ACI Conference - Tuesday, March 30th, 2011

Never having been to an ACI Conference before and, more importantly, never having been to a conference at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, any normal person (me) would Google the place to find out where to park.  Entering the address of the Marriott Marquis placed it right in the main part of the Moscone Center and since I'd been to a couple of other conferences at the Moscone, I assumed it must be there.  After parking in the cheap seat parking garage a few blocks a few long blocks south of Moscone, I find no one at Moscone has heard of the ACI; in fact, there's a completely different conference there this week.  Yank out the smart phone, try and make out the minuscule print and find the Marriott is actually several blocks *north* of Moscone.  Drag my bags.. anyway, you don't need to hear all this.  I made it.

Monday is what's called the "Pre-Conference Summit", costs an extra several hundred bucks and did not include enough of interest for me to attend.  If you're interested, the ACI Conference website lists what went on that day.  I want to talk about my personal view of the Conference so this Blog starts on Tuesday.

Tuesday has two parts to it: it's the second and last day of the Pre-Conference Summit but it also has several 4 hour classes in the morning and several more in the afternoon and are included in the Core Conference, even though the Core Conference doesn't start until Wednesday.  4 of the 5 morning courses were designed for specialty trades - insulating sidewalls, optimizing HVAC, etc. - so I went to the 5th, which sounded right up my alley, House as a System.

David Keefe is an experienced, quality speaker who has apparently retired from a few decades of working in the Efficiency field and now speaks.  It's not easy to speak for 4 hours with only a 15 minute break.  He warned us early in the session that it would be a fairly basic but complete going over of the Home Performance field and that's what it was.  He spend an hour or more setting up and describing concepts and history, and the rest of the time talking about how things are done and going over in detail why we have to be so careful about indoor air quality issues when we tighten up a house.  Using several detailed examples, he kept coming back to the idea that Home Performance Contracting is a large and complex discipline and if people are considering entering it, they must buy in to the 'house as a system' or risk serious health and safety consequences.  4 hours is a long time when I already know and believe what he was talking about so I sat in the back rows where I could micro-nod off in peace.  I slipped out for a while to check in to my hotel before returning in time to get CEU credits for the course. (Oops, did I just say too much?  BPI?)

The afternoon selection was an easy one: John Snell and Matt Schwoegler of the Snell Group were here from Vermont to talk about IR cameras and that course was GREAT!  Fun speakers in a tag team fashion, plenty of humorous examples of mistakes made amd enough new tips to keep me busy with my camera for months. Great stuff.  I've been wanting to take Snell's Level 1 Thermography class but it's $1500, which is out of my budget for the foreseeable future but apparently they're trying to put together a simpler class just for us Building Energy Nerds who will only be certified to use our IR cameras on building and promise we won't try to explain why the sky measures -22 degrees or other non-building questions.  The down side is that RESNET, one of my HERS certifying agencies, is eventually going to require this certification.

I've met several folks that I know already and I expect to meet more on Wednesday, when more people arrive for the main part of the Conference.  An impressing number of people fly in from other States.  So Wednesday morning - it's off to the Main Floor to meet up with quite a few people that I only know from phone conversations.  It'll be great to put faces to the names.

The Single Use Plastic Bag Blues

I love to visit Mexico. I like the climate, most things about the culture, and it's nearby. Possibly my least favorite part is one that's most obvious in the open desert: the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. Festooning (or is it infesting?) the low growing shrubs, hanging on by their well-designed handles, blowing sideways in the wind. My (ex) brother in law had an apt turn of phrase for it. He said “The Bag Bushes are in bloom.” Of course, we're far from immune on this side of the border. The sheer quantity of discarded bags is less here but not the eyesore-ness.

