Category: BCIT

I let slip in one of my recent posts that I know exactly how much greenhouse gas we would be pumping into the atmosphere if we were to fill up the fuel oil tank again.

Nobody challenged me on how I knew that. You trust me that much?

In fact, I know because Rodrigo Mora, who is on faculty in the Building Science Department at BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology) did a little calculation for me.

You might remember Professor Mora got a couple of students interested in studying this old house. One of them got a job and had to drop his project, but one completed a study and submitted a paper. I’m going to share those results, but first, here is what Rodrigo told me about what our furnace does to accelerate climate change.

The bottom line, as you can see, is that if we burn all 1100.7 liters of fuel oil in a full tank we create the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 3841 tons of CO2. Most of that is CO2 but some of it is methane (CH4) and N2O.

Rodrigo compared that to an average wagon-type car and it turns out that our furnace creates about the same amount of GHGs as driving for one year.

Great.

Here we are, a one-car family who supplements that gas-electric hybrid Toyota Prius with bus rides and an electric scooter, thinking we are doing well keeping another car off the road, when we realize that our house is polluting just as much as the missing car.

Our house is just sitting here. The sun beats down on it. The earth a few feet beneath retains a constant temperature year-round. The wind blows on it. Why do we talk about new windows and weather-stripping and saving 5-10% on our gas bill when we can go all the way and save 50% or 75%?

As a consumer I am bored by minor reductions in my fuel bill. If I fixed the storm door on our front door I bet we would save 1-2% right there. Yaaaawn. I’ll get to it but I do have better things to do.

But tell me I can save 80% and I’m listening. Tell me I can produce my own energy and sell it back to BC Hydro so that my energy bill for the year is a big fat zero, and I am yours. Well, that is what I’m telling you. The expertise and technology exists to do this right now and that’s the goal for Hammond Forever House.

Net-zero.

There is nothing stopping us from retrofitting every existing home in Canada so that they simply do not require oil or gas to heat them. Nothing except us.

Am I tempted to buy some fuel oil while the price is temporarily low? Yes. However, burning cheap oil intensifies the greenhouse effect just as much as burning expensive oil.

We’re all in this together. There is no Planet B.

When the house gets chilly these days I think a lot about our heat sources. I want to make more heat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I put more wood on the fire, I turn on the air conditioner/heater in the kitchen or I turn on the space heater in the kids bedroom upstairs.

But what makes it possible for us to live without turning on the oil furnace is something I don’t think about everyday: insulation.

Insulation is what is keeping the heat from escaping into the neighbourhood.

Insulation is the reason we haven’t filled the oil tank in 19 months. We used to fill it every 4 months when we first moved in.

In fact, before 2008, the furnace would turn on every twenty minutes because the house was so minimally insulated and sealed. We were comfortable enough because the thermostat was set and the furnace did its job. We went through a lot of oil, however, and now, thanks to BCIT, I know how much carbon we were putting into the atmosphere, (about the same amount an average car does in a year!)

The first step of reducing our energy costs and dependency is to conserve it. For most of us busy people, however, it is a case of ‘out of sight out of mind’.

With my in-laws, Julie and Dave’s help, we did as much as we could on our own in 2008. Julie was very happy that her daughter’s young family was buying the house she grew up in. Both she and Dave did a lot to make owning this beautiful old home possible for us. I don’t know how people of my generation afford houses without help from their parents.

One thing we couldn’t do on our own was insulate the exterior walls. The siding was in pretty good shape (although it needed some paint) and the interior of the house was nice, too. Even if we had wanted to, it was also clear ripping open the walls to insulate was a huge and expensive job so Dave hired a company to spray foam insulation into the walls.

Dave hired Greer Spray Foam Ltd. to do the job and supervised the work for us.

It is about what you would imagine. They drill holes in the walls and spray foam into them.

The foam fills the cavity between the studs of the wall and, when the operator feels the cavity is filled to a certain extent, he or she stops spraying and lets the cavity fill up with the expanding foam. It takes some skill because too little foam will leave gaps and too much can warp the walls or even break through weak spots.

In our walls they used open-celled half-pound foam which doesn’t expand as much as other stuff. Even so, there were a few spots where the foam broke through the interior walls or leaked through gaps. After it cures, you can clean it up pretty easily.

Dave discovered something interesting about the master bedroom closet that day. When the foam guy drilled into the wall of the closet, he pulled out the drill and noticed there was some cloth on the drill. He thought it must be some kind of pre-existing insulation. Dave went inside to see if he could explain it. One look and he shouted, “Don’t spray! Don’t spray!”

The wall of the closet is single-layered. There is no gap to spray foam into, only a closet full of clothes. The cloth that stuck to the drill was from one of Leanne’s sweaters. If they had sprayed in there it would have filled our closet with foam and embedded all those clothes in it.

Now we know why that closet, which inexplicably hangs out over thin air, is so darn cold all the time.

The other challenge to this process was the fire-breaks in the walls. Between the exterior studs up and down the walls are short, horizontal pieces that break the vertical spaces into smaller spaces. These are to prevent air from flowing freely up the inside of the walls. I imagine that was good for insulation as well as in the case of a fire. Unfortunately, it was impossible to predict where each cavity began or ended, so Dave and the spray-guy had to insert wires into the holes to see if they could detect a cross-piece. When the foam was sprayed, extra care had to be taken not to over-fill a smaller-than-expected cavity.

The result was a better-insulated, more solid house. The trains weren’t as loud and the house didn’t shake quite as much and the furnace did not come on so often.

Spray foam has its detractors. One downside to spraying foam into the walls of older homes is that the fact it is designed to cling to the wood means that if you ever demolish or renovate that wall, the wood cannot easily be re-used. It is covered in foam. We will cross this bridge when we finally renovate the back of the house. Another problem is the off-gassing which occurs for a while after installation and then there is the chemicals involved in the manufacture–it is mostly an oil or petroleum product. In our case there wasn’t much of a choice. I hope that the spray foam products improve like everything else in the future.

The challenge of insulating existing walls of this vintage really hit home when Monte Paulsen, our energy advisor, took some infra-red photos of the walls. There are gaps where the foam did not reach. I’m going to try and get those from him so I can share them with you.

The house looked like it had a case of the chicken pox until the following summer when our trusty neighbour, Brad, painted the house. I think it made for a spooky Hallowe’en effect, don’t you?