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| Up, up, up |
Though it’s not getting much attention yet, natural gas prices
are zooming upwards due to the cold winter the US has been experiencing.
(Propane prices have been increasing as well.) If you use natural gas for space
heating or hot water, these higher prices will necessarily be reflected in your
upcoming utility bills. Though these higher prices are no doubt temporary,
fundamentally the cost structure of fracking and drilling for natural gas is
such that energy companies are losing money on natural gas plays at current prices and so
have dropped drilling dramatically. Though current production is coasting along, some analysts say natural gas won’t be
profitable for any new plays until it reaches $6/mmbtu. In November the price
of natural gas was at $3.60/mmbtu. Today it is at $5.22/mmbtu.
What can be done to avoid inflated utility bills?
Short term, these might work:
1) Install a programmable thermostat and actually
program it. (It is estimated 40% of people who have programmable thermostats
don’t program them.) The benefit to this is that you don’t have to constantly remember
to turn the thermostat down at night or when you leave. It does it for you. Add
a blanket to your bed and set nighttime temperatures to 60 -62. Drop
temperatures while you’re away from home to 55 degrees. Yes, this does save
significant energy even though your heater will be blasting for a short while
to get temperatures back up when you return or wake up.
2)
Put on a sweater and reduce your household
normal temperature two degrees. If your kids are comfortable walking around
barefoot in the winter, your house is too warm! (Hello, I tell my kids, you
don’t live in Tahiti!)
3)
Don’t light a fire in the fireplace. This may be
counterintuitive, but when you light a fire, your natural gas-warmed air flies
up your chimney, sucking out far more heat from your house than the fire
contributes. However, if you have a fireplace insert or wood stove (even better
a high-efficiency one), then burning wood will reduce your use of natural gas
rather than increase it.
4)
Install a low-flow showerhead. There are good
ones out there that use only 1.5 gallons of hot water a minute. This reduces the load
on your hot water heater significantly. Wash clothes in warm or cold, not hot
water. Let family members know that pajamas and towels should be used/worn more than once before washing.
5)
If your hot water heater is not insulated, read
no further. Go insulate it right now. I mean it. Every home improvement-type
store sells hot water heater insulating wraps/blankets.
6)
Feel around your doors and windows for drafts.
Get ten dollars of weather stripping material and do what you can to reduce
these drafts.
7)
Close off rooms not in use and close off vents
to these rooms.
8)
Wear wool. I do this. A lot. The interior
temperature of my house is 60 degrees as I write this.
9) Get some exercise. Raising your metabolism
through exercise will make a slightly cooler house still comfortable to you.
10) Consider drying your clothes outside on the line
on sunny days.
11) Open your curtains for solar gain during the
day; close them for their thermal properties at night.
12) Cooking
doesn’t use much natural gas, at least not compared to space heating. In
general I wouldn’t worry about cooking, however I do use an electric kettle to
boil water and an electric crockpot for making broth.
Medium term
1)
Insulate, insulate, insulate. Best investment you can make. Heat wants to
rise, so work on the attic first. Seal off the attic from air movement (insulation
prevents heat from traveling, not air, so if air can travel, you’ll get heat
losses from that), then make sure insulation is at least knee-deep.
2)
If your house is drafty, get a professional to
do a thorough weather stripping. (Note:
if your house is drafty, 70 degrees can feel like 66. And if your house is not
drafty, 66 can feel like 70.)
3)
If you live some place crazy like California,
your walls may have no insulation in them. I’m serious. Ours didn’t. Blowing in
insulation can fix this.
4)
Time to think about the underpart of your
house—the crawl space or basement. If
there is no insulation between your warm, comfy house and the cold air beneath
it, there will be an energy transfer, which means you’ll lose heat. It may seem
silly to insulate the floor from underneath (and in many homes it is often not
possible) but if you can, it does work.
5)
Seal your heating ducts or have someone do it
for you. Poorly sealed ducts can reduce the efficiency of your heating system
by 30%.
6) Make sure the filter on your heater is not
clogged and reducing your heating efficiency.
7) If for any reason you need to replace your hot
water heater, consider a heat pump version, or a solar-powered (with a heat
pump back up) version. If you have a secondary hot water heater that is little
used, consider putting in an on-demand system instead. Yes, up front costs for
these new, more efficient technologies are higher, but some tax credits are
still available and you might have local incentives from your utility as well.
You’ll get the money back in lower energy costs within seven years even with
natural gas at $4/mmbtus. (Faster with higher nat gas prices.)