Not to mention the sheer waste. Plastic food store shopping bags, made from HDPE – high density polyethylene – are made from natural gas. About 600 BTUs worth. That's a relatively small amount; a therm, the unit of natural gas we see on our monthly utility bills, is 100,000 BTUs and we only pay a couple of bucks for that. But let's multiply that by roughly one hundred billion, the number of single-use plastic shopping bags made and used each year in the US. I think numbers are more graphic than the written word here: 100,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeros.  Multiply that by 600 BTUs and, well, you can do the math.

A few quick facts to bludgeon the subject with: World wide, there are roughly a trillion bags produced every year. More than 97% are thrown away. 10% or so eventually make it in to the ocean, where they drift for years or sink to the bottom. One report estimates that every square mile of the ocean averages 46,000 floating pieces of plastic. When a plastic bag does eventually start to break down, it releases BPA, PCBs, and other nasties which are known hormone mimics or are implicated in cancer. 4% of the entire world's oil production goes to making plastic bags. An average car driving one mile uses the same amount of energy as it takes to make 14 single use plastic bags. An estimated one billion seabirds and sea mammals are killed every year by ingesting plastic. The numbers are staggering.

Oddly enough, one thing that's worse is paper. It takes more than 4 times as much energy to create a paper bag than a plastic one and it takes twice as much energy to recycle a paper bag as plastic.  The plastic/paper choice at the checkout stand is not so easy.

Which brings us to reusable bags. As you can guess, they're not all made the same. Polypropylene, cotton, HDPE, LDPE, they each have their own sized carbon footprint. Cotton, though the best feeling of the lot, takes roughly a hundred uses to pay for itself at the '600 BTUs/single use plastic bag' rate. If you wash your cotton bags, the payback pushes off even further. It turns out that the simple polypropylene bag is the most ecologically economical, with a payback of 4 to 6 uses.

Other countries are far ahead of the US in the push to eradicate the invasive desert 'bag bushes'. California requires food stores to provide bag recycling, which could be considered a start. San Francisco was the first American city to actually ban plastic bags even though opponents argued, with some validity, that the ban would actually increase pollution. Seattle followed soon after by charging a fee per plastic bag used.

Other countries, though were far ahead of the U.S. Australia, many African countries, China, and Europe have all been controlling plastic bag use and production for much of the last decade.

So why are we still using so many?  I'm a perfect example of American laziness.  Half the time I forget to put my reusable shopping bags back in the car after I unload in my kitchen.  And even when I remember to take them in to the store, I still tear off two or three of those clear vegetable bags to hold my vegetables on the way to the checkout. Why? Why is it so hard for me to completely shake those Single Use Plastic Bag Blues?

I've just realized part of what I want from writing this: embarrassment. I want to stand there in the checkout line and know you are watching me with my vegetables in plastic bags. Of course it's silly, but if it's that little extra internal push that helps me remember my reusable shopping bags, I'll use it. Similar to smoking, peer pressure is what will make the plastic bag choice visible. I'm ready to change my behavior, to do my part in making reusable bags the social norm.

Somehow, I suspect our grandkids would thank us for it.

Seal It Tight Video

I don't know how they did it but they're making caulk and foam fun and sexy.  I love this:
Seal It Tight

and I'm going to link it on my website.

I'd rather ignore this blog, but it's probably prescient

Suzanne Shelton, CEO of the Shelton Group wrote a thought provoking opinion piece on the immediate future prospects of the Home Performance field.  She states "In fact, the availability of more generous federal tax incentives has been a primary driver for the increase in energy efficient home improvement activity we’ve seen over the past year."

Since I haven't seen any excess of activity this year, I'm not sure what increase she's talking about though I suspect that the US as a whole has seen a noticeable uptick in Home Performance contracting in 2010.  But the part I dislike - only because it's a somewhat bitter taste - is that the forecast for 2011, which I and many other Home Performance Contractors hope will be substantially busier, is that on third of possible clients is lost this year because of the decrease in tax incentives.  As Shelton says, "Thus at a minimum, approximately one third of the population who made their home more energy efficient would likely not have acted or would not have purchased the more efficient unit if it weren't for the incentives offered."

