The PeakReady Blog

The Heating Question

• Posted by e4 on November 14th, 2007 filed in Energy

Fossil fuels are very good at heating. Unfortunately, as most of us realize, they also have a lot of baggage - greenhouse gases, finite supply, rising costs, pollutants - you know the list.

Making your home heating environmentally friendly can be a challenge. Climate control is an energy-intensive task, and most of the solutions have their share of problems.

After conservation, passive solar techniques are often the best place to start. The idea is to capture the sun’s heat directly to warm the air in your house - the original greenhouse effect. There are many ways to do this. Build It Solar has some great low-cost do-it-yourself passive solar projects. Many will pay for themselves in a year or less.

Or, if you’ve got a bunch of money, you can build a whole new passive solar house that uses almost no energy, like this one:

But after that it gets a little cloudy.

Wood is probably the most sustainable, in many areas - especially if you have access to a mature woodlot or a nearby forest. Wood, especially hardwood, contains a lot of heat. There are up to 20 million BTU’s in a cord of wood, which makes it equivalent to about 20,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 220 gallons of propane, or 145 gallons of heating oil. And don’t forget, as the saying goes, if you chop your own wood, it warms you twice. In a mature stand of trees, deadfall alone can account for quite a bit of heating potential. Coppicing (repeated cuttings from fast-growing trees) is another possibility. Yet another advantage is that a woodburning stove requires no moving parts. Even so, wood is not the cleanest burning fuel, even with the latest catalytic techniques. (A fireplace, as opposed to a proper stove, is generally going to lose as much or more heat as it produces, by creating a convective current right up the chimney.) When considering wood as a heat source, we also have to be careful to manage woodlands properly and not contribute to deforestation. We need those live trees soaking up as much carbon dioxide as possible.Wood pellets are made from a waste product (sawdust) in most places, and burn cleaner and more efficiently than cord wood, but then they have to be manufactured, packaged, shipped, etc. And they require a stove with electricity and moving parts. Grass pellets are a possibility that probably scales a little better, but they have many of the same problems as wood pellets. Grass pellets are not commercially available at this point.

Dried corn, oats, cherry pits, olive pits, sunflower seeds, and various other grains and seeds can be harvested and burned for heat in stoves very similar to pellet stoves. They have ethanol and oils that can burn very cleanly and very efficiently (87% burn efficiency, and 0.3 - 0.7 grams per hour of particulate, compared to 2.5 and up for a modern wood-burning stove). Grains and seeds can be renewed in a single growing season. But these have to be processed as well. Less processing is required than it takes to convert the same grains to biofuels, but as with biofuels, it often puts your fuel source in direct competition with your food source. This could be justifiable at a regional level. Grains and seeds have the advantage of being quickly renewable and (potentially at least) sustainable. You can typically substitute pellets in corn- or other grain-burning stoves, but you generally cannot burn grains in a pellet stove.

One disadvantage of all of these options is that you can’t just “set it and forget it” - but then again, this is an advantage in many ways. You become much more aware of your fuel consumption, and there’s an incentive to conserve, because it means less time and effort on your part. You also become more aware of the weather. You’ll quickly learn that wind chill applies to your house as well as your skin, and that a blanket of snow on the roof is great insulation.

If you’re trying to get away from fossil fuels and you have a clean, renewable source of electricity, an electric heat pump is another option. Standard heat pumps can double or triple the efficiency of a standard electric heater (like a space heater), but they become less and less efficient as the temperature drops. Ground-source or water-source heat pumps can mitigate this problem and improve efficiency even further, but they are quite expensive to install.

In the long run, the best solution will vary to vary from place to place and situation to situation. No one solution can meet everybody’s heating needs. With fossil fuel prices likely to rise as time goes on, and with more and more concern about global climate change, now is a good time to consider the options.

As with many things, reducing consumption is the best (and often cheapest) place to start. Some ways to cut your heating needs include:

Winter heating is an area where a lot of fossil fuel use can be elminated without a lot of effort. And if you’re willing to put forth the effort, the savings (in both dollars and pollutants) can be substantial.

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