Green Your Home's Heating

When you are trying to make your own more green, you should think of you HVAC system first. There are many things you can do to make your heating system use less energy, from sealing your house to geting mroe energy efficient equipment. One family in Roxbury, MA is taking it to an extreme by trying to do without heat in the winter. Here is the article from Boston.com:

At a time when most people are contemplating whether to give in and turn up the thermostat, Simon Hare and his family are embarking on a bold experiment in green living: a winter with no heat.

Their modest, two-story cottage in Roxbury will be warmed by the sun, the body heat of Hare, his wife Damiana, and his 16-month-old daughter Lulu, and even the heat thrown off by its energy-efficient appliances. The airtight, well-insulated house is part of a small but growing movement to design and build extremely green dwellings by rethinking what is essential in a house.

“You make it really efficient; you design your house to do your work for you,’’ Hare said. “On a February day of 6 degrees, if it’s getting cool, we can heat the house by making a second batch of pancakes for my daughter.’’

As world leaders prepare to negotiate a new climate change agreement in Copenhagen in December, some homeowners are taking matters into their own hands, building structures that show just how far it is possible to shrink a house’s carbon footprint. While many green buildings are built from scratch on lots ideally situated for sunlight, a growing number of builders and designers are, like Hare, working with existing buildings, and studying the best ways to integrate green building techniques to densely populated, built-out urban areas like Boston.

Hare - owner of a small design and build firm called Placetailor - had hoped to save the original building, a gunsmith’s cottage from 1850, but the structure was too damaged. Instead, he salvaged portions of the chimney and some of the timber, and built his 750-square-foot house in the same footprint.

Hare has yet to spend winter in his new abode, but based on preliminary data and his own calculations, he believes the house will stay around 63 degrees. That’s a level he and his wife are comfortable with, in part because the temperature will be constant with no drafts. The house project is a match for Hare’s ideals. He travels to jobs on a bike, not by company truck, and took his own house as the first project, both to demonstrate these techniques to future clients and to provide for his family.

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