Are old houses doomed? The conflict between historic preservation and energy efficiency

By George Musser | March 26, 2010 | 41

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Editor’s Note: Scientific American‘s George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here.

As readers of this blog know, our family has done a huge amount to button up our Victorian-era house. Today when I hear the word "gun", I think caulk, not Glock. Our basement floor is littered with scraps of rigid foam board and drips of spray foam. But is it enough? Yesterday, listening to a panel discussion on climate change at the 2010 State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, I got the sinking feeling it’s not. The U.S. needs to cut emissions by 80 percent and I doubt there’s any way our house can do its part or even come close. Will old houses like ours be part of the low-carbon future? Or do they ultimately need to be torn down, leaving deep scars in our cities and towns?

My wife and I always wanted an old house. McMansions leave us cold — although, after all the time, money, and sweat we’ve poured into our place, I’m beginning to see their attraction. Our efforts last year reduced air leakage by just over 10 percent, which was deflatingly meager. After more weatherizing, the house is comfier, with fewer drafts, a more uniform temperature, and a slower cooling-off rate in winter. But I still dread the day of the month when we get our heating bill.

Even our energy auditor says he’s running out of ideas for easyish steps we could take. Upgrading appliances is hard to justify economically. Air-sealing the house to modern standards would mean ripping off the siding and wrapping the house from the outside. Replacing the gas boiler and steam radiators with a geothermal heat pump and forced air would run $68,800, of which state subsidies would cover about half. That estimate was the funniest thing I’d heard all day. And the sticker price wasn’t the real shock. Rather, it was the fact that the system would lower our heating bill by only about a third.

Newer construction can give you a factor of 10 since it’s easier to fit than retrofit. In our September 2005 issue, energy conservation pioneer Amory Lovins described his own house in Colorado. It is so superinsulated that it never needed central heat. In December I visited 41 Cooper Square, a LEED-certified classroom and laboratory building at Cooper Union, and was astounded by the sheer number of green features and design principles that are simply impossible to incorporate in any building after the fact.

In an essay last year, preservationist Sally Zimmerman of Historic New England argued that the demands of energy conservation threaten old houses. She cited one retrofit near Boston that cost $100,000. It had to be done with extreme care since old houses were designed to breathe, and reducing their air circulation can cause moisture buildup and mold growth. The homeowner has a fascinating blog that makes you realize how intimidating the endeavor is. Zimmerman wrote: "Perhaps the most likely outcome of a large-scale push toward deep-energy retrofits of older, less well-maintained homes is an increase in whole-house teardowns as owners and developers weigh the costs of new construction against these modifications."



I asked Lovins whether my house is hopeless and he reassured me it isn’t. Having worked with him in the past, I know he’s not a man to sugarcoat things, so if he says my house is salvageable, I tend to believe him in spite of my worries otherwise. In general, he says it should be feasible to cut an old house’s energy use by a factor of two to four. His group, Rocky Mountain Institute, helped to retrofit a building for which historic preservation was paramount: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. True, cost wasn’t much of an object. But Lovins says that new technologies and techniques are coming within everyone’s reach. For instance, Serious Materials is working on an adaptive window glazing whose infrared emissivity would vary with temperature — keeping in heat during the winter, keeping it out during the summer.



As if my opposite numbers at New Scientist magazine had read my mind, they published an article today on how old houses not only can be saved, but have to be. It would take decades to turn over an entire nation’s housing stock, and the rebuilding would itself consume energy. The article mentioned a promising new technology for retrofits: Spacetherm, an insulation panel with more than twice the insulation value of ordinary rigid foam boards.



Here are some other tips I’ve gathered:

