Hello from Albuquerque, NM

[ELGo]

I'm happy to find a forum of like minded people -- if not slightly nuts like me

My road to home conservation is through frustration with PV. I live in a neighborhood that has restrictive covenants to protect home values, and PV is just too radical for my neighbors. So rather than accept that my home would burn a lot of coal for years to come, I have spent the last couple of years switching to natural gas, upgrading my passive solar and cooling, and conserving.

My last round of cutting out energy wasters and improving efficiency was just completed this week, and it now appears our home has passed under the 3 kwh/day electricity consumption threshold. I'll know for sure once I receive a full month's bill. I was shooting for $10 a month (including $5 fixed charge), but I'll have to settle for about $13 a month.

I'm optimistic that even though my hot water is now natural gas, my annual NG use will be cut ~ 2/3rds by the new windows supplying passive solar. Although we have about 5000 heating degree days in my high desert microclimate, over 300 days a year are sunny. The trick here was deciding how to shade the windows so that the house is not a boiler in the summer
I'll have to wait for another winter for the accounting, and I have not finished installing all the windows.

One caveat to my EcoRenovating: I avoid measures that cost me more than the status quo, as calculated over the usable lifetime of the improvement. Anything I do saves energy, pollution, AND either saves me money or costs the same. The money is not as important to me as reducing my pollution footprint, but I realize that I am more effective convincing others to reduce their energy and pollution footprints if I can say that no puppies or dollars were harmed along the way

I look forward to sharing and learning. Cheers everybody !

[Daox]

Welcome to the site Elgo. Sounds like you'll fit right in.

What kind of improvements have you done to help keep the house cooler?

[ELGo]

Originally Posted by Daox

Welcome to the site Elgo. Sounds like you'll fit right in.

Thanks

What kind of improvements have you done to help keep the house cooler?

Mostly pretty basic, meant to take advantage of my high desert climate of cool nights and low humidity in the summer:


The expensive change was reroofing from tar and gravel to polyurethane and gravel. The roof had to be redone anyway and the foam was oddly not more expensive than a standard redo with tar so it was a pretty easy choice.

Then came attention to internal shading on *all* the windows during the day, and open shades at night to increase heat radiation outwards.

The most dramatic improvement in terms of cooling, or perhaps equal to the roof, was installing a whole house fan in an unused bedroom upstairs. I emphasize unused because it is noisy enough to bother most people while it is on. At night I open everywhere I can, and run the fan on a timer from about 10pm to 7 am. IIRC it draws ~ 80 watts, so a nightly consumption of ~ 0.7 kwh. Since we tend to cook less in the summer the overall house consumption stays about the same. I am able by the AM to draw the house temp down to within about 5F of the lowest outside temperature. For most of the summer this means the house starts at 68F in the AM and increases to a peak of 75F in the early PM. There are about 2 - 3 weeks in July when the AM is 73-75F and the late PM can reach 85F. The low humidity makes this a tolerable discomfort. In past years we used personal fans quite a bit, but I noticed last year no one bothered.

A lot of the daily increase in temperature is due to my allowing some ventilation into the house for air quality. I expect to install an HRV to improve this aspect of my daytime ventilation. Sorry I cannot be more quantitative here.