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Today is the ASES National Solar Tour and we are one of the houses featured on the Bloomington Solar Tour but wouldn’t you know it, after an unbelievably dry summer and fall, today it is raining.  (The last time it rained was during the girl scout campout I organized.  I seem to have a gift.)  Our solar furnace is not very impressive on cloudy days and I think people are staying indoors for fear they might melt but maybe it’s just was well we have a quiet weekend after a busy week.

The Simply Living Fair went well and people seemed to enjoy Will’s talk about our efforts to get down to a 90 kilowatt-hour month (we managed it in June but are thinking 120 kilowatt-hours is a more reasonable target in the fall).  The green living tour to our house and two other green buildings was fun despite having a small crowd of about eight.  In general, everyone who came was happy; I just wish more people had come.  Maybe next year.

On Monday, Will got a new toy in the mail.  It’s an infrared thermometer and it looks a lot like a price scanner or a space age neuron gun.  You point it at an object, pull the trigger, and it tells you what temperature it is.  Will has had hours of fun testing the temperature of various surfaces around our home.  I’m not quite as entertained but I do appreciate that it will help us identify heat leaks in our ductwork, walls, windows, and attic access panels (Will measured a 20 degree difference between the ceiling in the main room and the access panel to the attic – pretty alarming).

Yesterday we sold our little playhouse shed, which meant we got to watch a guy come and load it on a special kind of tow truck to take it away.  I still feel slightly guilty for not figuring out a way to put it to use but it had been sitting empty for two years so it was time to let go.  The dog is still a little confused as to what happened but we figure she’ll lose interest now that there are no longer mice and skunks and other critters hiding out underneath.  (We thought she had excavated some major tunnels under the shed and were expecting a sort of underground labyrinth to be revealed but apparently she only dug out the minimum needed to squeeze her body under the boards.)

Next week we leave on the train to New Mexico for a week, which will hopefully be a nice fall break.  It will be good to see family, even if the occasion for gathering is a memorial service for Will’s grandmother.  We are looking forward to exploring a new train route and getting a change of scenery for a little while, although I hope the leaves don’t all turn colors and fall off before we get back!

Okay, our solar furnace is actually installed!  Now if only it were cool enough to want to use it…  Still, that will come in time and for now we’re excited to show it off.  Here are some basic pictures of the final product; we’ll post pictures of the actual construction further down the road when we have caught up with ourselves (ha!).

It’s a lot flatter than I expected, about a handsbreadth deep.  I think it looks pretty good on the side of our house and Michael B. did an excellent job with the flashing around the edges.  So what you can’t see is that there are two holes in the back of the panel that continue through the wall of the house and into the living room.  One hole has a fan attached (that unfortunately sticks further into the room than we had envisioned) for pulling air from our house through the panel.  The fan is controlled by two thermostats.

One thermostat is mounted on the wall and lets us decide how hot we want our house to be (it cranks up to 90!).  The other is located inside the panel and makes sure the panel is hot enough to heat up air as it passes through.  We had it on for an afternoon right after it was installed and it gets amazingly hot.  We could totally set up a sauna in our living room if we wanted.

So here is my very crude graphic rendition of air flow through the panel heating our house.  We were a little surprised that the panel has no channels or grooves on the inside to direct air flow; it’s just one big black box.  The advantage is that you can cut the openings wherever you need them so if your house happens to have a phone jack or an electrical outlet right where you were going to install the fan, you can move it over a few inches and just put the hole in a different place in the panel.

We’ll keep you posted on results as the weather cools down.

Well, our solar furnace installation has been postponed until next Tuesday (initially because the materials didn’t arrive, then because our volunteer carpenter is trying to juggle paid work with this project) which is just as well since the weather seems to have zoomed back into the 90′s.  With a little luck I can keep the house clean until it actually happens…

In the meantime, Will and I are working on a presentation for the Simply Living Fair about the reductions in energy use we’ve seen since we started participating in the SIREN Energy Showdown.  Our working title is “Powering Down: Toward a 90 kWh Month.”  Sounds good, eh?  If you’re anywhere near Bloomington, you should totally come support the fair.  Tickets are only $12 and you’ll help me sleep better at night knowing that I didn’t just make a struggling nonprofit lose money putting on an event that they can’t afford.  (Yeah, I’m having some fun stress dreams these days between coordinating the fair and gearing up for a weekend of camping with 200 girl scouts ages 6-14.)