Guiltlessly avail yourself of government subsidies. Many respondents to my blog have complained that taxpayers shouldn’t pay for energy retrofits or solar panels. I disagree. In addition to stimulating the economy, which benefits us all, subsidies correct a market failure: retrofits and renewables do pay for themselves, but many homeowners can’t float the cost in the meantime. So the subsidies should be seen as an investment that we taxpayers will eventually recoup. President Obama’s proposed HomeStar program would provide juicily large tax credits for weatherizing. Those who still have an aversion to subsidies can consider commerical alternatives such as solar-leasing programs and Property Assessed Clean Energy bonds, which, in effect, spread the cost of energy improvements over successive owners of a house.
Old houses can teach new tricks. Not everything about old houses is un-green. Many of them were built with better materials and greater attention to natural air circulation. Our house’s tin roof not only has survived one and a half centuries, but is better than most modern roofs at reflecting unwanted solar heat. Restored and coated white, it kept our house cool enough last summer that we didn’t need to run our air-conditioners even a single minute.
Plug air leaks first. Our energy auditor impressed on us that air infiltration is the single biggest energy sink, and James Brew, an architect at Rocky Mountain, agrees: "You are proper in addressing air leakage as a first priority in these vintage homes — most assume it’s insulation (slowing heat conduction), but the largest energy drain is infiltration and ex-filtration. With a very thorough approach to this, and your added insulation work, you should be able to reach a place where your actual peak demand is reduced enough to begin evaluating equipment sizing."
Preservationists need to take the long view. Friends of ours wanted to install solar panels on their roof, but our town’s historic preservation commission blocked them, saying the panels (unlike ours) would have been visible from the street. I admire the impulse: so much of our country’s architectural heritage has been lost already. But if old houses can’t be brought up to modern standards, their very survival is at stake. Saving them may mean bending preservation standards. Peter Troast of Energy Circle, a startup company that offers advice and sells products to reduce home energy use, recently suggested that historic preservation guidelines could slow or stop the retrofits of millions of homes. "A hard line position that the exterior building envelope of historic structures can’t be touched means they can never achieve deep energy reductions," he wrote. "That would effectively condemn our aging buildings to hospice."

I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with retrofits and advice for what I can do to wring out more savings from my house.

George’s home, courtesy of him

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41 Comments

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1. stoutjerry 8:21 am 03/27/2010

On April 22 new lead abatement rules requiring extensive protective measures for workers and residents go into effect. When replacing windows in houses that contain lead the cost will increase will probably end many projects.
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2. Vermont Mom 9:58 am 03/27/2010

We live in northern Vermont, in a house that was built in 1960. In the past three years we have lowered the electricity bill by 90% and the heating bill (natural gas) by 80%. And I’m not done yet. My goal is to bring our home energy consumption to zero.
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3. gmusser 11:30 am 03/27/2010

Tell us more about what you’ve done!
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4. rapidanva 12:27 pm 03/27/2010

When I think about replacing old houses and automobiles with newer, more efficient ones, I wonder at the amount consumption of energy and new materials needed. Are we better off to run our cars into the ground and live in the old houses until they fall down rather than replacing them? It seems that updating and insulating, even if it’s not to the latest "new build" standard, would be the more "green" route.
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5. osaka 1:14 pm 03/27/2010

To tear down a perfectly good (and restored) house to build a more efficient one is itself inefficient. The energy used to create your old house has been spent, and to spend more energy to demolish it, transport it, create new building materials, move them, etc would add up to a lot more energy than would be saved during the lifetime of your old house! Eventually, over many years, old houses will burn down or be lost some other way, but until then, by far the best thing to do is to make what has already been built as efficient as possible, without replacing it. Homes are not disposable, especially well-built old Victorians like yours! Enjoy it.
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6. shvegas 3:01 pm 03/27/2010

I see two easy solutions. 1 – Stop worrying about carbon output. 2 – Reduce carbon output by creating power with nuclear power plants instead of on the consumption end.
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7. Vermont Mom 3:35 pm 03/27/2010

O.K. Here is the list so far -
1. Replaced all appliances with the most efficient energy star models available.
2. Wrapped all the hot water heating pipes in the basement.
3. Added insulation to the attic and basement.
4. Installed a super efficient furnace and on demand (tank less) hot water.
5. Replaced a plasma TV with an LED TV.
6. Installed three cell Hunter Douglas insulating shades.
7. Changed the roof color from black to light gray.
8. Installed ceiling fans.
9. Installed 16 PV panels.
10. Installed insulated trap door at the top of the attic stairs.
11. Installed all new double pane low E windows.
12. Replaced all the doors.
13. Installed window awnings.
14. Turned the heat down to 62.