Granted, California utilities have stepped up their rebate plans, rolling many of the individual existing rebates for insulation, high efficiency furnaces, etc. into the new Energy Upgrade California (EUC).  The requirements for a Contractor to get in to the EUC are set high enough to keep out the casual and untrained, but the program itself is fairly robust and is funded by everyone's utility bills so it's not going away for the next few years.  I've heard that cash rebates are available to qualified homeowners using qualified Home Performance Contractors up to $4000, though I haven't been able to get more than $3500 for a client so far.  And as it should be, the rebate amount is dependent on the tested and modeled percentage increase in energy efficiency of the home, so it's both science based and verified afterwards by both 3rd party Verifiers and by following the homeowner's utility bills for the next year or two.  That's a lot of what I like about the EUC: the building science, or home-as-a-system approach, helps us understand why certain efficiency measures are more important than others, the the verification system helps homeowners trust us as contractors.

The Shelton Group's Blog:     http://www.sheltongroupinc.com/blog/?p=2106

Energy Upgrade California:     http://energyupgradecalifornia.org/

PGandE Releases Energy Efficiency Estimates

Sonoma County reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 161 million pounds in three years

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PGandE) announced last month new estimates that demonstrate the significant impact energy efficiency investments made by Sonoma County customers have had on reducing harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. From 2006-09, PGandE customers in Sonoma County saved 248,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity through energy efficiency and helped avoid 161,000,000 pounds of GHG emissions - equal to the emissions from burning about 8,185,000 gallons of gasoline.

Many Sonoma County-based businesses achieved significant savings through energy efficient upgrades and retrofitting projects. PGandE supports these measures with customized energy efficiency incentive programs that are available to all local governments, businesses and residential customers.

“We congratulate Sonoma County for its focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and its great results,” said Randy De Caminada, manager of Energy Solutions and Service for PGandE. “PGandE is here to help all of our customers with energy-saving solutions.”

Climate Protection Results 2006-2009

Area	GHG Emissions Avoided (lbs. CO2)	Equivalent homes powered for one year	Equivalent Gallons of gasoline
Sonoma County	161,000,000	42,630	8,185,000
Santa Rosa	72,920,000	19,294,000	3,705,000
Rohnert Park	28,058,000	7,345,000	1,425,000
Petaluma	22,186,000	5,870	1,127,000
Cotati	3,070,000	812	156,000
Cloverdale	3,238,000	856	164,500
Sebastopol	6,198,000	1,640	315,000
Sonoma	7,798,000	2,063	396,000
Windsor	6,538,000	1,730	332,150

For more information, contact Kera Smith at (707) 577-1082 or visit www.pge.com.

Surprising results

Just did an audit on a VERY high end home up on the ridge above San Rafael, above the ferry building.  Built in 1913 for a well heeled ship's Captain.  Wild layout but was ready for a remodel, something the new owners were doing.  A brand new high efficiency furnace system was already installed with all new ducts and they looked *beautiful* from the outside.  Very neat and clean, beautifully finished and taped, we expected very low duct leakage. So we sealed up all the registers we could find and pressurized the duct system.  Surprise!  It was off the charts high.  First thought: perhaps the manometer was hooked up wrong or was on the wrong setting.  Nope.  Then perhaps we missed a register and that was why we couldn't pressurize the system.  After crawling all through the house; attic, upstairs, downstairs, basement, crawlspace, we couldn't find any open registers.