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Guess what?!?  We were chosen to have a solar air heater installed on our house as a demonstration project sponsored by the Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network (SIREN)!  Solar air heaters (also known as solar furnaces) are essentially big black boxes that heat up in the sun.  They are filled with air channels so that air flows through the panel, heats up from the sunlight, and then the hot air goes into the house (generally with the help of a small solar fan).  Solar air heating is a form of solar energy that’s actually more efficient than solar electricity (photovoltaic panels) but doesn’t get as much publicity.  SIREN is excited to promote the technology and also hoping to launch a pilot project installing these systems on low-income houses.

Our solar furnace will come from the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance (RREAL), a company in Minnesota that makes them and also does a lot of work making renewable energy more accessible through training, education, installations, and a unique assistance program.  They partner with agencies that serve the low-income community to install these systems for minimal cost as a way to make low-income families more self-reliant.  Pretty cool stuff!  SIREN hopes to bring a similar program down to our neck of the woods and is looking for an agency to partner with, hopefully the South Central Community Action Program (SCCAP), which is a local group working on weatherization and energy assistance for low-income families (among many other great assistance programs).  Will and I are going through the application process so we can work together to try out the system, show it off to anyone interested, and further weatherize our home.

Want to see the system?  We’ll be posting lots of pictures on our blog when the installation happens and we’ll also be opening our home up for a few tours.  One will be as part of the Simply Living Fair coming up September 25-26.  We’re giving a talk on home energy reduction as part of the Saturday workshops and then our house will be featured as part of the Solar Energy Tour on Sunday.  It should be lots of fun!  (Disclaimer: I am chairing the organizing committee for the fair so OF COURSE I think it will be lots of fun.)

Hopefully we’ll get accepted into the SCCAP program and they will help us do some insulating and caulking later this fall to further increase the energy efficiency of our home.  I’m also still contemplating putting a greenhouse on our front porch to help improve heat gain through our south-facing bay windows but I’m  not ready to make any promises.  Regardless, we are looking forward to lowering our carbon footprint this winter while enjoying free hot air from the sun!

Every year I say “This is the year I will seriously garden” and then I get distracted.  However, every year I get a little better.  This year I had a nice spring crop of peas and lettuce and kale, transplanted out a healthy batch of tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries, and then planted a nice selection of melons, beans, corn, and basil.

Then I left town for a couple weeks and the garden exploded.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I knew I was falling behind in the weeding department before I left and I made peace with the idea of having a weedy garden jungle.  What I didn’t take into account was the fact that both the weeds and the “proper” garden plants would go through a major growth spurt and fill all available space, including the pathways and fences.

It’s not all bad.  I’ve been enjoying a bumper crop of tomatoes, peppers, and basil plus a nice honeydew (the watermelon is almost ripe).  My bean plants grew like champions although it turns out the cowpeas grew a lot better than the other varieties so most of what I’m harvesting is dried beans.  I feel like I’m getting some good food out of the garden.

But it doesn’t look very pretty.  Happily, I have very tolerant neighbors who don’t seem to mind as long as it doesn’t get into their yards.  (I suspect a few of them are secretly pleased that the deer have been enjoying the unfenced areas of my garden rather than theirs.)  I’m hoping to clean it up a bit over the next few weeks and start some fall crops.  Now is the time to sow spinach, peas, kale, radishes, beets, and cold-season lettuce to harvest in the fall.

