I recently became aware of a home energy-saving device known as the ‘whole house fan’. In hot summer climates, this device helps your air conditioning work a lot less, which is especially useful if your house is the size of the Buffalo, NY train depot pictured above. But even if your house is much smaller, whole house fans can lower your electrical or gas usage significantly. Since electricity is produced primarily by fossil fuels and gas is a fossil fuel, you are lowering your carbon footprint and saving money!

The whole house fan is installed in your attic where much of the home’s hot air is trapped. When activated, it exhausts the hot attic air to the outside while pulling in cooler air back into the attic. Simple! However, you want to do this when the air outside is colder than the air in your attic - like in the evenings when you get home from work or school. This quickly cools down your house and uses less energy than your air conditioning. Then if you want to run the air conditioner to bring the temperature even lower, your A/C unit doesn’t need to work as hard and cuts off sooner. This saves energy and money! Make sure the installers build in a temperature shutoff gauge or timed dial so the fan doesn’t run all night.

Prices range from $1,000-$1,600, including installation. According to my manufacturer, a whole house fan can pay for itself over 2-3 summer seasons! Compare that with solar panels, which cost a lot more to purchase and can take 7 years or more to pay off, and the whole house fan becomes a no-brainer.

And if you ever sell your home, don’t forget to include the whole house fan and your historical cost savings in the real estate marketing materials (but don’t guarantee it!). The buyers will be able to enjoy the green energy savings too - lowering their costs of ownership.

I’m back with more tips for us lazy-busy conservationists. I just discovered the environmental beauty of condensed soup. Soup cans often travel great distances to reach your supper bowl, traveling by truck from the cannery and by car to your home. But if you sneak a peak at the ingredients you will find water fills these cans as the majority ingredient. When you buy a smaller can of condensed soup and add tap water, with a filter if you like, you reduce the fuel used and thus, the greenhouse gasses you contribute to our skies. Plus, less aluminum is used in the cans since they don’t need to be so big! And you provide a greater degree of quality control over your soup water.

What other food items offer a condensed alternative?

I discovered Buffalo was not named for those large, hairy mammals once found roaming North America and now taking wing in sports bars all over of America. Locals tell me it was some French explorer who proclaimed the local river to be a ‘beau fleuve’ or ‘beautiful river’. However, I prefer the idea of some mythical flying buffalo that tastes like chicken.

Buffalo is an interesting case. The city sits in an idyllic part of the country: Lake Erie to the West, Niagara Falls to the North, and the Adirondack mountain range to the East. Like most of the cities surrounding the Great Lakes, its growth was fueled by the Industrial Revolution and its close proximity to Lake Erie shipping. But much of the goods that use to move on the waters now move through the St. Lawrence Seaway, a channel built in the late 1950’s connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. And much of the manufacturing has moved overseas. Since the early 1970’s, population growth has significantly declined back to early century levels, with many of those people moving out to the suburbs. While unemployment is low, nearly a quarter of the residents survive under the poverty line and many of Buffalo’s beautiful houses and buildings lie vacant. Of course, the cost of living is low also and this has attracted significant investment in the city recently. You can buy a house for under $100k!

One such building is the Buffalo Central Terminal - the massive Art Deco railroad station which has been vacant for over 30 years. I had an opportunity to tour the facility, which is now used for parties and weddings. Thanks Pete.

However, there is one start-up company putting many of these old buildings and houses to good use…or reuse, that is. Buffalo Reuse is a building deconstruction and salvage company and a community-minded alternative to traditional demolition services that send good, often-vintage reusable building materials to the landfill. Buffalo reuse then sells these materials and in doing so, preserves a bit of Buffalo’s unique character. All in all its not a bad deal for everyone. Property owners help keep their air and water cleaner by conserving resources. The cost is a little higher but it is coming down and is partially offset by tax incentives. Work is created for local residents. Home builders and rennovaters have access to cheaper building supplies and inexpensive vintage fixtures. Thrifty artists can find art supplies that fit their budget. Yup, everybody wins.

In the following conversation, Executive Director Michael Gainer talks about who is buying reused building materials and what he sees for the future of hybrid deconstruction services and Buffalo Reuse. He also talks about how Buffalo Reuse is working to improve their price competitiveness with traditional demolition services through smarter deconstruction practices and an appeal to people’s nostalgia, conservation-mindedness and pocketbooks.

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Here are the home game stickers and scorecard. Please feel free to download PDFs, cut them out, add tape to the back and stick them near places in your house where conservation opportunities occur. This is a form of ‘just-in-time conservation’. Be careful not to use tape that might take paint off the walls! Come back to www.HowToConserve.com when you need more.

City, county, state and federal governments in the United States and worldwide, as well as not-for-profit corporations and publicly-funded educational institutions, may reproduce these illustrations as part of a conservation information effort and as long as the following attribution is made, “Illustrations courtesy of The Casual Conservationist ™ and www.HowToConserve.com .”

And for clarification, YES…teachers may reproduce these images as part of their classroom conservation studies and allow their students to reproduce these images as well.

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I’m in Seattle now but would like to talk a little Portland, OR from two days ago. What a great town! In addition to Powell’s Books, New Renaissance Book Shop at 1338 N.W. 23d Ave. now carries my book, The Casual Conservationist.

I had a chance to visit Hostelling International’s Portland Hawthorne District hostel where they recently put on an ‘Eco-Roof’. I tried to tell them they needed to cut the grass growing on the roof but they actually designed it that way! Apparently, this “living roof” not only soaks up 60% of the rainwater that would have gone into the storm drains and out into the ocean but also absorbs sunlight, playing its part in cooling down inner city summer temperatures. Plus it extends the wear of the roof! While pricing is still pretty spendy for the average homeowner, cities and counties are starting to support such efforts through grants and tax subsidies since it reduces the amount of water municipalities need to filter on its way to the ocean.

For a complete overview of how Talbot, Hostelling International and the City of Portland are playing their part to conserve, download my interview with Talbot onto your I-pod or MP3 player (approx time 20 mins).

 

 Talbot Wallace Interview [18:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Conservationville USA 2007 contender: Portland, OR
For working hard to keep polluted run-off from running off to the sea!

What else can cities do to reduce residential water run-off?

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Everyone tells you to reuse your supermarket bags but these bags are never where I am, when I need them. One solution is to create your own Bag Packs and to put them in things that will be with you next time you are shopping like purses, brief cases, car glove compartments and so on. Here’s a step-by-step guide for making Bag Packs so you too can take advantage of conservation opportunities when and where they occur. Remember, if you used every bag that touched your hands at least twice, you would be cutting your bag waste in half!

For Bag Packs, start with two paper or plastic bags and a rubber band…

fold the bags in half and then in half again…

roll up the sheet like you would a sleeping bag…

and wrap the whole thing with a rubber band!

Don’t forget to make lots of these and put them in places you will have access the next time you go shopping.

Invented a new way to conserve water, paper, plastic or peace-of-mind at home? Share the wealth! Let us all know what to do, how to do it and when to do it.