Green Tips for Making Your House More Energy-Efficient

This article was inspired by a brief conversation with the manager at the Duffield Hardware & Lumber Company in Duffield, Virginia (276-431-1582), whom I contacted while writing a previous article about Green jobs in Scott County. Without even being prompted by any mention of AC's "Top Ten List" format, he spontaneously supplied a Top Ten List of things you can buy at a locally owned hardware store to get tax credit for making your home more energy-efficient.

You can do some of these Green jobs without buying anything. Bags of old clothes or even rolls of old newspapers will work as temporary insulation around water pipes; if you have a toilet with a big tank, inserting a milk or bleach jug will convert it into an efficiency-flush model. These tips are provided to help people make selections when they're ready to buy things.

1. Insulate your house to reduce heating bills. (Does anybody really need to read more about this? You know it has to be done.)

2. Insulate your water heater in winter. This reduces the cost of heating water, reduces the work load for the heating elements in the heater, reduces the chance that the heater and its intake lines will freeze, and doesn't even interfere with the "temporary solar conversion" you can make in summer by installing either a gas or an electric water heater in front of a southwest window. (You can then peel off insulation where the sun shines, and use remaining insulation to boost the solar heating capacity on the shady side of the heater.)

3. Insulate your water lines. One of Scott County's biggest winter nuisances has to be our light-and-airy Southern approach to plumbing. For most of the year, all many of us need to do to have excellent-quality running water is buy some PVC pipe, insert it in the old spring box, connect it to the house, and let clean, cold water flow. Every two or three years—sometimes twice in a row, like last January and this December—this doesn't work; we get enough really cold weather that water freezes and pipes burst. Some of us seem to need to be told that we could reduce the cost and the nuisance of rebuilding water lines by insulating the lines before they freeze. Once in a while we may still get a deep enough freeze to make it necessary to peel off insulation and replace a pipe (which is a chore I'm not looking forward to doing, if and whenever the weather stays warm long enough, after writing this article) but insulating the pipes will get some of us through several winters in a row without having to replace a single joint.

4. Seal and insulate doors and windows with "weather strips" and storm doors and windows. Buy weather strips to install around existing doors and windows while they last. When the time comes to replace the whole window, you can buy the main window, storm window, screen, and frame as a single unit.

5. Insulate below the roof...or choose an energy-efficient roof material. Metal roofs, which used to be looked down on as being cheap and old-fashioned, are back in favor because they can be energy-efficient, especially if insulated.

6. Here in Scott County, Virginia, a limited number of rural homes received free waterless composting toilets. I've lived with one for years, and recommend it as being safe, sanitary, and much more pleasant than a water-flush toilet (see remarks about freezing water lines above). If you can afford one, contact the Sun-Mar company by all means. If you have to depend on a water-flush toilet, however, you can at least get one of the smaller tanks that reduce the amount of water wasted on each flush.

7. If you choose electricity as your primary heat source, get an Energy Star heat pump instead of using multiple space heaters.

8. If you have the option of choosing wood as your primary heat source (you have access to a wood lot that supplies enough usable dead wood, you have a safe chimney and room to put the stove, you either don't have a computer in your home or can keep it in a completely ash-free part of the house), buy a wood stove. If you can't use wood as either a primary or a backup heat source, you need a propane heater in case of power outages. Buy both from a local hardware store.

9. The Green approach to gardening and landscaping uses renewable human-body energy. By using a hand saw to cut wood, you can be warm twice. You can also burn off enough calories to enjoy more of your favorite foods by trimming hedges with hand-held shears, digging up weeds with a hoe, and cutting grass with a mowing blade. Heavy power tools are not easier for people in poor physical condition to use, and they don't encourage the slower, more reflective approach to gardening some Green people garden for. If you choose to use power saws, power mowers, power trimmers, etc., however, ask your local hardware store about lower-emissions tools.

10. Keep filters clean. This is discussed further in an article about making your household appliances more efficient, but it's also a way to Green up the whole house. Seal cracks around outside vents to any heat pumps, washing or drying machines, air conditioners, furnaces, etc. to keep these devices as efficient as possible. Dust off the non-replaceable screens outside these vents, and change the indoor filters every month, to make sure you're getting clean, climate-controlled air rather than inefficiently cooled or heated, dirty air.