I also have a few pledges for next year

• Plant things further apart – especially kale and melons but really I planted everything too close together.
• Get those tomato trellises in early and keep the tomatoes under control.
• Put in more weed-suppressing path materials (old carpet works great; straw works okay)
• Commit myself to time weeding the garden (yeah, I’m really just lazy)
• Build more fences!  My ugly metal-stake-and-deer-netting fence has actually done very well but everything outside the fence has been seriously chomped (especially my poor sunflower fort).

With a little luck, I’ll have 3-4 more weeks of tomatoes, a couple watermelons, and a nice harvest of popcorn to look forward to.  Oh, and it looks like two of my experimental crops are setting fruit – garden huckleberries and popping sorghum – which is very exciting!  I’m still not really replacing much of our diet with homegrown veggies and fruits but it’s nice to have a few treats and every year I feel a little more optimistic that I could be a homesteader if I really put my mind to it.

How does your garden grow?

Will and I spent a pleasant hour in the hammock a few weeks ago talking about project ideas for the house.  He’s been especially focused on energy savings and was very excited about the idea of building a solar shower.  I have many fond memories of outdoor solar showers but the ones I have used in the past involve solar water panels, plumbing, welding, privacy screens, and several other features that would challenge my handywoman skills.  Ever practical, Will suggested that rather than plunging into a new construction project, we should pick up a simple camp shower and try it out so we could go ahead and turn off our hot water heater.

We picked up a solar shower kit at a local box store for $25 that consists of a curtain with a zipper, a solar water bag with a shower nozzle, and a support structure to hang it all from.  We hung the support structure and curtain from one of the big sugar maples in our backyard, filled up the water bag, and I took the first shower.  It was not a great experience.  The shower bag came with a long tube leading to a shower nozzle, which in theory gives you the flexibility to spray in many different directions.  In actuality, you have to keep the tube stretched out and sloping down to get decent water flow, which means crouching down and risking mooning the neighbors.  We had also neglected to stake down the curtain, so it was blowing around a bit and decreasing my feeling of privacy even further.

After that first shower, I cut the tube into a short piece so now I can stand under it comfortably (Will has to duck a little).  We put a piece of indoor/outdoor carpet under the shower so it doesn’t get too muddy.  It’s still a bit of a pain to fill, heat, and hang the bag but it’s doable.  Actually, the biggest challenge is keeping the water comfortable instead of scalding hot.  The solar shower heats up too well some days and we have to add cold water.

We’re going to try it out a little longer but I think it’s been successful enough that we will try building Solar Shower 2.0, perhaps using the directions from the Carbon-Free Home book.  They suggest building a platform of some sort and putting a small (10-gallon) black barrel up on it with a shower spigot sticking out.  Ideally, it should be designed so you can fill it from the ground using a garden hose (or rain barrel) so you don’t have to haul it up and down.  Sounds good to me!  Maybe we can build some actual walls around it too….

After a poor April (with no year-over-year change in our electrical consumption), we got a new refrigerator and reevaluated our strategy. Reducing our furnace use helped a lot in the winter, but we barely used the A/C last year, so that wasn’t going to improve this year.

Thanks to the refrigerator, May was a good month. We were able to reduce our consumption by 50%! That brought our total usage for May to 121 kWh, which is a little over 4 kWh a day. Given that, I talked Maggie into trying to reduce our usage to less than 3 kWh a day in June. For comparison, leaving two incandescent bulbs on would use up the allotment for that day.

So June is over; how did we do? From June 1st to July 3rd, we used 79.9 kWh or a little under 2.5 kWh a day! Here’s how we did it.

No A/C – A/C isn’t as energy intensive as heating, at least in part because the temperature difference isn’t as high, but it still uses a lot of power. Running a typical central air system for half an hour can use over 1 kWh. Instead, we used blinds to reduce solar gain, opened windows when it was cool and closed them when it was hot, used the ceiling fan and window fans, and, on one particularly hot afternoon, took refuge in an air-conditioned movie theater.