So far the solar panels are performing even better than expected, thus we may end up closer to zero than we’d hoped. I’m hoping that with improved efficiencies, I’ll be able to have enough electricity to power a plug in hybrid when they become available. Getting to zero with the natural gas is going to be a lot harder, but I look at "Scientific American" everyday and know that new technologies are being developed all the time.
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8. abyssalmystery 10:29 pm 03/27/2010

I live in northwest Iowa where the winters are fairly cold. My house was built in 1935. The only energy savings projects that have been done that I am aware of was the addition of vinyl siding with polyurethane backing. I can turn the heat off when I leave for the day and come back 9 hours later and the heat drops only 5 degrees F. And thats when it is below 0 outside. I doubt more modern homes do much better.
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9. tomgarven 11:56 pm 03/27/2010

Here in the desert Southwest we have exactly the opposite problem. Too much heat. It costs almost nothing to heat our homes but up to $200.00 per month for Air Conditioning. Almost everything that "Vermont Mom" said is also true for our area except the following.

Almost all homes here are built on a concrete slab i.e. no basements. Also we use a lot of solar PV here and in most cases we don’t use or install tank-less water heaters we just install a few more solar panels. Also almost all homes use Heat Pumps instead of furnaces. It only cost me $.33/hour to run that 3 1/2 ton heat pump which keeps us cozy when the temps drop to about 35-45 degrees in the winter. However that same unit can cost me $120.00/mo to keep me cool in the summer heat. Have done every thing many other have done except for installing a heat pump water heater which should work well in this area since my garage never falls below 60 degrees F. Natural gas and propane are EXPENSIVE here and that is another reason most homes here are all electric.
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10. jgolson 1:54 am 03/28/2010

I spent $5000: caulking windows on the inside of the house, putting up a garage door blanket, and replacing : two exterior dors, the natural gas furnace and natural gas tank hot water heater. My gas bill has been about 30% lower this winter because of the energy improvements. The Alaska Energy Upgrade program reimbursed me for the entire cost of the improvements, which included installation of the furnace and water heater.
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11. j.quasimodo 7:46 am 03/28/2010

The figure of $68K for geothermal is astonishing. We did ours (retrofit, 3 wells 120′ deep, Missouri, 10% alcohol circulating) for $8K 15 years ago. There hasn’t been 10X inflation since then. I’ve heard $20K for geothermal in Connecticut now. Of course it depends on size, ours serves 3600 sq ft, runs dirt cheap year round.
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12. tomgarven 11:32 am 03/28/2010

I was just thinking about energy. If you install a geothermal heat pump and power that heat pump with a PV solar array then it really doesn’t make much difference if your home is super insulated or not does it? Your carbon foot print is still very low except at night when drawing power from the grid.

I have to agree – tearing down an older home jut to replace it with one with 2X6 foam walls seems like a terrible waste of resources.
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13. Montgomery Cole JD 12:56 pm 03/28/2010

Good for you and your efforts to save your old house. I had great improvements on my hundred year old house in Ojai by removing the old wooden exterior siding, insulating the walls [and rewire], then 1/4 inch plywood, then a sealant layer, and finish with 1/4 inch Hardy Board, which is made of concrete, looks like wood. The boards go on and have wood grain to them. The result, with new double pain windows is a dramatic warming of the house in winter and in summer we just keep the doors shut and the place stays cool in 100 degree heat till 4:00 PM, then a little AC helps. Also the Hardy board, plywood and insulation make the outside silent. Not a sound gets through. Also I did pile roofing insulation three feet high in the attic, which was really cheap and easy, and that also made the ceiling nearly impervious to heat loss or transmission, depending on the season. Well, good luck Monty Cole General Contractor, JD and amateur scientist.
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14. faderullan 1:20 pm 03/28/2010

In most (hot) areas of USA it would actually be both cheap and efficient to drill wells – and use the yearly average temperature under ground to keep the house comfortably cool – without the cost of running any heat pump at all – just a cirvculation pump suffices. And I talking without governmental subsidies. There are ground temperature maps available on the www for the entirity of USA. The drilled hole for a normally insulated house need usually not be deeper than eg 300 feet.
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15. Joseph Cullen 1:46 pm 03/28/2010

I’ve recently been investigating replacing our oil fired boiler with a heat pump. Unless the air temperatures are well below freezing, the latest air source pumps are competitive with ground source on performance and much cheaper and easier to install. The quotations that I am getting are around the 10000 UK pounds or about $15000 for a unit that will heat the house in winter and the swimming pool in summer. The house was built in 1560 and is a historically listed building in the south-west of England. It has a thatched roof and walls made of "Devon cob" – essentially rubble held together with mud! The heat pump is the next major project after the photo-voltaic installation that we completed in November and which is performing well. The UK government has put forward proposals for energy saving subsidies that will include heat pumps and our project is "on hold" until these are clarified.
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16. Plain Jane 10:23 pm 03/28/2010

Sorry… you will never recoup the cost of solar. If it’s something that’s cool to you , then go for the panels. Just don’t look at economic cost/benefit ratios. Same goes for wind.

