energy

A new web site about ADU’s: AccessoryDwellings.org

This blog gets a lot of visitors curious about the tiny house I made by converting my garage. That place (just a wee bit bigger than the one in the picture above) has three main virtues: 1. it’s smallness makes it very green, given that size is the primary determinant of a dwelling’s environmental footprint; 2. it’s nice, making it possible to live small without feeling like you are living in poverty; and 3. it’s very close to, but still quite separate from, the main house, meaning I can live a few feet from my mother-in-law and still think it’s...

A thermostat that knows when you’re away (review of Verdant V8-BB-7S with occupancy sensor)

Resources used by housing and transportation dwarf those associated by other parts of our “lifestyle.” If you want to be green in deed as well as attitude, you’ve got to take on the way you get around, and the energy used by your house. In the house, technology can obviate the impulse to nobly suffer to save energy (remember President Carter in his sweater?). Probably the first thing I installed in my family’s house when I moved in was a programmable thermostat. It saves energy by lowering the thermostat when I’m not likely to be home or wanting heat, and...

Drill baby drill!

As Bob Costas once said about another grand spectacle (the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics), “sometimes words add nothing.”

Why efficiency isn’t so efficient

While normally I don’t flog anybody’s work, it’s time to make an exception. Deep breath. Here goes: Gee, what a super article in the new E magazine (see this reprint on Alternet) about monster houses! Could that guy possibly have been reading this blog, or even, I dare say, writing for it? The article points out a strange fact: despite the fact that American houses have more energy efficient devices — light bulbs, windows, and so on — than ever, they’re also using more energy than ever. From space America positively radiates! (If I squint, I think I can see...

Beauty and the Beach: Cape Wind, Part I

I’m from Cape Cod, and I’ve never liked it when the ocean is interrupted. I like my view of the ocean to be cut short only by the curve of the earth, not by some meddling chunk of land or anything like that. It’s easier to feel continuous with the ocean if I can see a continuous ocean. The 130 giant wind turbines proposed for a site six miles off the shore, the power from which would supply 75% of the Cape and Islands’ electricity, would definitely interfere with my oceanic feeling. The fossil fuel-burning power plant in my hometown...