per day x 1.9 gallons x 365 days).

We were pleasantly surprised when receiving our next electric bill to find out it had dropped by $20. Later we came to learn that our RO system was over-spec’d. Our 220 volt motor was not required for hot water, 2nd floor toilets, or our washing machine. We also realized that we only had slightly elevated arsenic levels which affect our drinking and cooking only water but not our bathing, clothing, or dish washing water.

We decided we were best suited for a kitchen point of use iron oxide system versus a whole house point of entry system. We have now disconnected the whole-house RO system and replaced it with a point of use filtration system giving us safe drinking water in our kitchen and refrigerator ice maker. Other discoveries we made were that certain appliances were using watts when not in use.

For example an inexpensive radio was costing us over $1.30 per month simply by remaining plugged in all the time. We haven’t had time to investigate all of our electrical appliances, but plan to in the future. The fact that we started to take steps to reduce our electrical consumption put us in a good position to consider a solar electric or photovoltaic (PV) system.

While the payback is longer than hot water or wood boilers, we feel it will be a selling point for the house when we are ready to move in that direction. For now, however, this project was important enough for us to move forward with regardless of payback. The third path for our family was installing a 3.5kW solar electric system with the ability to add more panels in the future. This system is connected to the utility grid. Our utility provider installed a second meter free of charge. One meter reads the amount of electricity that our home is using; the second meter reads the electricity the solar panels are making. We then get billed or credited the difference.

In Conclusion: The installation technicians were both personable and conscientious throughout the processes. Some of the highlights so far are how little our oil furnace now runs, and how consistent the hot water temperatures are. Also, our house is much more comfortable now that we can heat it for less. We’ve raised the temperature in most rooms from 64 to 68 degrees and opened parts that were once closed off in the winter. One more bonus, we now have a warm basement due to our new boiler. There is a game room down there that is now more comfortable in the winter. The best feeling though is no longer watching the price of oil, as we’ve only used 30 gallons in the past 11 months, and especially looking forward to each sunny day.

We hope you’ve found the Rhoda family’s story as inspiring as we have – by reducing energy use and making smart investments in renewable energy technology, you can reduce utility bills significantly and subsequently help out the environment.

Review the whole project: Link to Part 1 – Rhoda Family Introduction, Part 2 – solar hot water provides immediate ROI, and Part 3 – reducing oil use with wood pellet boiler

New Year’s Resolutions

• Eat Better
• Exercise More
• Save Money on Energy Bills

There is no better time than now to work on reducing your energy loads. Successfully reducing your energy loads means you will be spending less money on energy bills each month. To be able to reduce your energy loads you will need to understand how you are using energy in your home; understanding is the first step towards energy efficiency and long term savings.

For most homes we can group energy into either a heating and cooling load or an electrical load. The heating and cooling load can be directly related to your home’s building performance, how well insulated your home is and how efficient your heating and cooling systems are.

To test your home’s building performance you may wish to consider having an energy audit performed. An energy audit is an objective way to assess how much energy your home consumes so you can get a handle on what steps you will need to start taking to get on your way to becoming energy efficient. An auditor will be able to pinpoint areas where your home is losing energy such as leaky windows and door cracks. They will also be able to determine your home’s heating systems efficiencies.

An energy auditor will often perform a blower door test to measure the extent of the leaks in your building’s envelope. They may also use an infrared camera which reveals hard to detect areas of air infiltration or missing insulation. You will receive suggestions of where you can improve your home’s building performance. The less energy your home is leaking out and essentially wasting, the more savings you will see each month.

How you use electricity in your home is a little different. There may be, literally, hundreds of items using electricity in your home. If you find yourself in a state of distress after paying your electric bill each month you may want to start to rein in where that electricity is going out.

Typical Use of Electricity in Your Home

According to the US Department of Energy 20% of a typical U.S. home’s electrical bill is in their appliances and home electronics. Artificial lighting in a home can be responsible for almost 15% of a household’s electrical usage. Electric water heaters may be accountable for 25% of your electric bill. And finally heating and cooling systems are the greatest source of electrical usage in a home, over 50% of a monthly bill. Do you know how your bill breaks up?

Understanding how you are using energy or how you are using electricity in your home will allow you to find ways to reduce that usage. You may realize that there are simple steps you can take that give you big cost savings, such as replacing older appliances with more energy efficient ones. Appliances carry a rating on them so you can tell how much power it requires while on. To reduce your lighting needs make sure to let in natural light during the day.

Replace your incandescent lightbulbs with bulbs that have a lower amp rating. Fluorescent lighting, such as CFLs, uses 25-35% of the energy used compared to incandescent lamps to provide the same amount of illumination. Upgrading your water heater and heating and cooling systems, as well as supplementing with a renewable energy supply will work to add to your monthly savings.

Typical Electrical Consumption by End Use

Every home uses electricity differently. Below is a chart, which according to the Energy Information Administration, is what a typical US home using each month in energy for common electrical appliances.

What are the ghost loads?

Your ghost loads are appliances that are using energy even when they are off. Common culprits of the ghost loads are your microwave, coffee maker, printer, clocks, and the DVD player. Although ghost loads only consume small amount of electricity, they are consuming those small amount 24 hours a day! The ghost loads in your house may be adding up to 100 watts or more a day of electricity you are paying for when you’re not even using it.