I have a 1500 sq foot house, not big by today’s standards I know. But I have an annual power bill of $1,000 for a family of 4. No gas; everything is electric.

The last time I priced solar, the equipment was around $25,000. That’s 25 years of electricity (not counting interest) and before then, I would have to start replacing equipment.

Solar is trendy, the technology is not there to reach the masses yet.
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17. faderullan 3:00 am 03/29/2010

Hi again. PV solar is not profitable – yet. But using the sun to produce hot water is profitable – without subsidies – very far north, even north of the polar circle. I speak out of my own more than 20 years use of ca 75 square feet of home-built hot water producing solar collectors that have provided me and my family free hot water from beginning of may to end of september every year. Virtually hazzle-free.
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18. Bops 4:52 am 03/29/2010

Thank you for your list. I saved it and we’ll see how much we can save.

There’s something very wrong with people that think nuclear power is clean, cheap, safe, worry free or green.
They may be smart people…but lack common sense.
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19. skypanther 8:35 am 03/29/2010

Replacing old windows with low-e modern windows has something like a 500 year payback (article in Old House Journal or This Old House, I forget which). You’ll see much faster payback by installing good storms, reglazing your windows, and caulking. I think the payback was under 5 years for that.

You can replace sash weights with spring lifts then fill the sash channels. Or, you can remove the inside moulding and add foam insulation across the sash weight channel and tape to seal. There’s a video on the This Old House web site demonstrating that. I’ve also run a thin bead of clear caulk along the inside window casing against the wall to seal out drafts. For winter, I slide thin felt weatherstripping between the top & bottom sash to help seal the windows.

I’m removing the cruddy 1950′s aluminum siding from our 1896 Victorian. As I go, I re-nail all the siding (it’s shrunk and loosened over the years), caulk around windows, doors, and corners. I’m applying quality paint. Most of the windows had lost all their glazing over the years, so I’m replacing all of that. I’ve taped up all the heating ducts. We replaced poorly sealing 1960′s vintage storm doors with new high-quality storm doors.

We have large maple trees on the south side…they provide shade for cooling in the summer. We open windows at night to let in the cool air, which the home’s thick plaster walls retain all day. We don’t have AC and rarely even need fans to stay cool on all but the hottest days.

In the winter the trees lose their leaves and let the sun shine in. I remove the screens from the triple-tracks so that as much sun as possible can come in the windows.

So far I’ve cut our heating bills by 20%, reduced drafts, and increased comfort. It’s not the perfect, sterile, even warmth of a modern home. But I take enormous pride knowing that I’ve preserved a house that could never be built again in today’s economy.
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20. Syster7 2:36 pm 03/29/2010

I found your blog very useful since I’m about to undertake a similar type of project.

My house is an old wooden farm house built in the 1880s. It’s had some renovations done to it already. It has modern electrical wiring, plumbing, central air, a relatively new oil furnace (not older than 15 years old), and new black ashphalt shingles. However, the old plaster and lathe walls inside and the old tongue and groove wood siding are, as far as we can tell, original.

We moved in last year and this year, we want to start doing our own renovations. Our budget is about $200/month this summer. I’m an avid DIYer, but I only have weekends to work on this. My goal for this year is to bring the heating bill to 66% of this past winter without raising our electricity bill.

I’m looking for all the ideas I can get.
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21. cryovolcanic 3:25 pm 03/29/2010

I wonder often at the modern need to always be ‘comfortable’. Our grandparents survived without central heating or air conditioning, putting on a jumper if cold rather than turning up the heating. I have neither air conditioning or central heating and live in an older home. If you do without these modern luxuries you become acclimatised to the ambient conditions, and going outdoors is not a shock to the system. I believe that this approach is healthier, and tend to think that the answers to many of today’s problems lie in using ideas from the past.
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22. MrSteve007 10:50 am 03/30/2010

I think you shouldn’t bother with attempting to air seal the exterior walls, unless you can see daylight. You should attempt to go back an caulk the bejezzus out of your lid (attic) and basement. Due to stack effect, the lid will be the major source of air loss and would be your largest issue.

