Climate and energy

Several folks have written in to ask whether or not my husband and I have air conditioning yet, during our remodeling process (see Living without AC isn’t SO bad…)

Answer: Kind of. Once we finally found a new sheetrocker to put the ceiling back up, we went to turn the AC on again. (Is it a good idea to have the AC on when there’s no insulation yet in your ceiling? No. But how else are you going to get the drywall mud to dry when it is 98% humidity out?)

Click, and…. the AC didn’t work. I thought fine, I wanted to put in a programmable thermostat anyway, next to the cost of the ceiling I won’t even feel it, so have the AC guy come on out and fix the whole mess.

He did. He also managed to discover a hole the size of a small elephant in the heat exchanger (we have a combined heat/ AC system). “Ma’am, you’re lucky you didn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning this winter.” And if we didn’t depend so much on our woodstove – well, who knows.

So he got the AC to limp along – which beats having a brand new programmable thermostat hooked up to nothing, right – but… Well. Yeah. We can’t ever use the heater portion of the unit again. We really do need some form of heat back-up to keep our pipes from freezing in the winter, too… dangit…

More or less, we need a whole new system. A heat exchanger is a pretty big deal. The unit is 13 years old. It has a 15 year life. Replacing the heat exchanger now is kind of the equivalent of replacing the alternator on a car that has over 200,000 miles – ie, not really worth it.

This is about the point when I went fetal and crawled under my desk. I did come out at one point, to grab a calculator. Then I crawled back into my little hole and tried to figure out how for the life of me I was going to make all the numbers work. They haven’t gotten back to us with an estimate yet, but I can’t imagine this experience will be cheap.

About this time I crawled out and went to a party (why not). Where I immediately ran into two people who asked after the remodel, heard the story, then more or less exclaimed “I can’t believe it! You’re so lucky! Now you get to upgrade to a more efficient system!”

I smiled, throttled no one, and went home and thought about it. They’re right. And at this point, it looks like we will go with a heat pump system, which is a form of geothermal.

How am I going to pay for it? Still not certain. However, frankly, with the price of fossil fuels going through the roof (and no end in sight), buying an energy efficient system is actually the most prudent move we could make.

Paying the equipment and capital costs up front stinks. No question. Paying the fuel costs on the back end, though – at the moment, those costs are a giant unknown. And I’d really rather not risk that.

Basically, the whole experience has made me think – when it all hits the fan, are you still going to go green? And what does going green mean to you?

There’s lots of green things that we didn’t do on this remodel. Most of that came down to materials. It would have been nice to get all environmentally-conscious surfaces and substances, but we couldn’t do those and make energy efficiency improvements, too. Our resources are limited, so we went with the choices that in the long run, would lower our energy costs.

It’s what was right for us (I hope! We’ll see how that heat pump works out). Our choices might not be right for others.

But – we’re the ones paying for it :)

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org