Finding out how you use electricity

To find out where your electricity is being used so to start to control that usage, you may be interested in the simple installation of an energy monitoring device. There are a number of energy monitors on the market today. The Energy Detective, or TED, is one of them. The Energy Detective can track and display your household’s electrical consumption in real time; it will also total your monthly consumption.

The system installs through a connection in your electric panel. The TED display monitor can be placed anywhere in the home, somewhere where the whole family will see it to get everyone involved in saving energy; you can even view its data online. The TED operates on the existing wires in your home. It connects to your main electrical panel to monitor specific electricity consumption from appliances, lights and other devices that consume electricity.

TEDs transmitting device, located in your circuit breaker panel, measures the amount of electricity coming into your home as you are using it and transmits data every second over your receiving unit. Your receiving unit can plug into any A/C outlet in your home. As you watch the meter you’ll know how much electricity is being used.

You can turn off different appliances and see to see how the meter changes. Turn off all your appliances to find your ghost loads. We’ve been told a hundred times to turn off lights when exiting a room. This can be a fun learning experience for you and your family to understand how those lights being left on correlates with electricity being used. You can learn more about TED at www.theenergydetective.com.

Resolving to be Healthy

Each New Year is a time for reflecting upon the last year and we make resolutions to live better moving forward. Your New Year’s resolutions are a personal commitment to yourself. You have decided there is something you want to see changed within yourself, your lifestyle, or your behavior.

Resolving to be healthy is what a lot of us seek. We want to eat better, exercise more, or quit an unhealthy habit. Saving energy is also apart of living well and being healthy; not only are you saving money but you are helping to create a more sustainable community and environment to live in.

This New Years resolve to be healthy — to live a healthy lifestyle and build a healthy planet.

More Information. . .

Calculate your own energy loads

Use this formula to estimate how much electricity an appliance uses.

(Wattage x Hours used per day / 1000) = Daily kilowatt hours (kwhrs)

1kW = 1000 watts

100 watt bulb x 8 hours day = 800 watt hours

800 watt hours / 1000 = .8 kwhrs/day or 24 kwhrs/month

At $.16 a kwhr, one 100 watt bulb running 8 hours a day costs you $3.84 on your monthly bill.

You can try this with different appliances in your home. Each appliance should show a rating of volts, amps or watts. Voltage (V) is the potential of electrical flow in a unit, and most appliances in the US are rated at either 120V or 240V; your larger appliances being the latter.

The actual movement of electrical current is called the amperage or amp. The larger the amp rating on an appliance generally the more powerful that appliance is. The more amps a unit has, the more electricity it draws while on. A vacuum cleaner that runs at 12 amps, for example, generates more suction than one that is rated at 6 amps. To convert this to watts you can multiply volts x amps. A wattage or watt is the measurement of the actual work performed by electricity.

The 12 amp vacuum cleaner, rated at 120 volts would be rated at 1440 watts, because amps x V = watts. Now that we know the wattage you can find out how much that appliance adds to your electrical bill. Your vacuum cleaner is not running all the time, so let’s say you use your vacuum cleaner for ½ hour every other day.

1440 watts x .5 hrs = 720 watts / 1000 = .72 kwhrs/day

.72 kwhrs/day x 15 days = 10.8 kwhrs of electricity on your electric bill each month

At $.16 a watt 10.8 kwhrs = $1.78

Although the vacuum has a high wattage rating, because of its low usage it’s generally not the culprit behind a high electric bill. It does add to it however, a good point to keep in mind is that a lot of little things can add up quickly.

To calculate your refrigerators’ load use 8 hours a day as its running time. Although your refrigerator is plugged in all the time, it cycles on and off as needed to maintain its interior temperature. Dishwashers and clothes dryers are typically a home’s biggest appliance loads.

Let’s compare that 100 watt incandescent lightbulb we used earlier to a CFL lightbulb with the same light output. A 22 watt CFL is said to be comparable to a 100 watt incandescent. The 100 watt incandescent running at 8 hours a day was responsible for $3.84 of your total electrical bill. A 22 watt CFL would be:

22 watts x 8 hrs = 176 watt hrs

176 watt hrs / 1000 = .176 kwhrs

.176 kwhrs * 30 days = 5.28 kwhrs/month

At $.16 a kwhr, 5.28 kwhrs/month would equal $.85 a month on your electric bill. That’s $3 a month in savings, or $36 a year for changing just one light bulb!

What’s the difference between a watt and a watt hour?

A watt is a measurable unit of power. The watt is used to specify the rate at which electrical energy is dissipated. A watt hour is a unit of energy equivalent to one watt of power expended for one hour of time. The watt hour is commonly used in electrical applications. The terms power and energy often get confused. Power is the rate that energy is used. In general, energy is equivalent to power multiplied by time.

For example, if 100 watt light bulb in turned on for one hour, the energy used is 100 watt hours. The same 100 watt light bulb turned on for 3 hours, the energy used is 300 watt hours. To convert to kilowatt hours, divide by 1000.