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Go Green |
Eco-Retrofit |
Eco-friendly pets? Here's a note to hand to the neighbour with the dog and the cat that make your life a misery! |
Have you considered a green retrofit to your home? Starting from scratch and building an eco-friendly home is possible, but you need deep pockets. It is possible to improve the efficiency of your existing home by attending to some simple items, and many at low cost. Energy. Saving energy is always the first priority. South Africans can look forward to a few years of increases in the cost of electricity so finding ways to economise is important. Do your own energy audit and find out how much electricity your appliances really use. With this information in hand, you can start to formulate a plan to save energy. Talk to us about an energy monitor. The easiest things to do: 1. Have a geyser blanket fitted to your geyser and have the adjacent hot water pipes covered with proper water pipe insulation. 2. Use rubber insulating foam around all windows and doors so that air flow and heat loss is controlled. Heat generated inside the home escapes through cracks in door seals, window seals and through airvents. Cold air comes in and cools your warm home very quickly. 3. If you will use a heater to warm a room, set the temperature a few degrees down on what you would normally use and wear a jersey. 4. Use your clothesline rather than your tumble dryer. Your tumble dryer is just a huge heating element and it draws a lot of power. 5. Consider passive heating and cooling. Use light and dark colours on walls internally and externally to absorb and reflect heat as appropriate. Painting your roof white with a ceramic-based roof paint will reflect maximum heat in summer. 6. Install high thermal masses (stone slabs, thick floor tiles) in large window openings to absorb daytime heat and release it at night. In summer shade the thermal mass so that it stays cool during the day and absorbs heat at night. Hot summers need low thermal masses which heat slowly and release heat quickly – metal roofs and timber walls heat and cool very quickly. In winter however, object with high thermal masses absorb and release heat very slowly. 7. Check the functionality of eaves – ideally they should be adjustable. This will facilitate the use of winter sun in heating the high thermal mass items during the day. In summer, when the sun is higher, these items will not be heated by the sun as the eaves will shade them. 8. Lighting normally consumes between 15 and 20% of your electricity. Consider LED lights – they are more expensive right now, but prices will come down and they last a lot longer than normal bulbs and CFLs. 9. Ensure that all your air conditioners are Energy Star rated. 10 Ceiling insulation is very effective. Ensure that you use an environmentally friendly material rather than something which is made from fibreglass or similar unfriendly material. Using an infrared camera you will quickly see where heat leakage is occurring in a ceiling. Water. This resource (and the lack thereof) is going to impact on all our lives in the very near future. Have a look at the way in which you use water and makes some changes. The easiest things to do: 1. Replace your shower head with a low-flow unit. 2. Replace your toilet with a low-flush or dual-flush toilet rated at 6 litres per flush or less. This doesn't have to be the entire cistern and pan, just the flush mechanism. 3. Use your grey water to irrigate your trees and shrubs. 4. Harvest all your rainwater and use it for flushing toilets and bathing etc. Use municipal water only for drinking. Don't buy bottled water it's about 7000 times more expensive than tap water and our tap water is fine. 5. If you need to water your garden often, begin to replace the invader and non-indigenous plants with indigenous water-wise plants. And then drip irrigate if really necessary. Re-cycling The easiest things to do: 1. Investigate the recycling of waste – buy bins and make some rules for separating garbage in your home 2. Make contact with a recyclables collector in your area - he will take away the separated garbage for a small fee 3. Change your shopping habits. Don't buy packaging. Shop at suppliers who don't wrap individual products in plastic. If you can use your own containers, that's even better. 4. Use a composter to process your kitchen vegetable waste and watch your garden fluorish. 5. Use a worm farm for some of the finer vegatble matter and generate really good plant food for pot plants Capital improvements If you have money to spend on some capital improvements, there are some essential first steps to take. 1. Think first and have a plan. Do some preliminary costing and work out a budget. Don't take the first quote that comes along, shop around. 2. A solar water heater is normally the first project. This can save you a lot of money once it has paid for itself (normally about 3 or 4 years). Do some proper research before you commit. These units are expensive and you need to buy the best that you can afford. 3. Install skylights for summer to get rid of accumulated heat and improve indoor air quality (IAQ). This works well in winter too. Open the skylight a small amount to get rid of cooking smells and bring in fresh air - you do lose energy but fresh air is also good. 4. Build a conservatory for winter to capture the sun's warmth. 5. Ask your builder what he can do to ensure that the most environmentally friendly materials are used. 6. Use materials that are available from local suppliers to reduce your transport costs. Insist that your project manager find local suppliers as part of his contract. 7. Understand that natural ventilation, caused by prevailing winds and facilitated by open windows and doors is rarely a solution for heating and/or cooling in any but the most moderate of climates. Determine which direction the cold wind blows from and build screen walls to deflect the cold wind away from doors and windows. 8. If you burn wood, coal or charcoal for heating, convert to gas. 9. Consider installing a heat pump system for heating your home. These systems extract the heat for the outdoor air and in effect generate more heat in kilowatts than they consume in electricity. They also have a benefit in that they can be reversed in summer and will extract the heat from the home. 10. Install thermostatic control on heaters, underfloor heating and airconditioing systems so that better control is possible. 11. If you have a cellar, the air down there will probably be cooler than anywhere else in the house. It may well be possible to pump that cool air into the house during the summer. In winter it maybe possible to pump warm air ino the cellar through the day in order for it to be released at night. It might be possible to put some high thermal mass units into the cellar to hold the heat and cool. 12. If you have a fireplace and routinely have a fire going, consider some form of energy recovery system. Most fireplaces are built onto outside walls and have a chimnet which goes straight outside. A lot of the heatgenerated goes up the chimnet or is radiated outdoors through the back of the fireplace and the chimney. If you can capture this heat and use it elsewhere, you gain a tremendous amount of value from your fireplace. 13. Double -glazed windows are not commonly used in South Africa but are available in a number of different materials and styles. Replacement of all your windows is a huge project but pays dividends in keeping the home cool in summer and warm in winter.
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