No hot water – the majority of residential energy use is cooling and heating, including water heating. My best estimate is that our 40-gallon water heater uses 300 Wh (0.3 kWh) a day. We got a solar camp shower and we’ve also taken some cold showers. As a bonus, we cut our water use significantly since you don’t dawdle in a cold shower!

No clothes dryer – Our clothes dryer runs about 2 kWh per load! Now that it’s summer, we’ve avoided using it entirely and line dry everything. It takes more planning, especially since we had so many thunderstorms in June, but that’s quite the energy savings!

Reduced computer use – I have a small netbook that uses less than half of the electricity of my normal laptop. I was able to get even better numbers by using Windows’ power settings to dim the screen and slow the processor. I also made sure to take my charger with me when I worked outside the house. That doesn’t decrease my overall electrical use, but partly offsets the fact that I work from home.

Sharing space – In the evening, Maggie and I make sure we spend most of our time in the same room. That means we’re only running one fan and one set of lights. It’s not a big savings, but it’s also pretty easy to do.

We won’t be able to sustain it into the winter, and some of it is extreme enough that we might not be able to sustain it for more than a month or two. I think we’ll be able to keep it under 3 kWh for July and maybe August, but when it gets cold again, we’ll have to turn on the furnace. We also won’t be able to stop using the dryer entirely at that point. Still, for now, we’re feeling pretty good!

This whole SIREN Energy Challenge has made us even more conscious of how much electricity we use and Will has become obsessed with switching off lights, unplugging appliances, and spending his free time trying to uncover the source of unaccounted energy use every month.  We thought we had made some major progress with our new water heater and our conservation efforts and were initially proud of our first quarter results – 11% less electrical use than last year.  Then we found out that the winning household cut their energy use by 35% for the quarter!

How did they do it?  They made a lot of little changes that we’ve also done like adding attic insulation, installing a programmable thermostat to lower their heat at night, caulking windows, and replacing light bulbs with CFLs.  However, they also made two big appliance changes.  First of all, they unplugged an underutilized chest freezer, determining that they didn’t need the space.  Secondly, they replaced their 1986 refrigerator with a new Energy Star model.

We don’t have a chest freezer but we immediately became suspicious of our refrigerator and got out the Kill-a-watt meter, which confirmed our fears.  The old fridge was using 2.6 kWhr/day, which was a big chunk of our daily usage.

Our “Carbon Free Home” book suggested insulating the fridge to try and increase its efficiency so we got some foam insulating board from the home improvement store and stuck it on with double-sided carpet tape.  (For those aesthetic types, they suggest building a wooden insulated box around the sides of the fridge and adding shag carpeting on the front for a little extra oomph.)  It seemed to help at first but then the electrical usage went back up, possibly because our house suddenly warmed up with the weather.  (We survived with the thermostat at 62 all winter long but in May 62 degrees started feeling really cold!)

I suggested that we look into getting a new fridge so Will started doing research and we figured an Energy Star fridge would be at least 50% more efficient, which seemed significant.  We shopped around a bit and although theoretically there are SUPER efficient fridges out there, we bought one that is simply VERY efficient from our local box star.

The results so far?  The new fridge uses less than 0.7 kWh/day, which is about one quarter of what the old fridge used.  Did you catch that?  It uses SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT LESS ELECTRICITY!  We’re thrilled and feel like it was totally a good purchase, even though a payback time of 8 years still seems like a lot.

Of course, replacing the refrigerator was relatively painless (at least in terms of our day-to-day lifestyle).  We decided to push on into the lifestyle change category in the quest of fame, fortune, and fabulous eco-prizes.  Tune in next week as Will regales the world with tales of turning off our air conditioning, our water heater, and our clothes dryer in the quest of using less than 3 kWh/day….

Energy Tracking Note:

kWh/day = kilowatt-hour per day which is calculated by multiplying the wattage that a device uses by the number of hours it runs in a day and dividing by a thousand.  Here’s a link to a nice post about estimating appliance energy use provided by our federal government.  For real world testing, you can use a Kill-A-Watt device on anything that plugs into a normal outlet (so it doesn’t work for most clothes dryers and water heaters).

