Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Heating issues (some addresses and more q's!!)

[Jeffrey O. Hobson (johobson]

Nancy Wight wrote:
>Some people in our group will definitely 
>have air conditioning for various reasons.  One person has a disability 
>that requires it.  Pablo and I have an office with lots of computer 
>equipment heating up the room.  I would say that at least half of the 
>houses are considering air conditioning.

If you are having an office with computer equipment, is it new or existing
equipment?  If any of it will be new, I highly recommend that you find
"Energy Star" computers, monitors, and printers - they turn themselves off,
or go into a very low-power state, if you don't use them for a
user-specified period.  By now, any computer, including OEM-PC's, should be
available meeting this guideline.  This is very different from a
screen-saver (which doesn't affect the power the monitor uses at all).  If
your computer vendor doesn't have info, contact Linda Latham in the "Energy
Star" Program of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in their
Washington DC office.

Reducing heat gains can be accomplished with other appliances as well.
Write to American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy for a copy of
their book "Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings", by John Morril & Alex
Wilson.  It is $7.95 ea., and this year's edition just came out.  The CGHES
lists ways to be more efficient as well as specific model numbers to look
for on various different appliances:
ACEEE 
2140 Shattuck Ave. #202
Berkeley CA 94704

>As for insulation, we are following the "Energy Crafted Homes" guidelines 
>which means our houses will have extra insulation, an improved envelope, 
>special windows, ventilation systems, and be practically air-tight.  The 
>claim is that we will use at least 50% less energy to heat and cool our 
>houses.  Some of the houses are situated particularly well for solar gain, 
>but some are not.
How much insulation (rated R-value)?
How is the envelope improved?
What are the window specs (double-pane, low-E, u-value, etc.)?
Is your architect familiar with passive solar design? 

>Lots of us are interested in being innovative, and I personally am very 
>interested in any information you have on this.  Unfortunately, we are 
>under a very tight budget at this point, and I doubt that we will be able 
>to do much in this area if the up front costs are high.
Are you on a tight schedule as well as a tight budget?  If so, probably
installing lines so that you can retrofit later is the best idea.  If you're
interested in the PV-powered heat pumps, try:
Electric Power Research Institute
3401 Hillview Ave.
Palo Alto CA 94303
415 855 7000 (or was is 2000, not sure)

For ground source heat pumps, my best contact is:
David N. Anderson
Geothermal Resources Council
P.O. Box 1350
Davis CA 95617
916 758 2360 phone
916 758 2839 fax

********************************
Stephen Hawthorne wrote:
>The address of EPRI would be of great benefit, since we want to end up 
>off the grid asap.  The contact info about geothermals was also very helpful.
EPRI is an organization of electric utilities, and as such, is unlikely to
look very favorably on desires to be off-grid (since off-grid usually means
off-utility as well, unless your local utility is selling and financing
"off-grid" systems).  However, they are sponsoring this PV-powered heat pump
development, which I think is being done by a firm in Minnesota or Michigan
(some M-state, I'm pretty sure, maybe Massachusetts).

See the EPRI address above.

Because I don't have any feeling for North Carolina weather, I don't feel
qualified to give you any more specific advice than I've given on your site.  

********************************
Ray Gasser wrote:
>Community is designed in two roughly parallel rows, with all houses facing
>within 10 degrees of solar south. Houses have 14 foot mostly glass walls . . .

Sounds pretty neat; clearly you've got an architect who knows his/her way
around solar design.  I'm curious about your "14 foot mostly glass walls".
Do you mean 14 feet high?  Are these 2-story buildings?  What's the story?

>Houses will be duplexes, in clusters of 6 or 8 units (4 or 4 buildings) with
>each cluster having an "energy center" with a common gas fired boiler and
>each unit being treated as a heating zone (or two). . . 

I'm also curious about the clustered heating system: what is the heat
delivery medium?  More precisely, do you have a single gas boiler which
distributing hot water to each unit, where a fan blows air over a hot water
coil and delivers hot air through ductwork to the house?  Or is the water
pumped through the floor, providing radiant heating, or baseboard heat
exchangers,  providing convective heat delivery?  

Finally, how did you decide all these questions I list above?  Did your
mechanical engineer (or the architect's mech. engineer) sit through your
participatory design process?  Who gave you the info you needed about what
energy impacts, air quality impacts, etc., different design decisions would
have?  Was it just the architect?  Did you have people in the
decision-making group who had some of this expertise, and use them as resources?

I ask all these questions in the last paragraph, as a young half
energy-engineer, half co-houser, trying to decide my future work directions,
and better understand how I could educate myself and gain practical
knowledge to let me do interesting work.

Hope this is all useful.

peas,
Jeffrey Hobson
johobson [at] wheel.ucdavis.edu
N Street Cohousing, Davis Energy Group