Next: get out the smoke generator so we could blow theatrical smoke in to the duct system and perhaps we could then see where it was blowing out.  Running around the house while the smoke generator was sending smoke in to the duct system, the whole place was slowly getting smoky.  Everywhere.  After working on this simple duct pressure test for 2 hours and going over everything multiple times, we finally had to face the fact that this beautiful duct and furnace system leaked like a SIEVE!  I mean huge leakage.  We had the duct pressure fan up to max and still barely were able to get a number of CFM leakage.  Ready? Over 1100 CFM25.  Perhaps that doesn't mean anything to you but we were expecting around 100 CFM from a new, correctly installed system and we got over 1100.  1100 CFM is another way of saying that the duct leakage was around 50%, meaning half, HALF, of the heat put out by the furnace was lost to the outdoors before it ever got inside.  And in a brand new system, no less.  I was floored.  Part of the report will emphasize that the contractor MUST get the HVAC sub-contractor back out there to do his own test and fix the system.  It won't be easy and there may be some metaphoric blood spilled but the owner has the right to a correctly installed system.

What an example of a beautiful façade hiding a lousy system.  Note to self: put aside your snap assumptions until the data is in with the real story.

From the DOE's Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy News

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently released a report on how governments and industry can spark homeowners to seek out home energy improvements, or retrofits, which save energy and money for consumers. Energy efficiency upgrades include energy saving improvements such as adding insulation, sealing air ducts, installing high-efficiency lighting, enhancing or replacing windows and doors, and replacing furnaces, heat pumps, water heaters, and air conditioners. Called "Driving Demand for Home Energy Improvements," this study will help ensure that the Department's investments in energy efficiency provide taxpayers with a high rate of return on their investments, deliver the maximum impact in local communities, and support a self-sustaining industry for residential energy efficiency improvements that will help grow America's economy and create new jobs.

The report is aimed primarily at policy makers and energy efficiency program designers, especially those new to the field. The authors examined 14 residential energy efficiency programs, conducted an extensive literature review, interviewed industry experts, and surveyed residential contractors to draw lessons from first generation programs. The report highlights emerging best practices, provides insights into how to increase the effectiveness of incentive programs for comprehensive home energy improvements, and suggests methods and approaches to use in designing, implementing, and evaluating these programs. The report's findings will guide future investments for DOE's residential energy efficiency programs and similar state and local programs. The report's conclusions include:

• It is not enough to provide information, programs must offer something people want: High home energy use is not currently a pressing issue for many people. It is more important to identify an issue that people are drawn to such as health, comfort, energy security, competition, or community engagement to attract interest.
• It is important to know your target audience: A blanket marketing campaign to reach "everyone" will likely be ineffective and expensive, especially at the start of a program. The more effective approach is to find and target early adopters and tailor messages directly to this important audience. Demographics can help program administrators better understand the market and select optimal strategies. Organizers can also segment the market by interest in hot issues such as health concerns or the likelihood of getting savings.
• Partner with trusted messengers: Larger subsidies and more voluminous mailings don't necessarily win over more customers. Programs can and should have a local face, with buy-in from community leaders. Tapping trusted parties, such as local leaders and local organizations, builds upon existing relationships and networks.
• Language is powerful: Avoid meaningless or negatively associated words like "retrofit" and "audit." Use words and ways of communicating that tap into customers' existing mental frames. Encourage program staff and contractors to use specific vivid examples, personalize the material wherever possible, frame statements in terms of loss rather than gain, and generate a public commitment from the homeowners.
• Contractors are program ambassadors: Contractors, more than any other party, are the people sitting across the kitchen counter making the final sales pitch to a homeowner – contractors are often the public face and primary sales force for the program. Most programs that succeed in performing a significant number of energy upgrades have worked closely with contractors. Conversely, poor first impressions or shoddy work by contractors can reflect poorly on the program.
• Make it easy, make it fast: Offer seamless, streamlined services such as packaged incentives, minimized paperwork, and pre-approved contractors. By making it simple, it will make the decision to invest in home energy improvements even easier.

The report concludes that success will require multifaceted approaches that acknowledge a deeper understanding of what motivates homeowners and what contractors are concerned about. Effective programs will tend to be tailored to the location, thoughtfully researched and piloted, personalized to the target audience, and more labor-intensive than simple incentive programs.