I haven’t done a thing for sidewall air leaks and have reduced air infiltration to 600 cfm @ 50pa. Using a blower door and IR imager really helps with that effort. Also, instead of changing out the whole HVAC system, maybe supplementing your needs with a very efficient (and cheap >$2,000) mini-split heatpump can reduce a large portion of your needs. I’ve been able to get a 12,000 BTU mini-split to cover all the heating and cooling needs of my home, using only a max of 900 watts.

As the owner of an early 70′s constructed home, who’s economically reduced energy consumption by 60% and just quadrupled the amount of insulation in the attic and crawlspace, I firmly believe with smart upgrades, it is very possible to dramatically improve older home use. Once I replace the water heater with a heat-pump unit and swap out the plasma, I expect everyday will be below 20 kWh year round on an all electric home in Seattle.
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23. mrmaps 1:11 pm 03/30/2010

The greenest house is ALWAYS the one already built. Living in a historic structure, despite the leaky insulation, is 10,000 times more energy efficient than demolition and rebuilding to LEED platinum standards. LEED standards, by failing to gauge the sunk costs of existing constructions, actually are causing more environmental waste than they purport to conserve.
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24. PastD 3:31 pm 03/30/2010

years ago I rented a few rooms in an old Victorian that was being brought back from the brink. In deep winter my rooms were always freezing (literally – typcially in the upper 40s) and for weeks I assumed it was simply because I was the last rooms on the old radiator system (along with the floor to ceiling windows on the south side of the building). Then one morning as I peaked over the tops of the covers I noticed that on the door out to the side porch, I could see light coming through the keyhole. I jumped up, stuck a piece of tape on the outside and inside openings to that keyhole, and for the first time in weeks the temp in my rooms went up into the 60s. Seems that little 1/4-1/2 inch hole was causing all the heat exchange with outside. Sometimes its the simple fixes that make a lot of difference.
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25. auburnjenc 5:33 pm 03/30/2010

Why must every property generate it’s own power? I applaud preservationists for taking a stand against solar panels everywhere and anywhere. It seems much more sensible for community-wide solutions to be sought rather than every home-owner installing new equipment (which expends energy to manufacture.) Let’s get more creative about the problem rather than trying a one-size-fits-all approach!
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26. jane 6:01 pm 03/30/2010

I have written on my blog about how old houses are often ‘built to the weather’ .. Their owners and builders were cognizant of the local (micro) and general ( macro) climate conditions they lived in. Today many people can’t tell me how the arc of the sun changes during the seasons.
If there is some interest, i will post my blog address.
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27. Alshaw 9:37 pm 03/30/2010

Don’t focus too much on ‘my house’, especially when looking at geothermal systems. Share your heat with the neighbours. I know of one lakeside homeowner who balked at the cost of a lake-source heat pump until I pointed out that the per-home cost would drop substantially if the three side-by-side houses shared a single system. Likewise I’ve seen subdivision plans that propose vertical geothermal pipes under a cul-de-sac to heat half a dozen homes in the court.
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28. eco-steve 9:51 am 03/31/2010

Why bother to warm your house when there is perfectly good insulating skiing clothing which allows you to turn your heating down drastically. As soon as the cold snap is over, heat your living romms again normally. Secondly, heat your house with an automated wood-chip stove : three times cheaper than fuel and carbon neutral!
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29. gmusser 12:20 pm 03/31/2010

Yes, I’d love to read your blog – I’m fascinated by microclimate effects.
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30. jane 2:59 pm 03/31/2010

try jgrarchitect.blogspot.com. Click on ‘original green’ in the list on the left hand side.
I used a carriage barn, open to the public, as an example so people could go visit it themselves.
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31. jane 3:10 pm 03/31/2010

A note to tomgarven: Do people in your area use the no-tech ways to cool houses – awnings and plantings to give shade, windows and vents to increase natural ventilation when it’s cool enough? Do people know of the work of Paulo Solari who lived and worked in Phoenix? As someone from the east coast, I found his workshop an amazing place to visit, 25 years ago.
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32. Harry A 5:15 pm 03/31/2010

New thin film solar will work on those metal roof and new solar shingles will also meet those fuddy old preservationist. If the walls are air space, use spray foam, check to make sure it meets lathe & plaster specifications. The Gov is planning to do a bulk purchase R-5 window deal to lower the cost. Don’t replace the HVAC system until sealing and insulating and windows are done. That way it will keep you from oversizing the system. If using geothermal, try radiant water heat instead of forced hot air.
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33. Erica David 5:30 pm 04/1/2010

