Comments on: The energy costs of the building industry http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2006/06/the-energy-costs-of-the-building-industry/ Creative adaptations to peak oil and climate change Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:38:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: Eric Praetzel http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2006/06/the-energy-costs-of-the-building-industry/#comment-8663 Eric Praetzel Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:44:48 +0000 http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2006/06/the-energy-costs-of-the-building-industry/#comment-8663 I'm hesitant about believing numbers from Rocky Mountain. Some of them are utterly out of wack with my reality. For instance the payback on solar water systems. My family spends $70 Cdn/yr heating water for a family of 4. $20 of that is keeping the electric tank hot and the rest is heating water. Going to a solar water heating system would actualy have a payback of over 100 years - if we assumed an interest rate of 0%! To be honest - if you conserve then it doesn't pay to get solar water heating. Dito in this region we have REEP - The Residential Energy Efficiency Project where they evaluate your house. Sadly - the measure things and then they use their "standard" house of your type. In our case that standard family/house like ours uses 4x the electricity, signif. more for heating. Even my neighbours uses 2x as much as electricity as we do - and they're all well below "normal". We considered spending $5k in doing something "green" - something our neighbours could see - but there is nothing we can do for that price. Solar water heating is a total waste of money. Solar PV is in the same boat because it costs $2,500 extra for an interverter that can be grid inter-tied. So we'd need to spend more like $20k or $30k to make the cost of the inverter a small portion of the total system. An electric car would be neat - but then if you're only driving 10,000 km/yr it's never worth buying a new car or spending a lot of money on an overhaul like putting in an electric motor and controller ... On the positive side I believe that it's easy for people to reduce their electricity use. However, at work I'm responsible for at least 40x the energy use of my family. We have nothing but obsolete T12 fluorscent lights and hundreds of computers and nobody who cares about efficiency and policies which ensure that nothing will ever happen. Hell the lights in my office use as much energy as my family in our house! I’m hesitant about believing numbers from Rocky Mountain.
Some of them are utterly out of wack with my reality.
For instance the payback on solar water systems. My family spends $70 Cdn/yr heating water for a family of 4. $20 of that is keeping the electric tank hot and the rest is heating water. Going to a solar water heating system would actualy have a payback of over 100 years - if we assumed an interest rate of 0%!

To be honest - if you conserve then it doesn’t pay to get solar water heating.

Dito in this region we have REEP - The Residential Energy Efficiency Project where they evaluate your house. Sadly - the measure things and then they use their “standard” house of your type. In our case that standard family/house like ours uses 4x the electricity, signif. more for heating. Even my neighbours uses 2x as much as electricity as we do - and they’re all well below “normal”.

We considered spending $5k in doing something “green” - something our neighbours could see - but there is nothing we can do for that price. Solar water heating is a total waste of money. Solar PV is in the same boat because it costs $2,500 extra for an interverter that can be grid inter-tied. So we’d need to spend more like $20k or $30k to make the cost of the inverter a small portion of the total system.

An electric car would be neat - but then if you’re only driving 10,000 km/yr it’s never worth buying a new car or spending a lot of money on an overhaul like putting in an electric motor and controller …

On the positive side I believe that it’s easy for people to reduce their electricity use. However, at work I’m responsible for at least 40x the energy use of my family. We have nothing but obsolete T12 fluorscent lights and hundreds of computers and nobody who cares about efficiency and policies which ensure that nothing will ever happen. Hell the lights in my office use as much energy as my family in our house!

]]>