8)
Double and even triple-paned windows. Windows
are expensive, and the walls, attic and the underpart of your house are cheaper
and probably more important to address. But if your windows are single-paned
and drafty, at some point they will need to be tackled. I am really happy with
the fiberglass-framed windows we’ve put in our house. They look very much like wood-framed ones,
they don’t need paint, they seal tightly (locking out both noise and air
transfer), and fiberglass expands and contracts at the same ratio that glass
does, so it is not prone to warping like wood. In general they are more
expensive than aluminum/vinyl but less expensive than wood.
9) If you’ve got your house reasonably tight and
live where it’s really cold, consider a heat-exchange ventilation system that
reduces energy losses by transferring heat between outgoing and incoming air.
10) Consider replacing any large evergreens on the
south side of your house with deciduous trees so you will get a solar gain in
the winter but still get shade in the summer.
11) Do not rely on electric baseboard heaters or
space heaters. They are wildly inefficient in terms of energy use, and as
natural gas prices go up, so inevitably will electricity costs. A heat pump
will cost you far, far less to heat your house.
12) If you replace your dishwasher/washing machine,
get the lowest water use, highest efficiency-rated ones you can find.
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| The US is lucky it is so well-suited to solar. |
Long term
1)
Let’s face it, long term almost all of us will
be heating our houses (that have become very well insulated) via electricity
with heat pumps. And those of us who live in regions that have above 4 kilowatt-hours
per square meter per day solar potential (i.e. most of the continental US and
Hawaii—check out the map) are going to end up with solar panels on our roofs.
It’s a matter of when, not if. Heat
pumps are now available that work in outdoor temperatures below zero degrees,
and the technology will continue to improve. Big plus—if you live where it’s
hot in the summer, heat pumps also cool! And they are more energy efficient at
this than current air conditioners.
2)
If you ever have the opportunity/need to build a
new house, be smart and make it zero net energy. Whereas it’s somewhat
difficult to retrofit an existing house to be tight enough to be highly
energy-efficient, it’s not hard at all when building one from scratch. Use
passive solar where appropriate, insulate massively, make it air tight with a
heat exchange ventilator, stick some solar panels on the roof, and put in a
heat pump for the small amount of heating and cooling you still might need. It
will only cost $10-$20K extra, and you’ll have almost no future utility bills.
You will be all set for the rest of the 21st century!
Any other ideas to keep natural gas bills low? List them in the comments!
Very useful post, Karen. We heat and cook with wood except in the summer months. Heating water used to be our biggest electric consumer but Now its pretty minimal. In winter we route our cold well water through our wood cookstove which lifts the temp from 38 to about 110 deg and it rests in an old water heater before passing when needed to our big 100 gal electric water heater which only has to heat it to 120. In summer we use our solar greenhouse which has a bunch of old radiators painted black and they heat water to 130-140 before feeding it to that same holding tank. The monitor on our main hot water tank can go many weeks without turning on. I agree on the insulate, insulate but Fiberglass insulation is awful primarily because of the mice and squirrels who set up housekeeping in the wall, floor and attic cavities. The BEST is spray foam which seals against air entry and stiffens the structure immensely. Our Marvin fiberglass framed windows perform exactly as you state because the coefficient of expansion is equivalent to that of the glass. They are the only windows to use in a fiercely cold climate like ours and are far superior to the old aluminum clad frames. I think you could have mentioned getting rid of old appliances and replacing them with energy star units. We found a beautiful nearly new 3 door fridge for a song which dropped our monthly fridge bill over $9/month. Our big freezer sits in a cold garage and turns on only rarely. We also dry our clothes on clothes lines strung around our wood stoves which has a nice side benefit of increasing the humidity. We have a clothes line with a Canadian designed pulley which runs 100' to a tree allowing us to hang clothes up outside without moving down the line .Cheers.
ReplyDeleteGreat adaptations for your climate and energy sources! I didn't emphasize wood heat mostly because the particulate matter issue for people living in densely populated areas. (Although wood stoves have much less issues with this, and high efficiency wood stoves have even less.) For people in less densely populated areas that have access to local sources of wood, wood heat can make a lot of sense. I love wood fires, but living in San Francisco, the energy it takes to get wood to my front door is ridiculous. And with the crazy weather we've been having (worst drought in 150 years?), the air quality is to the point most days we have "Spare the Air" days and can't burn anything. (Sigh.) But all the sun does mean our solar panels have been cranking out lots of electricity, so that's to the plus, I guess.
ReplyDeleteGood point about the appliances, especially to reduce electricity consumption. Refrigerators older than about ten years are usually big electricity gobblers. Very impressed that you can get your water that warm in the summer just with old radiators painted black in a greenhouse!