You mention leasing solar panels as a way of reducing your old home’s carbon footprint, and I’d like to vouch for that–I’m leasing panels from Sungevity.com in CA and there are quite a few installers and PACE programs around the country now who will lease you panels, often for zero-down. Whether you live in an old Victorian a McMansion, a solar lease is a no-brainer.
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34. Brad 4:23 pm 04/5/2010

Instead of trying to patch up air leaks in older homes to reduce heat loss, why not just heat more effectively with a masonry stove in the middle of the house? The advantage of radiant heat over forced air heating is that the former heats you rather than the whole house. Europeans have known that for ages.
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35. arch419 5:09 pm 04/5/2010

The call-to-arms (caulk guns and more) for preservationists to embrace energy efficiency is widely discussed but greatly confused by the marketplace. Inflated energy savings for replacement windows and the green mania for on-site renewable energy systems are but two examples of eco-bling, a new term for eco alterations that dont provide a positive return on investment. What we all need to do is get realistic and sort out the economically viable efficiency steps that work for occupied houses rather than focus on the extreme home makeover versions. In the words of Carl Elefante, we cant consume our way to sustainability, but we can conserve our way. Most old houses are going to evolve in a rather incremental fashion, and efficiency upgrades need to be a consistent part of this equation. Making energy efficiency gains is 10% steps is both logical and economical and can get an owner a long way to a new standard in efficiency.
Fixing air infiltration first, buy new equipment when needed and rest assured that the marketplace is making better mouse (and heat) traps. Insulated glass wood storm windows are now on the market! You can now have triple glazing instead of double glazing at a price that is cheaper than replacement windows. Geothermal systems are getting cheaper as more dealers get into this business. New furnaces that use outside air for combustion and dont need a chimney reduce air infiltration. A 10% energy savings from each of these items gets a 30% savings. The term of art for the new superefficient renovation is the deep energy retrofit, which aims to achieve a 70% reduction in operating energy from the norm of today.
The few case studies of old houses that have achieved deep energy retrofit status tend to be those that have had a complete new exterior skin or a gut rehab on the interior. As more champions of preservation tackle this issue, better examples of historic retrofits will emerge. This is not an impossible task, but it is one that is going to require a constant effort to find the right combination of new equipment, thermal envelope improvements and operation efficiencies. It may even bring us to the conclusion of doing things the way we used to. Im a big proponent of the solar clothes dryer, an $ 8 rope that goes between two trees and doesnt require the use of any fossil fuels. Hanging your dirty clean clothes out in the air makes a far more important environmental statement than the $ 10,000 worth of solar panels needed to run an electric clothes dryer!
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36. gjkleier 11:20 am 04/13/2010

I am an Architect specializing in the Green Renovation of Historic Homes. Currently I am completing the green renovation of a 105 year old, 3 story, 3000 square foot house. This will be my personal residence and I am documenting everything we are doing for a comparison with the house I currently occupy, a house virtually identical to the renovation. This information will be incorporated in a lecture series I do called Historic Architecture is the new Green Architecture.

What I can tell you for certain right now is this:
1) To tear down my house would be to throw away about 1.4 billion BTUs of embodied energy
2) It would require between 50 and 75 years for a new green house to save as much energy as is embodied in my house
3) The renovation uses Geothermal Heating, Cooling and Water Heating. My utility bill for the worst month of this winter was nearly $400 in my current house and only $73 for the renovation despite the fact that several windows were actually removed and the openings only covered with 6 mil poly. Banks will loan on these systems and the energy savings will make the payments.
4) Without tax credits, the extra cost for my geothermal system will be repaid in about 7 years (that is the cost difference between a high efficiency gas system and the all electric geothermal system and gas is a less expensive fuel in my area)
5) Installing spray applied insulation to the underside of the roof not only added the insulation factor, but sealed all the air leaks in that area. This virtually eliminates the chimney affect and significantly reduced the air infiltration on the lower levels. (The largest heat loss from a house is normally through the roof) Again, a bank loan can be repaid with the energy savings.
6) Restoring the original windows, including weatherstripping and spray foam in the gap between the window frame and the brick, has virtually eliminated the infiltration in those areas. The addition of storm windows later this year will further reduce the heat loss through the glass, cut the ultraviolet radiation and reduce the maintenance required.
7) The geothermal system is supplying hot water as a byproduct during the summer significantly reducing that utility demand (approximate amount as yet undetermined) The renovated light fixtures and new fixtures use CFL or Xenon bulbs, producing an estimated annual savings of 11,700 KWH or nearly 40 million BTU (about $750 at the $0.065/KWH that I pay).
9) Using the natural heating and cooling effects of many historic houses will reduce or eliminate the need for heating or AC during the spring and fall months. These things are not normally built into contemporary houses because we depend on heating and AC to accomplish the same thing.
10) On average, renovation requires about 40% fewer materials than new construction. Most of those materials will come from outside your community or outside of the country. True Green renovation can use as much as 60% fewer materials and recycles nearly everything.
11) Many of the materials and nearly all of the woods used in a historic house are superior to those available today. This is generally because these materials are no longer available to us.