A friend gave me her solar cooker last year because she lives in a shady neighborhood and it just wasn’t working for her.  I was very excited to receive it but had trouble getting motivated to use it until I picked up a book at the library this spring.   “Cooking with Sunshine” by Lorraine Anderson and Rick Palkovic has a great selection of recipes and tips but also talks about different options for when you have more or less time available.  They have some recipes that cook entirely in the cooker and others where you either do some cooking ahead of time (such as sauteing onions) or some cooking afterward (such as converting cooked rice into a rice salad).  They also talk about what foods you can leave in the solar cooker all day without worrying about burning or drying out.  I don’t want to admit how many times I have scorched rice or beans by leaving it on the stove for too long so I was very relieved to learn that wouldn’t be an issue with the solar cooker.

It also took awhile for me to grasp the idea that even if I only use the solar cooker for part of a meal (say cooking a pot of beans which I then incorporate into burritos or chili) I am still reducing my carbon footprint and taking advantage of free, clean energy.  Somehow I got caught up in the idea that if I were going to go solar I had to go all the way and the world would come crashing down if clouds rolled in and I had to put my beans in the oven to finish cooking them.  Silly but true.

Anyway, now I’m starting to get into the solar cooking routine although I’m still learning the ins and outs; we had some rather crunchy baked beans last week that hadn’t cooked quite long enough – although the flavor was excellent!  I’m also on the hunt for the perfect solar cooker dish.  Ideally, it would be an oven-safe dark colored pyrex or ceramic dish with a tight-fitting lid.  Right now I’m using a white casserole dish with a clear lid and covering it with a blue cloth to try and soak up some extra heat.  It works pretty well but the lid isn’t quite tight enough to keep in steam and so the top panel often gets covered in condensation, which reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the food.  It’s a common challenge for solar cooking and one solution is to vent the lid slightly but that also reduces cooking efficiency.  I have seen a lot of variations of solar cookers and it would be pretty easy to build your own.  This one is a little bulky but it’s well constructed with a moveable set of reflectors, a plexiglass lid on a rubber lip, and a shelf inside to keep the pot off the bottom of the oven.

I set the solar cooker up on our front porch (which is south-facing) and let it cook from about 10:00 to 4:00.  If I’m home, I’ll turn it a couple of times during the day so that the reflectors capture as much sun as possible but if I’m going to be gone, I just leave it pointing as close to due south as practical.  On a sunny day, the oven quickly heats up to 250 degrees.  On a cloudy day, it tends to hover at more like 150.  So far I’ve been sticking with grains and beans but I’d like to try some bread recipes and maybe a quiche.  I was surprised to see that egg dishes are considered fairly easy for the solar cooker but the reasoning is that they cook pretty quickly so you don’t have to have a perfectly sunny day.  I am also contemplating using the solar cooker to sterilize some potting soil for my next round of seedlings.

Have any solar recipes or tips to share?

It’s funny how writing a blog can set you up as an authority figure, and occasionally lead to fame and fortune.  We’ve been doing pretty well in the fame department but could use a little more fortune!

Most recently, I was contacted by a reporter in Canada for the article  “Aunt Jemima no more: Foodies make their own maple syrup” about urban maple tapping.  I was pleased she located a few other urban tappers with a little more experience under their belts since we really only tried it the one time with limited success.  I really do think urban maple syrup is a great idea for folks to pursue; it just hasn’t made it very high on our green list.

A few weeks ago, we got an e-mail from a reference librarian (also in Canada) looking for information on greasecars.  She was hoping we could help a patron who was looking for sources of vegetable oil in Edmonton and I’m afraid I wasn’t very helpful.  (In fact, I had to get out my atlas to locate Edmonton – it’s in Alberta, way north of Missoula, MT and pretty far north of Calgary.)

Still, it’s fun to feel connected with other green folks who are trying to do their little piece.  So keep the questions and interviews and suggestions coming!  (And if you can find some fortune, that would be nice too.)