Renovation of our historic housing stock and the reuse of buildings that can be converted to housing will have a dramatic environmental affect. These houses and buildings are usually close to our city centers. This can make mass transit more viable, reduce commute time, reduce traffic congestion, require no new roads or utilities, add nothing to the heat island affect and can actually reduce it. These neighborhoods are frequently more walkable, with many services and entertainment within a very short distance.

The problem with Greening our historic architecture has little to do with the building and nearly everything to do with understanding the building. All too frequently people are being taken in by Greenwashing, spending their money on worthless items or things that will never return the money they invested. Even people who specialize in Green Construction fail to recognize that historic homes have very special issues when it comes to making them Green. This frequently results in expensive investments in the wrong items with disappointing results. When done properly, a historic house can be every bit as energy efficient as a new house, and when it comes to being Green, no new house can beat the historic house done correctly.

Rather than dooming our historic buildings, I see the Green Movement and the problems we face with Climate Change giving the preservation movement a great shot in the arm&.. IF we can stay in front of those who, in ignorance, believe that new is superior, that all Green Technology is High Tech and that Historic Properties cannot be made Green.
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37. tomgarven 12:34 pm 04/13/2010

jane [said in part] A note to tomgarven: Do people in your area use the no-tech ways to cool houses – awnings and plantings to give shade, windows and vents to increase natural ventilation when it’s cool enough?

Yup we sure do and we also use evaporative cooling when humidity levels permit. But much more needs to be done. For example one of my biggest gripes is that our heat pumps are for the most part mounted on our roofs. Roof temperatures can easily reach 140 during the summer causing heat pumps to work extra hard to provide the necessary cooling. The worst part of this is that many of the AC contractors in the area make statements like – oh high SEER units are junk and won’t take the heat. Or we always put AC units in the roof since they are more efficient up there. Much more education is needed. Another poor practice is placing the air handling unit [blower fan] in the attic space. As you might guess placing your air handling unit in the 160 degree heat of your attic does not make you the smartest cheddar in the deli case. The building codes should also be revised to require all air ducts to be placed inside the insulation barrier. The same thing applies to the duct-work as stated for the air handler. Why run cold air through ducts in a 160 degree attic. Studies have shown losses of up to 30% through these ducts.

Way too long of an answer – sorry.
Tom G.
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38. beyondtheforest 6:06 am 04/25/2010

This article seems out of touch. People across the United States are broke and jobless, and here is someone with a beautiful restored Victorian (the type of house one would fittingly call the American Dream to own). Yet instead of realizing the beauty of his home the way it is, writer thinks it may be necessary to TEAR IT DOWN to make it more green? Lets just throw common sense out the window. Green = reuse, not destroy and contribute to landfills.

Furthermore, most older houses are much smaller than their newer suburban counterparts, thus contributing to energy efficiency by having less space to heat and/or cool. But the energy required to tear down a historic home and replace it goes far beyond the energy used to maintain the older home. This reminds me of the thinking of some politicians. You have to consider the unintended consequences.
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39. SinclairZ 6:32 pm 07/23/2010

There’s a very easy, very cheap way to reduce your heating bill when the weather gets cold – wear a sweater. Really cold? Wear thermal underwear and a sweater.
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40. wme.iandm 12:02 am 11/29/2010

I agree with the fact that, being the owner of old house makes more easy to help earth to lower down carbon emission by giving small modifications such as explained above.
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41. KimK1703 8:17 am 02/16/2012

Hi George,

Thank you for a nice read, and for highlighting the issues of owning an old house
You are so right about Copper Union’s new building.. It’s beautiful and astonishing!

Regards
Kim Kristensen
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